Brian Deese

Between the Obama and Biden administrations, Deese was the global head of sustainable investing for BlackRock, where he helped shift the investment firm’s focus to environmental, social and governance priorities (ESG activism) and its managed investments away from traditional energy sources. ^{2 3}

Activities

Obama Administration

Brian Deese joined the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama after former U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) suspended her unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign. After joining the Obama campaign, Deese was the deputy economic policy director for the development of the 2008 Democratic Party Platform. ⁴

In 2009, Deese was a member of the Economic Policy Working Group for the Obama-Biden Transition Team. He subsequently joined the Obama administration White House as a Special Assistant to the President in January 2009. ^{4 5}  Deese was instrumental in the 2009 bailout of American auto industries. ⁶

From February 2013 to January 2015, Deese was the deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Deese was the deputy director of the National Economic Council from January 2011 to February 2013 and played a role in negotiating the Paris Climate Agreement. ¹

Deese worked as a Senior Advisor to the President from February 2015 to January 2017. His appointment to succeed John Podesta as Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama was praised by the environmentalist League of Conservation Voters. ⁷ In an interview with Climate Brief, Deese said the Obama administration was “trying to reorient the country” on environmentalist policy lines. ⁸

Post-Obama Administration

Brian Deese joined the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government as a senior fellow in February 2017 following the end of the Obama administration. In October 2017, Deese left Harvard and joined investment company BlackRock as its global head of sustainable investment. ⁵

Deese held this role from February 2017 until 2020, where he worked to drive BlackRock’s focus on perceived climate and sustainability risk in investment portfolios. Through this work, Deese advocated for investment strategies, a transition to weather-dependent energy, ² and implementing environmental, social, and governance investing (ESG activism). In several interviews, Deese said that he thinks there is no tradeoff needed for ESG-focused investing as it is imperative for BlackRock to be focused on the energy transition away from fossil fuels. ³

Deese has said that BlackRock “is focused on the issue of transition” and that he believed there will be an “accelerated transition to a low-carbon economy.” ⁹ To approach this, Deese said that BlackRock was assessing companies based on what would happen to them if the price of carbon gradually increased. ³ In an interview at the World Economic Forum, Deese defined sustainable investing as “combining the best of traditional investing with insights about [ESG-related topics],” calling climate risk an “investment risk and saying that a changing climate will be at the center of BlackRock’s investing strategies moving forward. ¹⁰

In 2020, Deese was the director of the left-of-center Center for Applied Environmental Law and Policy  (CAELP). Prior to receiving tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service in 2020, CAELP was a fiscally sponsored project of the Arabella Advisors-managed New Venture Fund. ¹¹ Deese was on CAELP’s board of directors before leaving the organization in December 2020 during the Biden-Harris Transition. ^{12 13}

Biden Administration

Brian Deese joined the Biden administration in January 2021 as director of the National Economic Council. ¹⁴ Deese was President Joe Biden’s primary policy negotiator for infrastructure, semiconductor, and weather-dependent energy legislation that the Biden administration supported in 2021 and 2022. ²

In an op-ed published by the New York Times, Deese said that the Democratic Party’s spending bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, was effectively encouraging investment in weather-dependent energy. ¹⁵ He also said in 2022 that the U.S. economy was “in a period of transition” when questioned about the Biden administration efforts to reduce inflation. ¹⁶

In November 2020, the environmentalist League of Conservation Voters (LCV) supported Deese’s anticipated appointment to the Biden administration’s National Economic Council. In an official press release, LCV called Deese a “longtime climate policy expert.” ¹⁷

The Climate Action Campaign also supported the appointment of Deese to the Biden administration as a part of what it considered to be the “most climate-focused cabinet in history.” Representatives of the 350.org climate group including director Bill McKibben endorsed Deese’s appointment, ¹⁸ as did leadership of the Center for American Progress ¹⁹ and the Environmental Defense Fund. ^{20 21}

Post-Biden Administration

After leaving the Biden administration National Economic Council in March 2023, Brian Deese joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an Institute Innovation Fellow. ²²

As of December 2024, Deese is also on the advisory council of the Hamilton Project, a program of the left-of-center Brookings Institution. ²

Since leaving government, Deese has advocated for a “clean energy Marshall Plan” and called the transition to weather-dependent energy the “most important planetary challenge.” ^{23 24}

In 2023, Deese spoke at the Obama Foundation’s Democracy Forum. ⁶

Other Roles

From 2003 to 2005, Brian Deese was an economic policy analyst for the left-of-center Center for American Progress. ⁵ He was a co-founder of the left-leaning think tank Center for Global Development and worked there from June 2000 to January 2003. ^{25 5}

Personal Information

Brian Deese graduated from Yale University Law School in 2009. In 2000, Deese received an undergraduate degree from Middlebury College. ⁵ While working at the Hamilton Project, a program of the Brookings Institution, Deese co-wrote the book Delivering on Debt Relief. ²