Rachel Marie Riley (née Woodlee) is an American consultant who served as chief of naval research at the United States Navy from 2025 to 2026.
Riley graduated from Wofford College and was a Rhodes Scholar, attending the University of Oxford. After graduating from Oxford, she began working for McKinsey & Company, eventually becoming a partner.
In January 2025, Riley joined the Department of Government Efficiency, particularly focusing on the Department of Health and Human Services. In that role, she led efforts to terminate grants from the National Institutes of Health and to fire thousands of federal employees, with the grant terminations later being found unlawful by the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
In October 2025, she was named to lead the Office of Naval Research, a position she held until September 2026.
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Early life and education
Rachel Marie Woodlee was born in Greer, South Carolina. She attended Riverside Middle School and Mauldin High School, where she played volleyball. Woodlee signed with Wofford College to play volleyball. At Wofford, she majored in business economics and Chinese and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
Woodlee was named as a Rhodes Scholar finalist in November 2012 and received the scholarship, becoming the sixth person and the first woman from Wofford to become a Rhodes Scholar. She attended the University of Oxford on the scholarship.
Career
McKinsey & Company (2017–2025)
After graduating from the University of Oxford, Woodlee began working for McKinsey & Company, eventually becoming a partner. By February 2025, she had resigned to work for the Department of Government Efficiency.
Department of Government Efficiency (January–October 2025)
By January 2025, Riley had begun working for a preliminary network that would form the Department of Government Efficiency as an associate of Brad Smith. The following month, she began working at the Office of the Secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services alongside Luke Farritor; that month, ABC News reported that Riley was also serving as a senior advisor at the Department of State. Riley requested access to Medicare payment systems and met with the acting leadership of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services that month. Joined by Farritor, her work included reviewing IT contracts at the Food and Drug Administration.
In September 2025, Riley led an unsuccessful effort to fire 8,000 workers at the department ahead of a federal government shutdown, including an attempt to dissolve the Center for Scientific Review at the National Institutes of Health.
In April 2025, The Washington Post obtained an internal directory indicating that Riley was working at the National Institutes of Health. As the Department of Health and Human Services faced layoffs, she was criticized by HHS employees for limiting access to the master reorganization plan, preventing the employees responsible for executing the layoffs from viewing data files.
In May 2025, ProPublica and Nature reported on depositions given by National Institutes of Health officials in litigation brought by four states over the termination of NIH research grants, which described Riley's role in the terminations. Liza Bundesen, then deputy director of the NIH Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration, testified that she first learned of the terminations on February 28, 2025, from Riley, who informed her that "a number of grants will need to be terminated" and that this had to be done by the end of the day. Michelle Bulls, the director of the office, testified that the termination list and the template letter used to notify researchers had originated with Riley; the template provided categories covering DEI, research in China, and transgender or gender ideology. Bulls testified that by April 3 she had received more than five such lists, amounting to "somewhere between five hundred and a thousand" grants.
ProPublica reported that the depositions "portray Riley as giving directions on how to
Chief of Naval Research (October 2025 – September 2026)
On October 30, 2025, Politico reported that Riley was named the chief of naval research at the United States Navy. She replaced Rear Admiral Kurt J. Rothenhaus as head of the Office of Naval Research, a position historically held by an active duty two-star admiral.
In September 2026, Riley was replaced by Thomas C. Fu as chief of naval research, with Riley transitioning to a new role in the Department of the Navy.