Elaine Chao

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Elaine Lan Chao (born March 26, 1953) is an American politician who serves as the United States Secretary of Transportation, having assumed office on January 31, 2017.

A member of the Republican Party, Chao was previously Secretary of Labor under President George W.

Bush from 2001 to 2009. Born in Taipei to Chinese parents who had left mainland China following the Chinese Civil War, Chao immigrated to the United States at age 8.

Her father founded the Foremost Group, which eventually became a major shipping corporation.

Chao was raised on Long Island, New York and subsequently attended Mount Holyoke College and Harvard Business School.

She worked for a number of financial institutions before being appointed to several senior positions in the Department of Transportation under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.

W.

Bush, including Deputy Secretary.

She next served as Director of the Peace Corps.

Chao was president of the United Way of America from 1992 to 1996.

While not in government, Chao has served on several boards of directors and worked for The Heritage Foundation and the Hudson Institute, two conservative think-tanks.

Chao served as Secretary of Labor for the duration of George W.

Bush's presidency and serves as Secretary of Transportation under President Donald Trump.

Chao was the first Asian American woman and the first Chinese American in U.S. history to be appointed to a President's Cabinet. Chao married Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in 1993.

Early life and education

Elaine Chao was born in Taipei, Taiwan, on March 26, 1953, and immigrated to the United States when she was eight years old. She is the eldest of six daughters of Ruth Mulan Chu Chao, a historian, and James S. C. Chao, who began his career as a merchant mariner and in 1964 founded the shipping company Foremost Maritime Corporation in New York City which developed into the Foremost Group. In 1961, Elaine, along with her mother and two younger sisters, came to the United States on a 37-day freight ship journey. Her father had arrived in New York three years earlier after receiving a scholarship.

Chao attended Tsai Hsing Elementary School in Taiwan for kindergarten and first grade. She attended Syosset High School in Syosset, New York, in Nassau County on Long Island and was naturalized as a U.S. citizen at the age of 19.

Chao received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1975. In the second semester of her junior year, she studied money and banking at Dartmouth College. She received an MBA degree from Harvard Business School in 1979.

Personal life

In 1993, Chao married Mitch McConnell, U.S. Senator from Kentucky.

The University of Louisville's Ekstrom Library opened the "McConnell-Chao Archives" in November 2009. It is a major component of the university's McConnell Center.

In the two years leading up to the 2014 U.S. Senate elections, Chao "headlined fifty of her own events and attended hundreds more with and on behalf of" her husband and was seen as "a driving force of his reelection campaign" and eventual victory over Democratic candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes, who had portrayed McConnell as "anti-woman". After winning the election, McConnell said, "The biggest asset I have by far is the only Kentucky woman who served in a president's cabinet, my wife, Elaine Chao."

She has been described by Jan Karzen, a longtime friend of McConnell's, as adding "a softer touch" to McConnell's style by speaking of him "in a feminine, wifely way". She has also been described as "the campaign hugger" and is also known for bipartisan socializing. For example, in 2014 she hosted a dinner with philanthropist Catherine B. Reynolds to welcome Penny Pritzker as Secretary of Commerce, where she spent the evening socializing with Valerie Jarrett, Obama's closest advisor.

The New York Times described Chao as "an unapologetically ambitious operator with an expansive network, a short fuse, and a seemingly inexhaustible drive to get to the top and stay there".

Chao's father has donated millions of dollars to Mitch McConnell's re-election campaigns. Chao's extended family has given more than a million dollars to McConnell's campaigns. The extended family is also a top contributor to the Republican Party of Kentucky, giving it approximately $525,000 over two decades.

Elaine Chao is the oldest of six sisters, the others being Jeannette, May, Christine, Grace, and Angela.

Grace is married to Gordon Hartogensis who was nominated by President Trump in May 2018 and confirmed by the U.S. Senate as director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), a part of the Labor Department, in May 2019. Hartogensis co-founded forecasting-software company Petrolsoft in 1989, which was purchased for $60 million by Aspen Technology in 2000. He founded and led application software company Auric Technology LLC until it was sold to a company based in Mexico in 2011 and then helped govern the Hartogensis Family Trust.

