Sally Canfield

n her office, Sally Canfield has a framed photograph of herself and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson from Thompson's two-day confirmation hearing. Canfield is in the background behind her former boss, looking miserable. Reminiscing, Canfield laughs at the memory of those intense days right before President Bush's inauguration in 2001.

"I had 22 family members coming in that weekend," says the 32-year-old deputy chief of staff for policy at the Homeland Security Department. "I really just wanted to go home and lay on the couch." That easygoing sense of humor and the ability to juggle many demands has served Canfield well as she carries out what is arguably one of the harder policy jobs in the executive branch. Homeland Security Chief of Staff Duncan Campbell calls Canfield "a very impassioned, very bright policy mind . . . who works very well at interweaving various directorates' policy interests into one fabric that becomes the department's policy fabric."

The youngest of seven children, Canfield grew up in the Chicago suburbs and graduated from Northwestern University. For the past 10 years she has worked on health care policy, advising Bush during the 2000 campaign and later counseling Thompson during the October 2001 anthrax crisis. The White House brought her over from HHS in November 2001 to work with top homeland-security policy official Richard Falkenrath on crafting the administration's national homeland-security strategy and later the department itself.

As the top policy person in a new department with a high-profile mission, Canfield has to keep tabs on issues ranging from bioterrorism to devising a new department seal that reflects 22 different agencies. The challenge of her job, she says, is "trying to keep a handle on the stuff that goes to the secretary and the deputy secretary... and making sure we are meeting the deadlines and the expectations of certain people." The bottom line on her job, she continues, is that "it's everything and 10 more things."