Gina Raimondo, a Rising Star in the Biden Administration, Faces a $100 Billion Test

Ms. Raimondo grew up in Rhode Island in a close-knit Roman Catholic family, raised partly by a brother 13 years her senior who recalled wrestling with her and throwing her in the water at the beach.

She was “afraid of pretty much nothing,” said her brother, Dr. Thomas J. Raimondo, a pulmonologist in Warwick, R.I. “I think because we brought her up tough, but No. 2, she’ll enter a conflict figuring out, ‘How am I going to fix this?’”

In the sixth grade, she was also deeply influenced by watching her father lose his job at the Bulova watch factory as American manufacturers began sending jobs overseas. The job was a source of pride for her father and allowed him to provide for his family, and the loss sent him into a funk for years, Ms. Raimondo said in an interview. Her mother had shone in a job in human relations at U.S. Rubber, Ms. Raimondo said, but she was dismissed when she became pregnant, a common policy at the time.

As Ms. Raimondo grew up, other manufacturers like Timex and U.S. Rubber shut their doors, and she saw Rhode Island’s schools and infrastructure begin to fray. The significance of these closures would resonate when Ms. Raimondo studied economics as an undergraduate at Harvard, where her professors fed her a “steady diet” of how trickle-down Reaganomics had hollowed out the U.S. economy, she said.

It was also this decaying system — specifically, Rhode Island’s decision to slash public bus routes and library hours when budgets fell short — that ultimately drove Ms. Raimondo to leave a lucrative job in venture capital and run for state treasurer in 2010. There, she made changes to shore up the state’s pension system, clashing with unions and progressive Democrats in the process.

She was elected as the state’s first female governor in 2014. In that job, she introduced free community college and all-day kindergarten, repeatedly raised the minimum wage and cut business taxes. She also courted controversy by proposing a toll on commercial trucks to rebuild the state’s roads and bridges. In 2016, 18-wheel trucks circled Rhode Island’s State House for months, blasting their horns in protest and rattling the nerves of Ms. Raimondo’s staff.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/26/business/economy/gina-raimondo-chips-biden.html