107 Facts About Mitch Daniels

Mitch Daniels began his career as an assistant to senator Richard Lugar, working as his chief of staff in the Senate from 1977 to 1982.

Mitch Daniels was appointed executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee when Lugar was chairman from 1983 to 1984.

Mitch Daniels worked as a chief political advisor and as a liaison to President Ronald Reagan in 1985.

Mitch Daniels then moved back to Indiana to become president of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank.

Mitch Daniels later joined Eli Lilly and Company where he served as president of North American Pharmaceutical Operations from 1993 to 1997 and as senior vice president of corporate strategy and policy from 1997 to 2001.

In January 2001, Daniels was appointed by President George W Bush as the director of the US Office of Management and Budget, where he served until June 2003.

Mitch Daniels ran in Indiana's 2004 gubernatorial election after leaving the Bush administration.

In 2008, Mitch Daniels was reelected to a second term, defeating Jill Long Thompson.

Mitch Daniels was selected by the Trustees of the Board of Purdue University, all of whom he appointed or re-appointed while Governor, to become the university president after his term as governor ended on January 14,2013.

Mitch Daniels retired as Purdue president on January 1,2023, leading to speculation that he will again run for governor or the USSenate.

Mitch Daniels has been honored by the Arab-American Institute with the 2011 Najeeb Halaby Award for Public Service.

Mitch Daniels spent his early childhood years in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Georgia.

The Mitch Daniels family moved to Indiana from Pennsylvania in 1959 when his father accepted a job at the Indianapolis headquarters of the pharmaceutical company Pitman-Moore.

The 10-year-old Mitch Daniels was accustomed to the mountains, and he at first disliked the flatland of central Indiana.

Mitch Daniels was still in grade school at the time of the move and first attended Delaware Trail Elementary, Westlane Junior High School, and North Central High School.

In 1971, Mitch Daniels earned a Bachelor's degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University after completing a senior thesis titled "The Politics of Metropolitanization: City-County Consolidation in Indianapolis, Indiana".

Mitch Daniels initially studied law at the Indiana McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis.

Mitch Daniels has disclosed the arrest on job applications and in government background checks and spoken about the incident in opinion columns.

Mitch Daniels had his first experience in politics while still a teenager when, in 1968, he worked on the unsuccessful campaign of fellow Hoosier and Princeton alumnus William Ruckelshaus, who was running for the US Senate against incumbent Democrat Birch Bayh.

Daniels worked on Lugar's re-election campaign in 1971, and later, in 1974, he worked on Lugar's first campaign for Senate via L Keith Bulen's Campaign Communicators, Inc, a political consultancy where Daniels served as vice president.

Mitch Daniels served as Chief of Staff during Lugar's first term, and, during this time, he met Cheri Herman, who was working for the National Park Service.

In 1983, when Lugar was elected chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Mitch Daniels was appointed its executive director.

Mitch Daniels was manager of three successful re-election campaigns for Lugar.

In 1987, Mitch Daniels returned to Indiana as president and CEO of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank.

Mitch Daniels declined the offer, saying it would force him to spend too much time away from his family.

In 1990, Mitch Daniels left the Hudson Institute to accept a position at Eli Lilly and Company, the largest corporation headquartered in Indiana at that time.

Mitch Daniels was first promoted to President of North American Operations and then to Senior Vice President for Corporate Strategy and Policy.

Mitch Daniels managed strategy to deflect attacks on Lilly's Prozac product by a public relations campaign against the drug being waged by the Church of Scientology.

In one interview in 1992, Mitch Daniels said of the organization that "it is no church," and that people on Prozac were less likely to become victims of the organization.

When Mitch Daniels later became governor of Indiana, he drew heavily on his former Lilly colleagues to serve as advisers and agency managers.

Mitch Daniels resigned from the IPL Board in 2001 to join the federal government, and sold his IPL stock along with all other holdings in order to comply with federal ethics requirements.

On December 22,2000, President-elect George W Bush announced that he would nominate Daniels to serve as the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

The $2.13 trillion budget Mitch Daniels submitted to Congress in 2001 would have made deep cuts in many agencies to accommodate the tax cuts being made, but few of the spending cuts were actually approved by Congress.

Shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan, Mitch Daniels gave a speech to the National Press Club in which he challenged the view of those who wanted to continue typical spending while the nation was at war.

Nobel economics Laureate Paul Krugman noted Mitch Daniels is "held up as an icon of fiscal responsibility" without having earned it.

Mitch Daniels was the budget director at the time of the bill's passing and some have raised concerns over potential conflicts of interest.

In 2002, Daniels helped discredit a report by Assistant to the President on Economic Policy Lawrence B Lindsey estimating the cost of the Iraq War at between $100-$200 billion.