In April 2008, Chao's father gave Chao and McConnell between $5 million and $25 million, which "boosted McConnell's personal worth from a minimum of $3 million in 2007 to more than $7 million" and "helped the McConnells after their stock portfolio dipped in the wake of the financial crisis that year".

In 2012, the Chao family donated $40 million to Harvard Business School for scholarships to students of Chinese heritage and for the Ruth Mulan Chu Chao Center, an executive education building named for Chao's late mother. It is the first Harvard Business School building named after a woman and the first building named after an American of Asian ancestry. Ruth Mulan Chu Chao returned to school at age 51 to earn a master's degree in Asian literature and history from St. John's University in the Queens borough of New York City.

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Career

Chao served as vice president for syndications at Bank of America Capital Markets Group in San Francisco, and she was an International Banker at Citicorp in New York from 1979 to 1983. She received a White House Fellowship in 1983 during the Reagan administration and then became Vice President Syndications at Bank of America from 1984 to 1986.

Chao was named Deputy Administrator of the Maritime Administration in the United States Department of Transportation in 1986. She served as Chairwoman of the Federal Maritime Commission from 1988 to 1989. President George H. Bush nominated Chao as Deputy Secretary of Transportation in 1989; she served from 1989 to 1991. She served as the Peace Corps' Director from 1991 to 1992. She was the first Asian Pacific American to hold any of these positions. She expanded the Peace Corps' presence in Eastern Europe and Central Asia by establishing the first Peace Corps projects in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland's newly independent states of the former Soviet Union.

Following her service in President George H.W., she reacted emily. Chao served with United Way of America from 1993 to 1996. Following a financial mismanagement scandal involving former President William Aramony, she has been credited with rebuilding authority and public confidence to the organization. Chao was a Distinguished Fellow with The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., from 1996 to her appointment as Secretary of Labor. After leaving the government in January 2009, she returned to the Heritage Foundation.

Chao was the only cabinet member in the George W. Bush administration to serve for the entire eight years. She was also the longest-serving Secretary of Labor since Frances Perkins, who served from 1933 to 1945 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The Washington Post announced that the Labor Department under her leadership was "widely chastised for walking away from its regulatory function on a variety of topics, including wage and hour legislation and workplace safety."

For the first time since 1971, a big West Coast ports dispute costing the US economy nearly $1 billion a day was settled when the Bush administration obtained a national emergency injunction against both the employers and the union under the Taft–Hartley Act. Led by Chao in 2003, the department updated the labor union financial disclosure laws under the Landrum–Griffin Act of 1959, which introduced expanded disclosure requirements for union-sponsored pension plans and other financial mismanagement to discourage embezzlement or other financial mismanagement.

The Fair Labor Standards Act amended the white-collar overtime law in 2004.

After reviewing 70,000 closed case files from 2005 to 2007, the Government Accountability Office found that the Department's Wage and Hour Division (WHD) improperly investigated allegations from low- and minimum wage employees, who claimed that employers failed to pay the federal minimum wage, mandated overtime, and refused to issue a final paycheck.

During Chao's tenure, a 2008 Government Accountability Office study revealed that the Labor Department gave Congress inaccurate estimates, understating the expense of outsourcing employee labor to private companies.

Mine safety regulators failed to perform federally mandated inspections at more than one of the country's 731 underground coal mines in 2006, according to a 2007 study by the Department's Office of Inspector General (OIG), and the number of worker deaths in mining accidents increased to 47 in that year. "147 inspections at 107 mines with a total of 7,500 workers were missed," MSHA's Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). According to a separate analysis of 21 inspection reports, documents were missing, misdated, or mislabeled, and that "MSHA inspectors mistook inspection results in reports and on the agency's Web site."

In 2006 and 2007, West Virginia's Sago Mine explosion killed 12 people in January 2006; Alma Mine in West Virginia, which killed two people in January 2006; and the Darby Mine No. Five miners died in May 2006 in Kentucky; and the Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah, which killed six workers and three rescuers in August 2007.

