On March 1, 2001, the United States Senate confirmed President George W. Bush’s
appointment of Sean O’Keefe as the Deputy Director of the Office of Management
and Budget. As the first deputy cabinet officer appointed in the Bush Administration,
Mr. O’Keefe oversees the preparation, management and administration of the Federal
budget and government wide management initiatives across the Executive Branch.
Prior to the current appointment, Mr. O’Keefe was the Louis A. Bantle Professor
of Business and Government Policy, an endowed chair, at the Syracuse University
Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He also served as the Director
of National Security Studies, a partnership of Syracuse University and Johns Hopkins
University for delivery of executive education programs for senior military and
civilian Department of Defense managers. Appointed to these positions in 1996,
he was previously Professor of Business Administration and Assistant to the Senior
Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School at the Pennsylvania
State University.
Prior to appointment as the Secretary of the Navy in July 1992
by President George Bush, he had served previously as Comptroller and Chief Financial
Officer of the Department of Defense since 1989. Before joining Defense Secretary
Dick Cheney’s Pentagon management team in these capacities, he served on the United States Senate Committee on Appropriations staff for eight years, and was Staff Director of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. His public service began in 1978 upon selection as a Presidential Management Intern.
Sean O’Keefe is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public
Administration and has served as chair of an Academy panel on investigative practices.
He was a Visiting Scholar at the Wolfson College of the University of Cambridge
in the United Kingdom, a member of the Naval Postgraduate School’s civil-military
relations seminar team for emerging democracies and has conducted seminars for
the Strategic Studies Group at Oxford University. He served on the national security
panel to devise the 1988 Republican platform and was a member of the 1985 Kennedy
School of Government program for national security executives at Harvard University.
In 1993, President Bush and Secretary Cheney presented him
the Distinguished Public Service Award. He was also the recipient of the Department
of the Navy’s Public Service Award in December 2000. Sean O’Keefe was the 1999
faculty recipient of the Syracuse University Chancellor’s Award for Public Service.
He is the author of several journal articles, contributing author of Keeping
the Edge: Managing Defense for the Future, released in October 2000, and in
1998, co-authored The Defense Industry in the Post-Cold War Era: Corporate
Strategies and Public Policy Perspectives. He is also a member of the Bohemian
Club of San Francisco.
Sean O’Keefe earned his B.A. in 1977 from Loyola University
in New Orleans, Louisiana, and his M.P.A. in 1978 from The Maxwell School. He and
his wife Laura reside in Manlius, New York with their children Lindsey, Jonathan,
and Kevin.
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