NRI Pulse Staff Report
Washington, DC, June 18, 2022: President Joe Biden has nominated security expert Radha Iyengar Plumb to the post of Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, a key Pentagon position. The White House made this announcement Wednesday.
Plumb currently serves as the Chief of Staff to the Deputy Secretary of Defense.
Prior to her appointment as Chief of Staff, she was the Director of Research and Insights for Trust & Safety at Google, leading their cross functional teams on business analytics, data science, and technical research. She previously served as the Global Head of Policy Analysis at Facebook where she focused on high risk/high harm safety and critical international security issues.
Plumb previously was a Senior Economist at the RAND Corporation where she focused on improving measurement and evaluation of readiness and security efforts across the Department of Defense.
She also held a number of senior staff positions on national security issues at the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and the White House National Security Council. At the outset of her career, she was an Assistant Professor at the London School of Economics and did her postdoctoral work at Harvard.
Plumb received her Ph.D. and M.S. in Economics from Princeton University, and she holds a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
