Samantha Silverberg is a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government. She is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Samantha served in the White House from 2021 to 2025, where she was the special assistant to the president for transportation and infrastructure policy at the National Economic Council and deputy assistant to the president for infrastructure implementation under the White House chief of staff. In these roles, she was responsible for designing, negotiating, and implementing President Joe Biden’s signature infrastructure legislation, which made historic investments across roads, bridges, transit, rail, water, high-speed internet, clean energy, resilience, and other sectors. During her tenure, federal agencies deployed over $600 billion in infrastructure funding across more than 70,000 projects; connected 3 million homes to high-speed internet; replaced 500,000 lead pipes; launched 12,000 bridge repair and replacement projects; and started construction at 200 airport terminals.
Prior to joining the White House, Samantha served in multiple leadership roles at the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), also known as the “T.” Samantha served as deputy chief administrative officer, helping oversee the administrative functions of one of the oldest transit agencies in the country, including finance, revenue, information technology, human resources, labor relations, and real estate. As senior director of capital program planning, she stood up a new function for capital planning, programming, budgeting, and decisionmaking to evaluate and prioritize projects using data-driven selection criteria. She also led the development of the first Capital Needs Assessment based on new analytic models to revise out-of-date backlog estimates and provide the foundation for a long-term capital plan. During her tenure, MBTA capital investment doubled, from $875 million to $1.6 billion.
Samantha began her federal service as a presidential management fellow at the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Transportation. She earned a BA from the University of Virginia and a Master in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School.