The Joe Biden administration plans to nominate Sandia National Laboratories alum and State Department veteran Mallory Stewart to be assistant secretary for arms control, verification and compliance, the post responsible for ensuring the last remaining nuclear arms treaty is functioning as intended.
The White House announced its intent to nominate Stewart just before the U.S. July Fourth holiday. The administration had yet to nominate Stewart at deadline Friday. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will have to approve her nomination before the full Senate can vote to confirm her for the role.
If confirmed, Stewart would succeed Yleem Poblete, the last Senate-confirmed official to hold the post during the Donald Trump administration. The assistant secretary for arms control, verification and compliance reports to the under secretary of state for Arms Control and International Security. The Biden administration had not nominated a full-time under secretary at deadline.
In January, Stewart joined the Biden administration’s National Security Council as special assistant to the President and senior director for arms control, disarmament and nonproliferation. Right before that, however, she spent three years working for Sandia at the lab’s cooperative monitoring center, and later as senior manager for global nuclear security and nonproliferation.
Stewart spent 15 years at the State Department from 2022 to 2017, most of which were as an attorney adviser in the Office of the Legal Advisor.
In between her government jobs, Stewart spent a few years as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Washington, and as a non-resident fellow at the D.C.-based Stimson Center.
If she negotiates the Senate without incident, Stewart will be in charge of verifying that the U.S. and Russia are each complying with their obligations under the New Start nuclear arms control treaty, which Biden and Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, extended for five years in February.