Mitch Daniels called this estimate "very, very high" and stated that the costs would be between $50-$60 billion.

Douthat and other defenders of Mitch Daniels accuse Mitch Daniels' critics of mischaracterizing the six-month supplemental appropriation as a request to fund the entire war.

On May 7,2003, Mitch Daniels announced that he would resign as OMB director within 30 days in a move that Bush administration officials said was to prepare to run for governor of Indiana.

Mitch Daniels traveled in a donated white RV nicknamed "RV-1" and covered with signatures of supporters and his campaign slogan, "My Man Mitch".

On his first day in office, Mitch Daniels created Indiana's first Office of Management and Budget to look for inefficiencies and cost savings throughout state government.

Mitch Daniels called for strict controls on all spending increases and reducing the annual growth rate of the budget.

The General Assembly approved $250 million in spending cuts and Mitch Daniels renegotiated 30 different state contracts for a savings of $190 million, resulting in a budget of $23 billion.

In 2006, Mitch Daniels continued his effort to reduce state operating costs by signing into law a bill privatizing the enrollment service for the state's welfare programs.

In mid-2009, after complaints of poor service, Mitch Daniels canceled the contract and returned the enrollment service to the public sector.

One of the most controversial measures Mitch Daniels successfully pushed through was the state adoption of Daylight Saving Time, which Mitch Daniels argued, in a complicated economy, was needed to end constant confusion and bring Indiana into a year-long alignment with the rest of the country.

Mitch Daniels pressed for the entire state to switch to Central Time, but the General Assembly could not come to terms.

The measure was opposed by most Democrats, who began an advertising campaign accusing Mitch Daniels of selling the road to foreign nations.

In 2007, Mitch Daniels signed the Healthy Indiana Plan, which provided 132,000 uninsured Indiana workers with coverage.

In 2008, Mitch Daniels proposed a property tax ceiling of one percent on residential properties, two percent for rental properties and three percent for businesses.

Mitch Daniels was named on the 2008 "Public Officials of the Year" by the Governing magazine.

Mitch Daniels garnered 20 percent of the African American vote and 37 percent of Latinos in his 2008 re-election campaign.

Mitch Daniels won with more votes than any candidate in the state's history.

On July 14,2010, at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Mitch Daniels was on hand to help announce the return of IndyCar Series chassis manufacturing to the state of Indiana.

Mitch Daniels has been recognized for his commitment to fiscal discipline.

Mitch Daniels is a recent recipient of the Herman Kahn Award from the Hudson Institute, of which he is a former president and CEO, and was one of the first to receive the Fiscy award for fiscal discipline.

Mitch Daniels proposed a range of spending cuts and cost-saving measures in his budget proposal.

Mitch Daniels was interviewed in February 2011 about the similar 2011 Wisconsin budget protests in Madison.

In July 2013, the Associated Press obtained emails under Indiana open record laws in which Mitch Daniels asked for assurances that a textbook, The People's History of the United States, written by historian Howard Zinn "is not in use anywhere in Indiana".

In one of the emails, Mitch Daniels expressed contempt for Zinn upon his death:.

Mitch Daniels responded by saying that if Zinn were alive and a member of the Purdue faculty, he would defend his free speech rights and right to publish.

Mitch Daniels later revised his statement stating he "axed the words of a Stanford University professor who expressed irritation with being included in the original remarks" while removing the quotes that appeared in the Reason article.

On May 10,2011, Mitch Daniels signed into law two immigration bills; one denying in-state tuition prices to illegal immigrants and another one imposing fines for employers that employed illegal immigrants.

Mitch Daniels denied the charges, saying he would have enacted the same agenda years earlier had the then-Democratic majority permitted him to do so.

Mitch Daniels submitted a two-year $27.5 billion spending plan to the General Assembly which would result in a $500 million surplus that would be used to rebuild the state reserve funds to $1 billion.

Mitch Daniels proposed a wide range of budget austerity measures, including employee furloughing, spending reductions, freezing state hiring, freezing state employee wages, and a host of administrative changes for state agencies.

Mitch Daniels backed the creation of additional toll roads, expanding on his 2006 overhaul of the Indiana Toll Road system, in an attempt to secure an additional source of revenue for the state.

Mitch Daniels announced in October 2006 that a substitute natural gas company intended to build a facility in southern Indiana that would produce pipeline quality substitute natural gas.

Questions were raised because Leucadia National hired Mark Lubbers, a former aide and close friend of Mitch Daniels, to promote the deal.

The Mitch Daniels administration maintained that the plant would create jobs in an economically depressed part of the state and offer environmental benefits through an in-state energy source.

Mitch Daniels signed the legislation on February 1,2012, without much fanfare in the hopes of dispersing labor protesters before the Super Bowl in Indianapolis.

