Heidi Cruz, a managing director at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in Houston, has taken an unpaid leave from her private wealth-management job to help with her husband’s campaign for the U.S. presidency, a person familiar with the matter said.
Ted Cruz, 44, a Republican senator from Texas, said on Twitter early Monday morning that he plans to run for president in the 2016 election. Heidi Cruz’s leave will last the duration of the campaign, said the person, who asked not to be identified speaking about Cruz’s employment.
Heidi Cruz, 42, a Harvard Business School graduate who worked in President George W. Bush’s administration, joined Goldman Sachs in 2005 and was promoted to managing director, the firm’s second-highest rank, in 2012. She serves as regional head of the Houston office in the private wealth-management unit, which serves individuals and families who have on average more than $40 million with the firm.
Heidi and Ted Cruz met in Austin, Texas, in 2000, when both were policy aides on the Bush campaign, according to a New York Times profile in 2013. Her employment at Goldman Sachs became a political topic when Richard Durbin, a Democratic senator from Illinois, tried to push TedCruz, who has been critical of President Barack Obama’s health-care policies, into admitting he was on his wife’s Goldman Sachs health insurance plan, the Times reported.
Heidi Cruz accompanied her husband as he kicked off his presidential campaign Monday at Liberty University, a religious school in Lynchburg, Virginia. He became the first major-party candidate to formally enter the race and called for conservatives to “rise up to reignite the promise of America.”
Cruz grabbed national headlines in 2013 when he spoke for 21 hours on the Senate floor in favor of defunding the Affordable Care Act and helped to trigger a partial government shutdown. Monday, he described a president taking office in 2017 who would repeal Obamacare, abolish the Internal Revenue Service, and eliminate the Common Core educational standards.