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President George W. Bush named Deborah J. Cavett as executive director of the White House Initiative on Tribal Colleges and Universities on Jan. 9, 2006. In this role, she supports the nation's 32 tribal colleges and universities, ensuring that they have full access to federal higher education programs. These institutions serve about 14,000 students each year and offer associate, bachelor's and master's degrees, as well as vocational certificate programs. In some rural areas, these schools offer the only postsecondary option for students. They also provide crucial services to some communities that suffer from high rates of poverty and unemployment.

In this post, Cavett is also the primary liaison with the president's board of advisers on tribal colleges and universities as it recommends actions for all federal agencies to take in strengthening the capacity of these institutions.

Cavett comes to the Department after a long, successful career at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), where, since 1997, she had directed interagency initiatives for the Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service. This arm of USDA has supported the nation's more than 100 land-grant colleges and universities since passage of the First Morrill Act in 1862—the same year that Abraham Lincoln established USDA's predecessor, the office of agriculture.

Cavett gained administrative experience for her current post when she served as USDA's liaison to both tribal colleges and universities, which received land-grant status in 1994, and historically black colleges and universities, 18 of which—including the privately run Tuskegee University—are considered 1890 land-grant schools. She was also a member of the USDA's policy committee for the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, and, since 1993, had supported both tribal college programs and those of Hispanic-Serving Institutions through her work as a USDA program manager.

The daughter of a farmer and teacher, Cavett was born in Fairfax, Mo. She attended high school in Iowa, after her mother moved there to teach high school business classes. She later earned both her bachelor's and master's degrees in Spanish from the University of Northern Iowa in 1973 and 1974.

After finishing graduate school, Cavett took a temporary position with USDA's former Soil Conservation Service (now known as the Natural Resources Conservation Service) in Mills County, Iowa, while she was waiting to be hired by one of the big tree nurseries in Shenandoah, Iowa. By the time one of the nurseries called her, she had already received a full-time offer from USDA.

Soon, she was promoted to the Des Moines office, where she worked on personnel and hiring. Starting in 1978, for four years, she also ran the employee orientation program for the service's approximately 200 new hires in the state, and, in 1982, she was promoted to Washington, D.C., to head a delegated examining unit for specialists in natural resource fields, such as soil and range conservation. During the Reagan administration when there was a lull in USDA's hiring in 1986-87, she part of a three-person team detailed to work with the agency's Office of Personnel Management to help write its implementation of the then-new Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS).

Back at her agency, Cavett served as a management analyst until 1993, overseeing contract programs for watershed and conservation management. She was USDA's liaison on Inspector General and the then-General Accounting Office audits, working with staff throughout USDA to resolve audit findings. She also implemented the agency's first automated management tracking system for personal property and its 13,000-unit vehicle fleet, working closely with USDA's National Finance Center in New Orleans.

Cavett and her husband, a retired USDA statistician, live in Anne Arundel County, Md. They have one son, who is a student at George Mason University.