The White House has nominated Sean O'Keefe as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. Since 1996, O'Keefe has been the Louis A. Bantle Professor of Business and Government Policy at The Maxwell School of Syracuse University, where he also directs the National Security Studies program.
O'Keefe served as secretary of the Navy under President George Bush in 1992 and as comptroller and chief financial officer of the Department of Defense from 1989 to 1992. Before joining then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney's Pentagon management team, he served for eight years on the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee and was staff director of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. O'Keefe's public service began in 1978 as a presidential management intern.
O'Keefe is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and served as chair of an Academy panel on investigative practices. He was a visiting scholar at the Wolfson College of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. O'Keefe is a member of the Naval Postgraduate School's civil-military relations seminar team for emerging democracies and has conducted seminars for the Strategic Studies Group at Oxford University.
O'Keefe earned a bachelor's degree at Loyola University in New Orleans in 1977 and a M.P.A. degree at The Maxwell School in 1978.