N.C. Council of State & Executive Branch 2025 in Review – Part 1: Commerce Sec. Lee Lilley

Thanks for joining us this Saturday morning.

Today, we’re kicking off a series examining what key leaders across the North Carolina Council of State and the executive branch accomplished in 2025. We’ll focus on the roles that have the greatest impact on the business community, starting with Secretary of Commerce Lee Lilley.

Thanks for reading.

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For those inside the Raleigh bubble, Lee Lilley has been a mainstay for the better part of a decade.

He left the private sector in 2018 to serve as then-Gov. Roy Cooper’s chief liaison with the General Assembly. Though Republican lawmakers clashed fiercely with his boss, Lilley enjoyed a reputation for pragmatism and professionalism inside the Legislative Building. Adversarial politics functions best when the personalities involved can engage in policy disputes without personalizing the conflict – both Lilley and the lawmakers and staff who dealt with him achieved this relationship. 

Indeed, during his first week on the job, Lilley faced an ambush of sorts during a legislative committee hearing. Ostensibly there to just introduce himself, lawmakers invited Lilley to the microphone. What followed was a line of questions about the Cooper Administration’s suspect maneuverings during the Atlantic Coast Pipeline permitting process. The questions were fair game, and Lilley handled himself well.

He advanced within the Cooper administration, serving as a jack-of-all-trades on everything from pandemic recovery to economic development. Cooper’s successor, Gov. Josh Stein, then chose Lilley as his Secretary of Commerce.

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It’s an ideal perch, generally insulated from the partisan bickering that consumes other areas of state policy. For many years, both Republicans and Democrats in the legislative and executive branches have set aside their disagreements and worked together on questions of economic development. 

The Secretary of Commerce, then, has the luxury of focusing almost entirely on the substance, not the politics, of the job. So what did that substance look like in 2025?

The department’s most visible role is to recruit and negotiate incentives with major employers. On that count, 2025 was a banner year. Gov. Stein announced in December that joint efforts between the Department of Commerce and the Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina yielded more than 33,000 jobs in 2025. 

The press release highlighted “the announcement of Scout Motors’ new headquarters in Charlotte, creating 1,200 jobs, and Vulcan Elements’ decision to invest nearly $1 billion in Johnston County, establishing the largest rare earth magnet factory in the world outside China.”

The announcement did not credit policies enacted by the General Assembly – especially on taxes, regulations, and energy – that make such recruitment wins easier.

The Department of Commerce has also taken under its remit a challenging task: hurricane recovery. Under Cooper, the state’s long-term hurricane recovery operation fell under the Department of Public Safety. But Stein placed the Helene recovery team, including the home rebuilding program, under Lilley’s department.

That may reflect Stein’s desire to break from the flailing recovery team he inherited from his predecessor, his confidence in Lilley, or both. Regardless, hurricane recovery is a fraught endeavor that often fails to meet expectations (especially when layering in federal, state and local finger pointing) under any bureaucracy. Still, the Department of Commerce has been very public about some of its early achievements, particularly its completion of the first home rebuild earlier this year. 

In all, 2025 offered Lilley political cover and substantive opportunity – and he used both to leave a clear imprint on the state’s economic landscape. The job will only grow more complex as recovery demands, workforce pressures, and global competition intensify. But North Carolina enters 2026 with momentum, and Lilley sits in a place that has the potential to continue a bipartisan consensus that economic development is off-limits for political battle. If that consensus holds, he’ll have ample room to keep cultivating the conditions that make North Carolina attractive to businesses and families.