(Washington) John Berry is expected to be named the next director of the Office of Personnel Management, an appointment that would make him the highest-ranking openly gay official ever.

OPM provides U.S. agencies with personnel services and policy leadership including staffing tools, guidance on labor-management relations and programs to improve work force performance.

OPM also has an an investigative branch that last year probed Bush administration Special Counsel Scott Bloch for refusing to protect LGBT workers and allegedly retaliating against whistleblowers in his own office.

Bloch’s stonewalling complaints of discrimination by LGBT federal workers dated to February 2004, when he ordered references to sexual orientation removed from the Office of the Special Counsel website. Since 1998, when President Bill Clinton issued an executive order prohibiting bias in the civil service, the OSC had taken that to include sexual orientation.

A month after the references disappeared from the OSC website, Bloch said gay workers were no longer protected. 

The Obama transition team has not yet named a replacement for Bloch.

Currently, Berry is director of the National Zoo. He is a former executive director of the National Fish & Wildlife Foundation and served as assistant secretary of the Interior Department for management.  Berry also served as legislative director for House Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) from 1985-1994.

“[This] is a meaningful step forward for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community,” said Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese. “In his new role, John will make critical decisions regarding the implementation of fair workplace policies for millions of federal workers.”

Other openly gay appointments by the Obama transition team include Nancy Sutley to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality and Fred P. Hochberg to head the Export-Import Bank.

Sutley is a deputy mayor of Los Angeles. She supported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton during the Democratic primary and was a member of her Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender steering committee.

The deputy mayor for energy and environment in Los Angeles and the mayor’s representative on the Board of Directors for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, Sutley has a long record of working on environmental and natural resources policy.

She previously served on the California State Water Resources Control Board, which is responsible for protecting water quality and resources throughout the state, and was the energy adviser to former Gov. Gray Davis. During President Bill Clinton’s administration, Sutley was an EPA official, including being a special assistant to the EPA administrator in Washington.

Hochberg is dean of the New School for Management in New York.

From 1998 through 2000, Hochberg served as deputy, then acting administrator, of the Small Business Administration, an agency elevated to cabinet rank by President Bill Clinton, with more than 4,000 employees and 100 offices across the country. 

At the SBA, he directed the delivery of a comprehensive set of financial and business development programs for entrepreneurs, with particular outreach to women and minorities. He also served on President Clinton’s Management Council.

From 1994 to 1998, Hochberg worked as founder and president of Heyday Company, a private investment firm managing real estate, stock market investments, and venture capital projects. Prior to that, he was president and chief operating officer of the Lillian Vernon Corporation, where he led the transformation of a small family mail order company into a publicly traded direct marketing corporation, one of the great success stories of American entrepreneurship.