The Senate on Thursday confirmed Jim O’Neill, co-founder of the Thiel Fellowship, as deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in a 52-43 vote.
In November, Politico reported the selection of O’Neill by then-President-elect Donald Trump for the deputy secretary role at HHS.
“He will oversee all operations and improve Management, Transparency, and Accountability to, Make America Healthy Again,” Trump said in a statement.
Jim O’Neill’s Career Background
O’Neill co-founded the Thiel Fellowship in 2010 and served as CEO of SENS Research Foundation.
According to his LinkedIn profile, he sits on the board of Advantage Therapeutics and is an adviser at FounderPool.
The Yale University graduate was managing director at Mithril Capital Management and Clarium Capital Management.
O’Neill also held leadership roles at HHS during President George W. Bush’s administration, including principal associate deputy secretary, member of the steering committee for the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority and associate deputy secretary.
Related Articles
Gregory Barbaccia, federal chief information officer and a 2025 Wash100 awardee, has shared his insights on how the federal government should advance digital transformation. “I notice a lot of the government considers itself to be ‘digital,’ but in reality, we’ve only digitized, not transformed. Sure we went 0-1, but that should have just been the beginning,” Barbaccia wrote in a LinkedIn post. He noted the lack of automation and that workflows remain unchanged despite the replacement of paper ledgers with spreadsheets. “Files are shared over email instead of through real-time collaboration tools,” he added. Advancing Digital Transformation in Federal Government
The Federal Communications Commission has adopted new rules that seek to eliminate unnecessary paperwork and address regulatory barriers to the ground-station-as-a-service, or GSaaS, business model as part of efforts to drive innovation in the U.S. space economy. FCC said Thursday the new rules establish a process for ground station operators to secure a baseline license without first identifying a satellite point of communication. A simple FCC notification will be required for each new point of communication. According to FCC, the change would eliminate nearly half of earth station modification applications. “Making the smallest change to a satellite system or earth
The General Services Administration has announced a OneGov agreement with Amazon Web Services that will provide up to $1 billion in direct incentive credits to federal civilian agencies. According to GSA, the direct incentive credits, aggregated across the agencies, will include savings on core AWS cloud services through AWS credits, infrastructure and application technologies modernization through AWS modernization credits, access to AWS training and certification through training credits and a streamlined engagement model with greater savings for direct contracts through direct partnerships. Advancing America’s AI Leadership The agreement is expected to accelerate large-scale IT transformation and boost AI innovation across