Majority Statement

• Chairman Roger Wicker
  Read statement

  Majority Statement

  Chairman Roger Wicker

  Today, the Committee will consider three nominations for important roles within the Committee’s jurisdiction. The nominees before us today are:

  Gregory Autry, the nominee for the Chief Financial Officer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration;

  Daniel Huff, who has been nominated to be Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Legislative Affairs; and

  Nathan Simington, nominated to be a Member of the Federal Communications Commission. Welcome all three of you.

  The Chief Financial Officer at NASA is charged with overseeing financial and budgetary matters for the agency.  Dr. Greg Autry has been nominated for this key role.  Dr. Autry previously worked as a professor at the University of Southern California and was the Director for the Pacific Commercial Spaceflight Initiative from 2018 until 2020.  He currently serves as the Vice President of Space Development for the National Space Society.  Since 2018, he has served as a member of the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC).  In 2017, he served as the Interim White House Liaison for NASA.  Dr. Autry also has taught at Florida Tech/International Space University Center for Space Entrepreneurship at the Kennedy Space Center.

  Greg Autry received his B.A. in History and Computer Science from California Polytechnic University in 1999.  Dr. Autry also received his M.B.A. from the University of California, Irvine in 2002, and his Ph.D. in Management, Economics, and Public Policy in 2013 from the University of California, Irvine’s Paul Merage School of Business.

  The Department of Commerce has a wide range of policy areas within its portfolio, and the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Legislative Affairs is an important liaison between the Department and Congress on all of them.  Daniel Huff is the nominee for this position.  Mr. Huff is currently serving as a detailee to the Office of Presidential Personnel in the Executive Office of the President, where he works as an Advisor. When he began his service as a detailee this spring, Mr. Huff worked for the Department of Housing and Urban Development as the General Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, where he began working in the spring of 2019.  However, his home agency employer recently became the Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration, where he is now a Deputy Chief of Staff.

  From 2011 until 2019, Mr. Huff worked as a counsel at the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on the Judiciary, and earlier in his career he worked as Crime and Terrorism Counsel at the Senate Judiciary Committee.  He received his B.A. in Mathematics, Economics, and History from the University of Toronto in 2002, and his J.D. from Columbia Law School in 2005.

  The Federal Communications Commission is the nation’s independent government agency which regulates interstate and international communications matters.  Mr. Nathan Simington has been nominated to serve as a member of the FCC for a term of five years from July 1, 2019.  Mr. Simington has been a Senior Advisor for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) at the Department of Commerce since June of 2020.  Before joining the NTIA, Mr. Simington was Senior Corporate Counsel for Brightstar Corporation in Miami, Florida, where his portfolio included wireless credit, mergers and acquisitions, tower services, operations and logistics, data security, and regulatory compliance.

  Prior to joining Brightstar, Mr. Simington practiced law as an Associate at major law firms in Chicago and Washington. Nathan Simington graduated from Lawrence University in 2001 with a Bachelor’s degree in Music and received Masters degrees from the University of Rochester in 2006 and 2007.  In 2011, Mr. Simington received his J.D. degree from the University Of Michigan Law School.

  I would like to thank all of the nominees for testifying today and for your willingness to serve in these positions. And as a matter of fact some of you went to extra effort to testify in person, and we very much appreciate that.  I will now turn to the acting ranking member Senator Blumenthal for his opening remarks.

Testimony

• Dr. Greg Autry

  to be Chief Financial Officer

  National Aeronautics and Space Administration
  Download Testimony (527.17 KB)

• Mr. Daniel Huff

  to be Assistant Secretary

  Department of Commerce
  Download Testimony (109.48 KB)

• Mr. Nathan Simington

  to be a Member

  Federal Communications Commission
  Download Testimony (99.31 KB)