Tom Vilsack

Thomas James Vilsack (born December 13, 1950) is an American politician serving as the 32nd United States secretary of agriculture in the Biden administration.

Vilsack was born on December 13, 1950, in a Roman Catholic orphanage in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where his 23-year-old birth mother (a secretary) had lived since September 1950 under the pseudonym of "Gloria"; he was baptized as "Kenneth".

He was adopted in 1951 by Bud, a real-estate agent and insurance salesman, and Dolly Vilsack.

They named him Thomas James.

Vilsack attended Shady Side Academy, a preparatory high school in Pittsburgh.

He received a bachelor's degree in 1972 from Hamilton College.

While at Hamilton, he joined the Delta Upsilon fraternity.

He received a Juris Doctor from Albany Law School in 1975.

Vilsack moved to Mount Pleasant, Iowa after marriage.

After the mayor of Mount Pleasant was gunned down in December 1986, Vilsack led a fundraising drive to build a memorial fountain.

The deceased mayor's father asked Vilsack to run for mayor of Mount Pleasant; he was elected and began serving in 1987.

He and his wife volunteered in the failed 1988 presidential campaign of then senator Joe Biden.

Vilsack was elected to the Iowa Senate in 1992.

Following his election, he worked on legislation requiring companies who received state tax incentives to provide better pay and benefits.

He helped pass a law for workers to receive health coverage when changing jobs and helped redesign Iowa's Workforce Development Department.

He also wrote a bill to have the State of Iowa assume a 50% share of local county mental health costs.

In 1995, Vilsack voted for H.F. 519 "to protect animal agricultural producers".

The founder of hog factory farming operation Iowa Select Farms Jeff Hansen was pleased, and is quoted as saying the bill was a fair compromise.

In 1998, Terry Branstad chose not to seek re-election after 16 years as governor.

The Iowa Republican Party nominated Jim Ross Lightfoot, a former U.S. Representative.

Vilsack defeated former Iowa Supreme Court Justice Mark McCormick in the Democratic primary and chose Sally Pederson as his running mate.

Lightfoot was the odds-on favorite to succeed Branstad and polls consistently showed him in the lead.

However, Vilsack narrowly won the general election and became the first Democrat to serve as governor of Iowa in thirty years and only the fifth Democrat to hold the office in the 20th century.

A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the 40th governor of Iowa from 1999 to 2007.

During his tenure, Iowa experienced a peak in new CAFO construction.

During the 2000 contest for the Democratic presidential nomination between Vice President Al Gore and former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley, he remained neutral.

In 2002 he won his second term in office by defeating Republican challenger attorney Doug Gross by eight percentage points.

In the first year of his second term, Vilsack used a line-item veto, later ruled unconstitutional by the Iowa Supreme Court, to create the Grow Iowa Values Fund, a $503million appropriation designed to boost the Iowa economy by offering grants to corporations and initiatives pledged to create higher-income jobs.

On November 30, 2006, he formally launched his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 2008 election, but ended his bid on February 23, 2007.

President-elect Barack Obama announced Vilsack's selection to be Secretary of Agriculture on December 17, 2008.

He previously served in the role from 2009 to 2017 during the Obama administration.

His nomination was confirmed by the United States Senate by unanimous consent on January 20, 2009.

On July 19, 2016, The Washington Post reported that Vilsack was on Hillary Clinton's two-person shortlist to be her running mate for that year's presidential election.

U.S. Senator Tim Kaine from Virginia was ultimately selected.

Vilsack raised funds to rebuild an athletic facility for young people; in a 2016 interview, he describes himself "as the Jerry Lewis of Mount Pleasant for a couple days" when he hosted a pledge drive on the local radio station to raise the funds.

This led him to involvement in the local Chamber of Commerce and United Way.

Until his January 13, 2017 resignation one week prior to the end of Obama's second term as president, he had been the only member of the U.S. Cabinet who had served since the day Obama originally took office.

On December 10, 2020, President-elect Joe Biden announced his intention to nominate Vilsack to once again serve as secretary of agriculture in the incoming Biden administration.

Vilsack was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on February 23, 2021, by a vote of 92–7.

Currently Vilsack is the second longest serving Secretary of Agriculture, only being surpassed by fellow Iowan James "Tama Jim" Wilson.