Looking Ahead: A Bipartisan Path Forward

In 2014, he was elected to the U.S. Senate. Cassidy serves as Chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions (HELP) Committee and serves as a member of the Finance Committee, the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and the Veterans Affairs Committee.

Following his successful efforts to lower the cost of health care, secure coastal restoration projects to protect Louisiana families from natural disasters, reform our nation’s mental health system, and secure many other legislative accomplishments, Bill was reelected in 2020 to his second term in the U.S. Senate.

In 2023, he became Ranking Member of the Senate HELP Committee and was elevated to Chairman in 2025. He is the first physician to serve as HELP Ranking Member or Chairman since 1933, when it was called the Education and Labor Committee.

Bill is married to Dr. Laura Cassidy, and they have three children and one grandchild. Laura is a retired general surgeon specializing in breast cancer. She helped found a public charter school to teach children with dyslexia. The Cassidy family attends church at the Chapel on the Campus in Baton Rouge.

Laur Hesse Fisher is a researcher and advisor, helping climate leaders build cross-partisan strategies for climate solutions. As Senior Vice President at DEPLOY/US, she worked to scale right-of-center leadership on climate and clean energy. Before then, she spent ten years at MIT, including as the founding director of the MIT Climate Change Engagement Program, where she launched award-winning climate communications tools like climate.mit.edu and hosted the TILclimate (now Ask MIT Climate) podcast, recognized by the New York Times as a top-three climate podcast. She has worked with leaders across the political spectrum – from senior philanthropic and nonprofit leaders to policymakers and advocates in coal communities – and spoken widely on climate engagement, including for the White House and United Nations.

Professor Gillingham is the Senior Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at the Yale School of the Environment and a professor of economics at Yale, with a primary appointment at the School of the Environment and secondary appointments in the Department of Economics and School of Management. He is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 2015-2016, he served as the Senior Economist for Energy and the Environment at the White House Council of Economic Advisers. He is an energy and environmental economist drawing from the fields of applied microeconomics, behavioral economics, industrial organization, and integrated assessment modeling of climate change. He has published widely on consumer decisions and policy in transportation, energy efficiency, and renewable energy. His work has been published in top-tier journals such as Science, Nature, PNAS, Journal of Political Economy, AEJ: Economic Policy, RAND Journal of Economics, Quantitative Economics, Management Science, Marketing Science, Journal of the Association of Environmental & Resource Economists, and the Journal of Environmental Economics & Management.
 
Prior to joining the Yale faculty, he worked at the California Air Resources Board, White House Council of Economic Advisers, Stanford Energy Modeling Forum, Resources for the Future, and Joint Global Change Research Institute of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.  He also the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to New Zealand.  His Ph.D. is from Stanford University, where he studied management science & engineering and economics. Before beginning a career as an economist, he was a wilderness ranger in Wyoming and New Hampshire.