Rebecca Blank

Rebecca Margaret Blank (September 19, 1955 – February 17, 2023) was an American economist and academic administrator.

Blank was born on September 19, 1955, in Columbia, Missouri, and grew up in Roseville, Minnesota.

She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota with a degree in economics and earned a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Blank married Hanns Kuttner in 1994, and they had a daughter.

In 2022, Blank fell ill while vacationing in Europe, and was subsequently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

She died at a hospice facility in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, on February 17, 2023, at the age of 67.

Blank was the Robert S. Kerr Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

From 1997 to 1999, Blank was a member of Council of Economic Advisers in the 1990s during the Clinton Administration, participating in White House decision-making on economic, social, and regulatory policy issues.

Blank was a professor of economics at Northwestern University and director of the University of Chicago–Northwestern University Joint Center for Poverty Research.

She also taught at Princeton University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Blank was previously a finalist for the position in 2008, when Carolyn "Biddy" Martin was selected as Chancellor.

Throughout her time as Chancellor, Blank had to contend with an in-state undergraduate tuition freeze, in addition to hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to state funding.

She additionally worked to minimize faculty departures following the removal of statutory tenure protections by the Republican-controlled Wisconsin State Legislature as well as legislation shifting away power from a long established faculty/student shared governance arrangement to the politically-appointed Board of Regents.

Blank implemented full-tuition scholarship programs for Wisconsin students whose families earn less than $60,000 annually and presided over substantial increases in both the size of the Freshman class and the 4–6 year graduation rates for undergraduate students.

Blank engaged in several efforts to highlight the history of marginalized populations at the university, which included the establishment of a Public History Project and efforts to acknowledge the Ho-Chunk Nation, on whose ancestral land the UW-Madison campus sits, as well as the presence of Divine Nine fraternities and sororities on campus.

During the Obama Administration, Blank joined the U.S. Commerce Department in June 2009 as Secretary Gary Locke's principal economic advisor in her role as Under Secretary for Economic Affairs and head of the Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA).

ESA oversees the two premier statistical agencies in the United States: the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

She also served as Locke's appointed Board Representative to the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation.

During her service at ESA, Blank played an important role in overseeing a decennial Census operation that was both timely and under budget – netting $1.6 billion in 2010 savings.

Within ESA, she supervised a staff of economists and policy analysts who produced various reports and forecasts that helped develop and assess domestic and international policy.

On November 18, 2010, United States Department of Commerce announced that Blank would become its Acting Deputy Secretary.

In that role, she focused on management and policy matters for the department's 12 bureaus, functioning as Commerce's chief operating officer.

Her management roles were overseeing nearly 45,000 employees and also a $10 billion budget.

In late 2011, President Obama nominated Blank as Deputy Secretary of Commerce.

Blank became the Acting Secretary of Commerce for the first time on August 1, 2011, after Gary Locke became U.S. Ambassador to the People's Republic of China.

President Obama nominated John Bryson and on October 21, 2011, he became the 37th Secretary of Commerce.

At the same time, Blank was designated the Acting Deputy Secretary of Commerce.

The United States Senate confirmed her to the post on March 29, 2012, by unanimous consent.

Blank was designated Acting Secretary of Commerce a second time on June 11, 2012.

Incumbent Secretary John Bryson took a medical leave of absence following his citation on felony hit-and-run charges.

He transferred his powers to Blank for an undetermined length of time.

A Department of Commerce spokesperson said he had suffered a seizure.

She was chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 2013 to 2022.

She served in several senior roles in the United States Department of Commerce during the presidency of Barack Obama, including more than a year as acting United States Secretary of Commerce.

On March 18, 2013, Blank announced that she was leaving the Obama administration to become chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Following her resignation, Cameron Kerry was designated as Acting Secretary of Commerce, pending the Senate confirmation of Penny Pritzker.

It was announced on February 21, 2013, that Blank was one of four finalists for the position of Chancellor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

A special committee of the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents recommended her for the position on March 18.

She announced that she would accept the position the same day.

The full Board of Regents unanimously confirmed Blank as chancellor on April 5, and she began as chancellor on July 22.