Tom Hicks

Acting Under Secretary of the Navy (2014-2016, 2017)
Deputy Under Secretary of the Navy for Management (2013-2017)
Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy (2010-2013)
Vice President, U.S. Green Building Council (2005-2010)

Tom Hicks performed the duties of the Under Secretary of the Navy from 2014 to 2016 and again in 2017 representing the Department on all policy, budget, and strategy matters and serving as the Chief Operating Officer/Chief Management Officer of the Navy.  In this capacity, Tom led the day-to-day business operations of the Department and served as Department’s senior official on Space, Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear Enterprise, Defense Business Council, Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness, Military Health, Military Professionalism, Sexual Assault, Force of the Future, Transgender Integration, Women in Service, Secretary of Defense Senior Leadership Council, and Department of Defense/Joint Staff executive leadership working groups. 

Concurrent with this role, Tom served as Deputy Under Secretary of the Navy for Management as the Secretary of the Navy’s principal advisor on all business management functions including offices of the Chief Information Office, Strategy and Innovation, Business Operations, and Administration.  In this capacity Tom was responsible for overseeing and executing the Secretary’s Innovation Vision to improve use of information, accelerate new capabilities to the Fleet, build an innovation network, and develop advanced war fighting concepts. 

Prior to these roles, Tom served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy;  the Secretary’s senior official on all matters pertaining to energy sourcing, energy efficiency, and alternative fuels managing an energy investment portfolio of $1 billion annually.  In concert with the Secretary’s energy vision, Tom established the 1 Gigawatt renewable energy initiative announced by the President which resulted in the procurement of more than 1.2 Gigawatts of renewable energy and cost savings in excess of $100 million.  Tom led the creation of the Department’s $800 million public-private partnership accelerating the capacity of the advanced alternative fuels industry to provide hundreds of millions of gallons per year of military-compatible, low-emission alternative fuel price-competitive with conventional fuel. 

Prior to the Navy, Tom was Vice President of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED®) and International Programs with the U.S. Green Building Council.  Tom oversaw the implementation and expansion from four to seven individual rating systems while increasing presence to more than 120 countries yielding nearly 70,000 building projects totalling over 12 billion square feet. Tom led the wholesale re-engineering of the certification processes and business model, development of the volume certification model, and both brand and reference guide fulfilment, driving ten-fold net revenue growth. 

Prior to the USGBC, Tom was a Senior Program Manager with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR® program.  Tom created and managed the ENERGY STAR commercial building rating system enabling measurement and tracking of building energy performance on a 1 to 100 scale. To date, more than 400,000 commercial buildings totalling over 35 billion square feet of floor space have been benchmarked using the ENERGY STAR rating system and More than 25,000 buildings have been certified as ENERGY STAR with a cumulative cost savings of $3.4 billion and a cumulative greenhouse gas emissions savings of 17 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent. 

Tom received his Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland and has completed coursework at The George Washington University, Said Business School at Oxford, and the Harvard Business School.

Tom is a Distinguished Fellow at the Council on Competitiveness.