WASHINGTON (NewsNation Now) — With less than one week until his inauguration, President-elect Joe Biden on Friday announced several nominations for key administration posts as well as additional members of the COVID-19 response team.

Biden is nominating Deanne Criswell, commissioner of New York City’s Emergency Management Department, to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He’s also tapped former CIA deputy director David Cohen to return to the agency in the same role he served during the Obama administration.

Biden also is calling on former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler to help lead the COVID-19 vaccine drive. Kessler has been serving as co-chair of Biden’s board of advisers on the coronavirus pandemic.

The pick of Kessler comes after Biden on Thursday called the Trump administration’s rollout of coronavirus vaccines a “dismal failure.” The president-elect will unveil his plans to speed up inoculations on Friday.

The picks, along with a trio of other new nominations, comes as he looks to fill out top positions at federal agencies.

Kessler, who will have the title of chief science officer of COVID response, headed the FDA in the 1990s under presidents of both political parties.

Kessler will work out of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, assuming responsibility for the scientific side of Operation Warp Speed, an effort launched under the Trump administration to rapidly develop vaccines and treatments. The drive has already produced two highly effective vaccines with more promising ones in the works. Kessler will coordinate vaccine review and approval, as well as the logistics of manufacturing millions more doses. 

Other additional members appointed to the White House COVID-19 Response Team include:

• Amy Chang as policy advisor
• Abbe Gluck as special counsel
• Rosa Po as COIVD response team deputy chief of staff
• Andy Slavitt as senior advisor to the COVID response coordinator
• Vidur Sharma as policy advisor for testing
• Ben Wakana as the deputy director of strategic communications and engagement
• B. Cameron Webb as senior policy advisor for COIVD-19 equity.

Deanne Criswell, who spent more than five years in top posts at FEMA during the Obama administration, is the first woman nominated to head the agency, whose primary responsibility is to coordinate responses to major disasters inside the United States that require federal attention.

She has served as New York City’s emergency management commissioner since June 2019. In her earlier work at FEMA, Criswell served as the leader of one of the agency’s National Incident Management Assistance Teams and as a federal coordinating officer. In New York, part of her duties included leading the coordination of the city’s emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Between her stints at FEMA and in New York, Criswell was a principal at Cadmus Group, a firm that provides homeland security management consulting and training services for federal, state and local government agencies and private sector companies. The company made about $68 million between the time she joined the firm in 2017 and when she left in June 2019, according to a tabulation of contract spending data from the site USASpending.gov.

David Cohen, who was deputy CIA director from 2015 to 2017, has traveled the world for years tracking money flowing to terror groups, such as the Islamic State group, and other bad actors on the international stage. His work directing the Treasury Department’s intelligence unit earlier in his career earned him the nicknames of “financial batman” and “sanctions guru.”

Cohen is not a registered lobbyist, but his firm does millions of dollars in lobbying work each year on behalf of clients that include the Beer Institute, Sinclair Broadcast Group, Walgreens and American Financial Group.

Nominees are required to disclose details of their finances and complete ethics agreements as part of the confirmation process. Once confirmed, federal ethics laws can require the officials to recuse themselves from working on issues that could impact their previous business interests.

The president-elect is also nominating Shalanda Young, the top staff aide for the House Appropriations Committee, to serve as deputy director at the Office of Management and Budget and Jason Miller, who was deputy director of the White House National Economic Council in Obama’s administration, to serve as deputy director for management at the agency.

Biden is tapping Janet McCabe, an environmental law and policy expert who spent more than seven years as a top official at the Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration to return to the agency as deputy administrator.

“Each of them brings a deep respect for the civil servants who keep our republic running, as well as a keen understanding of how the government can and should work for all Americans,” Biden said of his picks in a statement. “I am confident that they will hit the ground running on day one with determination and bold thinking to make a meaningful difference in people’s lives.”