On December 12,2010, Mitch Daniels suggested in a local interview that he would decide on a White House run before May 2011.

Various groups and individuals pressured Mitch Daniels to run for office.

On March 6,2011, Mitch Daniels was the winner of an Oregon straw poll.

On May 5,2011, Mitch Daniels told an interviewer that he would announce "within weeks" his decision of whether or not to run for the Republican presidential nomination.

Mitch Daniels said he felt he was not prepared to debate on all the national issues, such as foreign policy, and needed time to better understand the issues and put together formal positions.

Mitch Daniels announced he would not seek the Republican nomination for the presidency on the night of May 21,2011, via an email to the press, citing family constraints and the loss of privacy the family would experience should he become a candidate.

Mitch Daniels was the only American university president and one of two national political figures to make the global list.

Mitch Daniels' selection had the "full endorsement of the search committee" when on June 21,2012, the Board unanimously elected Mitch Daniels to the position.

In preparation for his term as President of Purdue University, Mitch Daniels stopped participating in partisan political activity during the 2012 election cycle and focused instead on issues related to higher education and fiscal matters.

Mitch Daniels has continued this practice, opting to send Open Letters to the Purdue community instead of giving a formal State of the University speech, as is more common in higher education.

Mitch Daniels worked out most days at the student gym and ate frequently with students in dining facilities and Greek houses.

At the Spring 2021 Commencement, Mitch Daniels rode into the Purdue Football Stadium on a couch car designed by Purdue students that was often spotted on campus during that academic year.

In 2015, Mitch Daniels announced plans to open the Purdue Polytechnic Indianapolis high school, designed to be a bridge for inner-city students to Purdue by admitting graduates directly to Purdue.

Mitch Daniels described the high school as an attempt to increase the number of low-income, first-generation, and minority students who are prepared for Purdue.

Mitch Daniels has been criticized by student groups and faculty for his unwillingness to take stronger stances on public displays of white supremacy on campus.

In 2019, Mitch Daniels met with Purdue student government leaders to discuss a controversy surrounding a Purdue student who was unable to buy cold medicine when an off-campus CVS clerk did not accept his Puerto Rican driver's license as valid.

The University Senate's Equity and Diversity Committee issued a statement calling Mitch Daniels's phrasing "problematic" stating, "The idea that there is a scarcity of leading African American scholars is simply not true".

In June 2020, as the Black Lives Matter movement gained national momentum, Mitch Daniels endorsed the creation of a university system-wide task force to examine racial inequality in response to the murder of George Floyd and other incidents of racial injustice.

Tuition at Purdue, prior to Mitch Daniels' arrival, had increased every year since 1976.

Two months after Mitch Daniels assumed his role as president, Purdue announced it would freeze tuition for two years, eventually extending the freeze for ten years, through 2023.

The total cost of attending Purdue has fallen since Mitch Daniels assumed Purdue's presidency.

Mitch Daniels announced the first tuition freeze before the state had determined Purdue's funding for the next biennium.

Mitch Daniels reduced meal plan rates for students by 10 percent, froze housing costs, and cut the university's cooperative education fees which had previously increased every year.

In fall 2014, Mitch Daniels announced a deal with Amazon to save students on textbooks and provide students, faculty and staff with free one day shipping to locations on campus.

In September 2013, Mitch Daniels announced the first major priorities of his administration, known as "Purdue Moves".

The plan continued Mitch Daniels' focus on affordability but called for new investments such as the hiring of 165 new faculty in STEM disciplines, expansion of flipped classrooms, growing summer enrollment, investments in plant science and drug discovery research, and the creation of competency-based degree programs and some three-year degree options.

In 2021, Mitch Daniels announced an expansion of the original moves called "Next Moves".

Mitch Daniels announced in April 2020 that Purdue intended to welcome students back on campus in the fall, becoming one of the earliest university leaders to do so, saying it would be an "unacceptable breach of duty" to not reopen.

Mitch Daniels released a plan called Protect Purdue that was designed to protect the most vulnerable of Purdue's campus from the disease by relying on masking, contact tracing, facility modifications, and a student pledge.

Mitch Daniels was replaced by Dr Mung Chiang as President of Purdue University effective January 1,2023.

In February 2013, Mitch Daniels was asked to co-chair a National Research Council committee to review and make recommendations on the future of the US human spaceflight program.

In March 2013, Mitch Daniels was elected to the board of Energy Systems Network, Indiana's industry-driven clean technology initiative.

In June 2015, Mitch Daniels was elected to serve on the board of directors for Indiana software company Interactive Intelligence until its sale to Genesys.

In July 2015, Mitch Daniels became a co-chair of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

In November 2016, Mitch Daniels was elected to serve on the board of directors for Norfolk Southern Corporation.