The widows of the two men killed in the Alma Mine fire in 2010 filed a federal lawsuit for negligence, inability to respond against assaults, and conflicts of interest. "MSHA's investigation of the fire revealed substantial deficiencies by inspectors, supervisors, and district administrators," at the mine, but the department did not accept responsibility for the negligent inspections. MSHA will be found responsible "if a negligent inspection resultes in the accidental death of a coal miner," the appeals court found in 2013. The two widows were settled in 2014, with MSHA agreeing to pay them $500,000 each and encouraging them to attend OIG interviews relating to the fire; MSHA also agreed to develop a training course on how to detect fires in underground mines.

The Labor Department had been chastised for "walking away from its legislative role on a variety of topics, including wage and hour legislation and workplace safety." After rules changes in January 2008, a 2009 internal audit assessing a controversial workplace identified as a result of workforce instability, uneven inspections, and prosecution revealed that employees had failed to obtain required information, conducted uneven inspections, and failed to identify repeat fatalities because reports did not contain the company's names or failed to notify when two subsidiaries with the same owner were affected.

Chao reprised her previous work as a Distinguished Fellow at The Heritage Foundation in 2009, and she wrote for Fox News and other media outlets.

She has also served on a number of government and non-profit boards, including the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Wells Fargo, New York–Presbyterian Hospital, News Corp, Dole Food Company, and Protective Life Corporation. Chao was expected to receive $1–5 million in compensation for her service on Wells Fargo's board. She was given the Woodrow Wilson Award for Public Service in June 2011.

She resigned from Bloomberg Philanthropies' board in January 2015 because of the firm's plans to significantly raise funding for the Sierra Club's "Beyond Coal" campaign.

Former US Marine Corps General James T. Conway, former Mojahedin-e Khalq, former FBI Director Louis Freeh, former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and former Governor Howard Dean of Pennsylvania all agreed that Chao had consulted organizations related to People's Mujahedin of Iran (aka Mojahedin-e Khalq or MEK), a group exiled from Iran following crimes in the 1970s against the Shah of Iran and the Ayatoll Chao was paid $67,000 for the two speeches, which took place in 2015 and 2016.

Chao served as a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute until she was elected as US Secretary of Transportation on January 31, 2017.

President Donald Trump declared on November 29, 2016, that Chao will be nominated to be Secretary of Transportation. Chao was confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 93–6, with her husband, then-Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell abstaining. Although support existed on both sides of the Senate, several Senators expressed skepticism against government control privatization, potentially triggering tensions between Democrats and the new Trump administration.

Chao resigned on January 7, 2021, the day after the 2021 riots of the United States Capitol, she said, effective January 11, 2021. "She thanked the president for the opportunity to serve as Transportation secretary in a two-page resignation letter to Trump, which contained just one sentence about the Capitol riots, and praised the department's accomplishments over the past four years."

Chao revealed the establishment of a pilot program to test and analyze the integration of civil and public drone operations into the airspace system in 2017. Ten finalists were chosen to participate in the initiative in 2018. UPS Flight Forward's air carrier and pilot certificate for drone deliveries to a hospital campus in Raleigh, North Carolina, was issued by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 2019. The FAA suggested a new rule in December 2019 after multiple reports in Colorado and Nebraska of unidentified objects flying in formation at night over several rural counties, including drones that were not clearly identifiable.

Chao's Non-Traditional and Emerging Transportation Technology (NETT) Council, an internal Department of Transportation group charged with identifying "jurisdictional and regulatory gaps" when considering new transportation technologies, was announced in March 2019. In April 2019, the FAA introduced new guidelines to modernize the certification for commercial space flight launches and reentries. The president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation sluggishly criticized the plan at a congressional hearing in July 2019 as not meeting its stated objectives.

According to a Politico review published in October 2018, Chao had more than 290 hours of appointments that were branded "private" during working hours in the first 14 months of her tenure as Secretary of Transportation. Former Transportation Minister David Coveney referred to the situation as unusual. According to current DoT officials, the "private" designation helped Chao's safety by concealing her true activity.

