Hill Heat

Full committee hearing.

Nominees:

• David Fink, of New Hampshire, to be Administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration
• David Fogel, of Connecticut, to be Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Director General of the United States and Foreign Commercial Service
• Pierre Gentin, of New York, to be General Counsel of the Department of Commerce
• Robert Gleason, of Pennsylvania, to be Director of the Amtrak Board of Directors

David Armstrong Fink is a former president of Pan Am Railways and son of the late David Andrew Fink, a career railroader who worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad and Penn Central before serving as president of Guilford Transportation, later rebranded as Pan Am Railways. The younger Fink began his career with General Motors in the 1980s, and became Pan Am Railways president in 2006 after serving as executive vice president in 1998. He remained president through Pan Am’s acquisition by CSX Transportation.

In the 96-year history of McKinsey & Company, Pierre Gentin is the first senior partner not to have served as a management consultant. Hired into the partnership in 2019, Gentin is McKinsey’s global general counsel (GC), and his legal résumé includes tours as a federal prosecutor in New York, as the global head of litigation for Credit Suisse, and as a partner at the Wall Street firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel.

David Fogel served as Co-Founder, President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer of IndexIQ, an innovative indexing business and exchange-traded fund (ETF) issuer currently with over $4 billion in assets under management. In April 2015, New York Life, a Fortune 75 company, completed its acquisition of IndexIQ. Fogel began his career in 1997 as a corporate attorney at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, focusing on mergers and acquisitions, securities, and private investment funds. In 1999, he co-founded SmartPortfolio.com, Inc., which became a leading email financial newsletter business with over 250,000 subscribers that was sold to TheStreet.com, Inc., a publicly-traded financial information company, in 2000. After the sale, Fogel joined TheStreet.com where he integrated his prior business and led new product development. In 2003, he helped launch Circle Peak Capital LLC, a private equity firm focused on investments in small-cap consumer product and financial services companies. In 2005, Fogel became Vice President at Groton Partners, a boutique merchant bank specializing in mergers and acquisitions and sophisticated private investments. In 2006, he left Groton Partners to start IndexIQ with two partners. In September 2020, Fogel was appointed by Trump Senior Advisor and Chief Business Development Officer in the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment at the United States Department of State. Prior to the State Department, he was appointed as Chief of Staff, the number two position, at The Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM).

Rob Gleason was the chair of Pennsylvania’s Republican Party from 2006-2017. He was supposed to be part of an alternate slate of electors, as the former president attempted to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in 2020, but “refused to come to Harrisburg” to be a part of it. Gleason was one of the 19 electors for Trump in 2024 after his second successful campaign for the presidency.