Former Clinton administration budget chief and Federal Reserve Board Vice Chairwoman Alice Rivlin has died at 88.
The Brookings Institution, where Rivlin served as a senior fellow for economic studies, confirmed the news. A cause of death was not provided.
“The Brookings Institution will be forever indebted to Alice Rivlin for her innumerable contributions to our work,” the institution said in a statement on Rivlin’s death. “Our community will never forget her integrity, her energy, and her commitment to policy that speaks for and serves all Americans.”
Before running the Office of Management and Budget under former President Bill Clinton, where she was the first woman to run an administration’s budget operations, Rivlin was also the founding director of the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan budget and economic office for Congress. Rivlin ran the CBO from its inception in 1975 until 1983.
Rivlin’s most recent governmental position was with the fiscal commission formed by former President Barack Obama to address the mounting national debt. That commission’s plan was ultimately not adopted, as it contained a combination of unpopular spending cuts and tax increases. She also headed the financial control board created by Congress in the late 1990s to help Washington, D.C., recover from a debt and budget crisis.
A trained economist, Rivlin was awarded the Paul Volcker Lifetime Achievement Award for Economic Policy from the National Association of Business Economics in 2015, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, unofficially known as the ‘genius grant,’ in 1983, and a number of other honorary degrees and public policy leadership awards.
Throughout Rivlin’s life she maintained an affiliation with the Brookings Institution, the Washington-based think tank that employed her several times. She served as the public policy nonprofit group’s economic studies program director from 1983 through 1987.
“Alice was amazing,” tweeted William Gale, a Brookings colleague of Rivlin. “I won’t focus on her accomplishments or how gracious she was, will just recount one episode. We went out to lunch awhile ago, and a man literally stopped her on the street and said ‘Ms. Rivlin, I want to thank you for everything you’ve done for the country.'”
Another former Clinton administration official, Rep. Donna Shalala, D-Fla., called Rivlin’s death “a great loss to our country and this Congress.”
“She was a brilliant public servant— one of a kind,” said Shalala in a release.