Chao, the Secretary of Transportation, appeared in at least a dozen interviews with her father, James, a shipping magnate with strong industry interests in China. Multiple instances where Chao's office aided in the promotion of her family's shipping company were cited by the Transportation Department's inspector general, who provided numerous examples. In December 2020, the inspector general ordered the Justice Department to investigate a criminal probe into Chao, but the DOJ denied. The appearances sparked ethical questions, according to ethics experts, who said that public officials are forbidden from using their positions to benefit others or themselves. A gift from Chao's businessman father James to Chao and his wife Mitch McConnell, valued between $5 million and $25 million was disclosed by Federal disclosures cited by The New York Times. The company's founder (and which her sister, Angela, now operates), The Foremost Group, has ties to the Chinese state and Chinese elites. It obtained hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from a Chinese bank, and it has substantial concerns about a large shipyard funded by and long-term agreements with a Chinese steel producer owned by the Chinese state. Angela and James Chao served on the boards of a Chinese state-owned shipbuilder, and the China Council for International Trade (which was established by the government of China) and the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (which was also listed by the Government of China).

Foremost shipped 72% of the total tonnage from January 2018 to April 2019, China. Other than its New York headquarters, the Foremost Group has virtually no presence in the United States other than its New York headquarters. The US Department of Transportation continually sought to reduce funding and loan guarantees for domestic American shipping companies, shipyards, and shipbuilders during the period when Chao appeared with her father at promotional functions for the company. Congress rejected these proposed budget reductions in a bipartisan manner. Chao's Department has been trying to prevent funding for a program that helps small domestic shipyards remain economically competitive, as well as a separate program that gives loan guarantees for the construction or reconstruction of ships with American registration.

Chao promised to sell the stock she had earned while on the board of directors of Vulcan Materials, one of the country's largest providers of road-paving materials, by April 2018. Since the Wall Street Journal and other major news outlets revealed in late May 2019 that she was still holding the stock, worth $250,000 to $500,000, she sold it on June 3, 2019, for the first time since April 2018.

Politico announced in June 2019 that Chao had named Todd Inman as a special liaison "to help with grant applications and other requirements" for Transportation Department programs in the state of Kentucky, the only state to have such a liaison. Inman was supposed to serve as an intermediary between the Department, local Kentucky officials, and Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, who is Chao's husband. This resulted in at least $78 million in grants for programs in Mitch McConnell's strongholds, Boone County and Owensboro. Inman was in charge of the 2008 and 2014 re-election bids of McConnell; McConnell and local officials sponsored the awards after he announced in Owensboro in December 2018 that he would seek re-election in 2020. Inman became Chao's chief of staff later this year.

The Oversight and Reform Committee, led by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, opened an investigation into whether she used political office to advance her family's business interests in September. According to a letter sent by Chao on September 16, the Department of Transportation was asked to cancel a trip to China in 2017 that Chao had intended to take because State Department ethics investigators challenged her efforts to bring her family members in formal meetings with the Chinese government.

The Inspector General issued their report on March 4, 2021, blaming Chao for a variety of ethical offences, including using department funds for personal errands and promoting her father's biography. In December 2020, the Justice Department and the United States Attorney's Office in Washington, D.C., among other things, and the criminal probe was also revealed. Both of them have declined to open criminal probes into Chao.

Mitch Behm, the Trump administration's acting Inspector General of the Transportation Department, was shot by the Trump administration in May 2020. Behm, a non-political appointee, was investigating whether Secretary Elaine Chao was giving preferential treatment to Kentucky projects. Mitch McConnell, her husband, is the senator of Kentucky and faced a re-election bid at the time.

Howard "Skip" Elliott Elliott has been named interim Inspector General of the Transportation Department by Trump. Elliott, on the other hand, served in a dual capacity, where Chao was his boss. Elliott, therefore, was in charge of an investigation into his own behavior and Chao's.

Chao was elected to the board of directors of Kroger's supermarket chain in August 2021. On Twitter, Kroger shoppers reacted angrily, with calls for a boycott becoming a national trend, as a result of her ties to the Trump administration and Mitch McConnell's husband.

Chao has three honorary doctorates, including an honorary Doctor of Humanity Letters from Georgetown McDonough School of Business in 2015. She was initiated at SUNY Plattsburgh as an honoris causa initiate in 1996.

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