Age: 41
Occupation: Chief financial officer of Chicago

A year ago, when Mayor Lightfoot gave the city’s top fiscal job to Bennett, who’d helped steer Chicago Public Schools out of a pension crisis as the district’s CFO, the municipal government was saddled with $1 billion in debt. Bennett and her budget director reduced it by $162 million in three months. Then, in a televised address in March, Lightfoot announced she was handing Bennett the “financial challenge of a lifetime”: rolling out unprecedented relief programs to mitigate the effects of the coronavirus crisis.