Froman served as liaison of the American Bar Association's Central and East European Law Initiative (CEELI) legal assistance program in Albania. He was also a member of the Forward Studies Unit of the European Commission in Brussels.[1]
Froman served as a White House Fellow in 1992-93 and worked in the White House Office of Economic & Domestic Policy.
After the end of the Clinton administration in 2001, Froman followed Robert Rubin from the Treasury Department to Citigroup.[12] He was President and Chief Executive Officer of CitiInsurance and head of Emerging Markets Strategy at Citigroup, managing infrastructure and sustainable development investments.[1] He received more than $7.4 million from January 2008 to 2009 alone.[13]
Froman and Obama were not in touch after their time at Harvard until Obama's 2004 Senate campaign, when Froman volunteered to advise Obama on policy; he introduced Obama to Robert Rubin.[12] In 2008, Froman served on a 12-member advisory board of the Obama campaign's transition team,[1][14] and joined the White House for a second run in 2009. He went back to the position he held during the Clinton years, as deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, at the National Security Council and the National Economic Council until 2013.[citation needed]
On May 2, 2013, Froman was nominated to serve as U.S. Trade Representative. Financial documents provided to the Senate Finance Committee showed he had nearly $500,000 in an offshore fund at Ugland House on the Cayman Islands, which Obama had once described as "the biggest tax scam in the world".[15] In 2013, congressional testimony Kevin Brady, criticized the EU low carbon fuel standard, where oil from tar-sands is classified by itself due to its higher carbon polluting impact compared to regular oil as a "discriminatory, environmentally unjustified" trade barrier, to which Froman responded, "I share your concerns", followed by a description of his work to "press the Commission to take the views of . . . U.S. refiners under consideration". Froman's role as in the drafting of classified trade deals (made public by WikiLeaks) is under scrutiny by lawyers and politicians alike.[16]
The U.S. Senate confirmed Froman in a 93-4 vote on June 19, 2013.[17] One of the four dissenting senators was Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren, who faulted Froman for "refusing to commit to [...] standards of transparency in trade talks set by the George W. Bush administration".[16] Environmental groups have criticized Froman for negotiating the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement in secret and that he "took care of his friends on Wall Street and in corporate board rooms at the expense of sound environmental and climate policy".[18]
From 2013-2017, Froman served as the lead negotiator on the U.S. side for a bilateral investment treaty with China.[19]: 312 The negotiations had been on-going since 2008.[19]: 312 On taking office, the Trump administration stopped negotiations.[19]: 312 According to Froman, the effort to reach an agreement was "more than 90 percent complete".[19]: 312
In 2017, Froman joined the Council on Foreign Relations as a distinguished fellow in the Washington, D.C., office.
In April 2018, he was hired by Mastercard Inc as Vice Chairman and President for Strategic Growth.[20]
Froman lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Nancy Goodman.[12] They have one son, Benjamin, and one daughter, Sarah. His older son, Jacob, died in 2009 at age ten from a medulloblastoma, a rare form of pediatric brain cancer.[24]
