A former lead official at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) will become the second-ranking executive at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
The Senate confirmed Nani Coloretti to serve as the deputy secretary of HUD. Coloretti was the acting chief operating officer of the CFPB when it opened in 2010 and stayed with the agency from August 2010 to March 2011.
In a 2011 interview with FedInsider.com, Coloretti talked about the process of building the CFPB staff from the beginning, with employees from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Office of Thift Supervision and five other agencies helping to build the foundation of the CFPB. Six of those seven agencies transferred employees to the CFPB.
“In bank supervision, OCC and OTS examiners may be doing several things, and you can’t divide that person in half,” Coloretti told FedInsider.com in the interview. “What people feared is that the agencies would send people they didn’t want anymore. We tried to create a pull factor, not a push factor. So we created position descriptions. Then the agencies worried we’d take the best people.”
After leaving the CFPB, Coloretti went back to her job as assistant secretary at the Treasury Department from there, serving as assistant secretary, and President Obama appointed her as a member of the Government Accountability and Transparency Board in 2012.
“Nani is a proven executive who has excelled at making government more efficient at the municipal and federal levels,” HUD Secretary Julian Castro said in a news release. “Her breadth of experience and track record at the Treasury Department make her the ideal choice for a mission-oriented agency like HUD.”
Coloretti will manage the HUD’s day-to-day operations, including a $45-billion annual budget and approximately 8,500 employees.
“I’m immensely grateful for the trust that President Obama and Secretary Castro are placing in me to help lead HUD at this critical time,” Coloretti said in the release. “This department is undergoing significant change as it works to support our nation’s housing recovery and improve the way it serves communities all across this country. I’m looking forward to working with the department’s outstanding employees and continue a data-driven approach to help make HUD’s operations run as efficiently as possible.”
Before working in Washington, Coloretti served as a policy advisor and budget director in San Francisco, where she led the development and implementation of the city’s $6.2-billion annual budget. Coloretti also spent six years in San Francisco as the policy and budget director at an agency that worked to improve the lives of children, youth and families by investing in cross-cutting, evidence-based initiatives.
She is a recipient of the UC Berkeley Goldman School Award for Policy Innovation, the National Public Service Award, and the Fed 100 award.