Brad Grantz: Republican staff director, Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee 

Brad Grantz has been a thorn in President Biden’s side when it comes to nominations. 

He spearheads a Republican staff on the Commerce Committee that has played a key role in derailing three of Biden’s high-profile nominees: Gigi Sohn, Biden’s pick to serve on the Federal Communications Commission; Phil Washington, Biden’s choice to head the Federal Aviation Administration; and Ann Carlson, the president’s choice to serve as administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.  

Grantz previously served as Republican staff director for the Senate Banking Committee and before that as legislative director for former Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) and as staff director for the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Health Care.  

While working on the Banking panel he helped nix Biden’s nomination of Sarah Bloom Raskin to serve as vice chair for supervision of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors and also played a role in quashing Saule Omarova’s nomination to serve as comptroller of the currency.  

Grantz also has an encyclopedic memory for policy details and a knack for explaining them succinctly and sensibly to senators and colleagues who are not quite as familiar with complex policy details.  

While on Toomey’s staff, he worked on the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, then-President Trump’s landmark tax reform law, and on the 2020 CARES Act, the massive bill Congress passed to keep the U.S. economy from sliding into a depression at the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.  

He later worked on shutting down the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending programs, a top priority of Toomey, who warned that keeping the emergency programs in place would turn the Fed into a “lender of first resort” and compete with private sector financial institutions.