After graduating from the MSFS program, McDonough worked in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate on the foreign affairs and foreign relations committees. He joined President Obama’s team as senior foreign policy advisor and was appointed Deputy National Security advisor in 2010 before being named White House Chief of Staff. He later became a senior principal at the Markle Foundation and a visiting senior fellow at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In 2021, he joined the Biden-Harris administration—along with Vice President Harris’s National Security Advisor Amb. Nancy McEldowney (MSFS Director, 2017-2020), Senior Policy Advisor for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations Paula Garcia Tufro (MSFS’06) and USAID Executive Director for COVID-19 Jeremy Konyndyk (MSFS’03). McDonough currently serves as the 11th Secretary of Veterans Affairs under President Joe Biden.
Secretary McDonough has returned to the Hilltop on various occasions. In this 2018 keynote address at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, McDonough discussed the future of global refugees and migration. He also declared “it’s really good to be back on the hilltop” before chanting Hoya Saxa. McDonough emphasized the role that the university and the MSFS program has played in public service. “At a time when universities across the country are struggling to define their role in the world and in this economy, I think […] Georgetown is right where it should be,” McDonough says, adding “what is done at Georgetown does not stay at Georgetown. It goes out to the community, especially … to the most vulnerable and disadvantaged.”
