1. Lanhee Joseph Chen is an American political scientist, lawyer, and academic who has served as a member of the Amtrak Board of Advisors since December 2024.
47 Facts About Lanhee Chen
1. 2.
Lanhee Chen was the policy director for the 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign and Romney's Chief Policy Adviser.
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Lanhee Chen has been described as the "orchestra leader" behind the Romney 2012 campaign.
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Lanhee Chen was a senior adviser to the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Marco Rubio.
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Lanhee Chen has twice been the senior policy adviser to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
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Lanhee Chen has served in presidential administrations of both major parties.
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Lanhee Chen was nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the US Senate to a seat on the bipartisan and independent Social Security Advisory Board, which advises the president, Congress, and the Social Security Administrator on Social Security policies.
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Lanhee Chen was recommended for the post by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and served from 2014 to 2018.
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Lanhee Chen currently serves as chair of the board of directors of El Camino Health, a major hospital in Silicon Valley.
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Lanhee Chen was the Republican nominee for the 2022 California State Controller election.
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In September 2024, Lanhee Chen was nominated by President Joe Biden to a seat on the Board of Directors of Amtrak.
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Lanhee Chen was confirmed by the US Senate on December 21,2024.
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Lanhee Chen was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to a Taiwanese American family.
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Lanhee Chen's parents were Taiwanese benshengren who had immigrated from Yunlin County, Taiwan, to the United States.
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At age seven, Lanhee Chen moved with his family to Rowland Heights, California, where he was raised in a large Taiwanese community.
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Lanhee Chen speaks Taiwanese Hokkien more fluently than Mandarin Chinese.
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Lanhee Chen was one of the top students in California and one of the top nationally in the International Extemporaneous speaking and Lincoln-Douglas debate.
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Lanhee Chen was one of the nation's top student senators in the 1994 National Speech and Debate Association John C Stennis National Student Congress.
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Lanhee Chen was a roommate of Tom Cotton, who later became a US Senator representing Arkansas, and businessman Bom Kim.
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In 1999, Lanhee Chen served as a co-president of Harvard Model Congress.
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Lanhee Chen served in 2014 and again in 2018 as a senior adviser on policy to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
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Lanhee Chen was the healthcare adviser for the George W Bush 2004 presidential campaign.
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In 2003, Lanhee Chen was the Winnie Neubauer Visiting Fellow in Health Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation, an American conservative think tank based in Washington, DC.
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In 2015, Lanhee Chen was named one of the POLITICO 50, a list of the top "thinkers, doers, and visionaries transforming American politics".
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Lanhee Chen announced his candidacy for the California State Controller in July 2021, seeking to replace termed out controller Betty Yee.
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Lanhee Chen lost to Malia Cohen in the 2022 California State Controller election.
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Lanhee Chen stated he would prioritize strategic planning and financial efficiency at Amtrak.
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Lanhee Chen was a CNN political commentator in 2016, and is believed to be the first Asian American to hold that position.
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Lanhee Chen is often on television and radio, and frequently appears on a variety of networks, including ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, CNBC, FOX Business Network, Bloomberg TV and the BBC.
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Lanhee Chen has appeared as a roundtable guest on ABC This Week, Face the Nation, Meet the Press, and Fox News Sunday and is a guest on top television political programming, including MSNBC's Morning Joe and MTP Daily, and CNN's State of the Union and The Lead with Jake Tapper.
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Lanhee Chen is a frequent guest on the Hugh Hewitt Show, a conservative talk radio program.
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Lanhee Chen was one of the lead commentators on Bloomberg TV's 2014 election night coverage with Mark Halperin and John Heilemann.
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In 2017, Chen served as the William E Simon Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University.
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Lanhee Chen is a Strategic Advisor with NewRoad Capital Partners, a private equity fund focused on growth equity investing.
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Lanhee Chen is a member of the board of trustees of the Junior Statesmen Foundation and is on the advisory board of the Partnership for the Future of Medicare and the Global Taiwan Institute.
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Lanhee Chen was named the inaugural director and currently serves as a senior adviser to the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, a project of the Aspen Institute co-chaired by Henry Paulson and Erskine Bowles, aimed at gathering, in a non-partisan spirit, a diverse range of distinguished leaders and thinkers to address significant structural challenges in the US economy.
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In 2015, Lanhee Chen was selected as a member of the Committee of 100, a membership organization of Chinese Americans dedicated to the spirit of excellence and achievement in America.
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Lanhee Chen has argued for repeal of President Obama's healthcare law.
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Lanhee Chen contributed to a conservative, market-based replacement for the Affordable Care Act, which was published by the American Enterprise Institute in 2015.
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Lanhee Chen proposed in part a flat tax or "flatter" tax, and tax simplification.
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Lanhee Chen has said that Romney would "make permanent" the Bush tax cuts from 2001 and 2003.
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Lanhee Chen said that Romney would get "rid of Dodd-Frank" and replace it with regulation "that works".
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Lanhee Chen said that Romney's plan would instead use more limited regulation with more "reasonable" regulation, including those that govern derivatives and "some kind of consumer protection".
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Lanhee Chen criticized the Obama administration for its "pivot" to Asia, arguing that it lacked substance and was not pursued sufficiently robustly.
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Lanhee Chen was a top adviser to the Romney campaign on policy, including US policy toward China, and has been called "hawkish".
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Lanhee Chen viewed China as a topic that distinguished Romney in the 2012 campaign.
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Lanhee Chen is married to Cynthia Fung Lanhee Chen, a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law School who is a judge of the Santa Clara County Superior Court.