Susan Rice, the US Ambassador to the United Nations (UN), will become President Obama's National Security Adviser, a move that replaces a former Brookings-affiliated official with a former Brookings scholar.
Amb. Rice will be replacing Tom Donilon, who used to serve on the Board of Directors at the Brookings Institution. Perhaps Donilon will return to Brookings?
Rice was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution from 2002 to 2009. There she focused on US foreign policy, weak and failing states, the implications of global poverty, and transnational threats to security. The various work she did while at Brookings can be found here.
Rice is also a former Board Member of the American Security Project (ASP). She was also on the Board of Directors of the Atlantic Council.
Rice's replacement as UN Ambassador, Samantha Power, is semi-connected to Brookings. Her husband, Cass Sunstein, is a Visiting Fellow of Governance Studies at Brookings.
It was recently announced that Jason Furman, another former Brookings scholar, would become Chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA).
In other recent revolving door think tank news, Ambassador Johnnie Carson, former Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of African Affairs, has joined the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) as a Senior Advisor.
But that's not all. Today, the Center for American Progress (CAP) named Matt Lee-Ashley, former Deputy Chief of Staff at the Department of the Interior, as a Senior Fellow.
Here
is a previous Think Tank Watch post (which is periodically updated) on
Obama Administration officials who have stepped down and entered the
think tank world.