Daschle Accepts Obama Cabinet Post

Health care interests, including CVS Caremark (CVS Quote), the National Association for Home Care and Hospice, Abbott Laboratories (ABT Quote) and HealthSouth (HLS Quote), are among the firm's lobbying clients.

His wife was acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration in the Clinton administration. She is one of Washington's top lobbyists. Her lobbying clients over the past year included AMR (AMR Quote) American Airlines, Lockheed Martin (LMT Quote) and Boeing (BA Quote), Senate lobbying records show.

Daschle is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think-tank run by top Obama transition adviser and former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta. According to his biography for the think tank, Daschle serves on the advisory boards of Intermedia Partners and the BP America Inc. external advisory council, and on the boards of CB Richard Ellis (CBG Quote), Mascoma Corp., Prime BioSolutions, The Freedom Forum, the Mayo Clinic, the Center for American Progress, the LBJ Foundation, and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Daschle's strong Capitol Hill ties and knowledge of how HHS works mean "it is a perfect appointment," said former Republican Congressman John Porter, who chairs the medical research advocacy group Research!America. "He'll do an outstanding job."

Besides health reform, the next HHS secretary will deal with the growing budgetary woes of some of the nation's critical health agencies.

One example: Years of funding that didn't keep up with inflation means the National Institutes of Health has lost 14% of its buying power, said Dr. Harold Varmus, NIH's former director and a science adviser to Obama's campaign. That has left promising disease research without money to move forward.