Board Members

Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. previously served as the 12th president of Purdue University and prior to that served two-terms as the former governor of Indiana. During his tenure, Indiana went from bankruptcy to a AAA credit rating, led the nation in infrastructure building, and passed sweeping education reforms, including the nation’s first statewide school choice voucher program. At Purdue, he has prioritized affordability and student success.  He froze tuition and committed to maintaining the freeze for at least four years, called for greater accountability in higher education, and invested in a series of initiatives that are expanding Purdue’s STEM focus and facilitating the commercialization of faculty discoveries. In recognition of his leadership as both a governor and a university president, Daniels was named among the Top 50 World Leaders by Fortune Magazine in March 2015. Previously, Daniels served as President of Eli Lilly’s North American Pharmaceutical Operations, as a senior advisor to President Ronald Reagan and as Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President George W. Bush. He earned a bachelor's degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton in 1971 and his law degree from Georgetown in 1979. 

Leon Panetta is most recently the former Secretary of Defense (2011-13) and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2009-11). Previously, he served as President Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff (1994-97), Director of the Office of Management and Budget (1993-94), and a United States Representative from California's 17th district (1977-93). During his time in Congress, he chaired the House Committee on the Budget from 1989-93, and served as chairman of many subcommittees and task forces. He founded the Panetta Institute for Public Policy in 1998 with his wife, Sylvia, and serves on many boards and commissions, including the Public Policy Institute of California.

Timothy Penny represented Minnesota’s First Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1982-1994. Throughout his congressional career, Penny placed an emphasis on budget issues. He chaired the Democratic Budget Group as well as the Porkbusters Coalition. Previously, he was a member of the Minnesota State Senate from 1976-82. In 2001, he was appointed to President Bush's bipartisan commission on Social Security. Most recently, Penny was a senior counselor at Himle Horner, a Twin Cities-based public relations and public affairs firm, and co-chair of the Humphrey Institute Forum at the University of Minnesota. Currently, Penny serves as Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation’s (SMIF) president & CEO. He is the co-author of two books, Common Cents (1995) and The 15 Biggest Lies in Politics (1998).

Maya MacGuineas is the president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Her areas of expertise include budget, tax, and economic policy. As a leading budget expert and a political independent, she has worked closely with members of both parties and serves as a trusted resource on Capitol Hill. MacGuineas testifies regularly before Congress and has published broadly, including regularly in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, and numerous other outlets. She also appears regularly as a commentator on television.

MacGuineas oversees a number of the Committee’s projects including the grassroots coalition Fix the Debt; the Committee’s Fiscal Institute; and FixUS, a project seeking to better understand the root causes of our nation’s growing divisions and deteriorating political system, and to work with others to bring attention to these issues and the need to fix them. Her most recent area of focus is on the future of the economy, technology, and capitalism.

Previously, MacGuineas worked at the Brookings Institution and on Wall Street, and in the spring of 2009 she did a stint on The Washington Post editorial board, covering economic and fiscal policy. MacGuineas serves on a number of boards and is a native Washingtonian. Contact her at MacGuineas@crfb.org and find her on Twitter @MayaMacGuineas.

Barry Anderson has been actively involved for over four decades in budgeting, helping presidents, prime ministers, and governors construct and implement their budgets, and helping disseminate the best practices of budgeting around the world. Most of his career has been with the U.S. federal government: as the senior career official at the White House's Office of Management and Budget; as the Deputy Director and then Acting Director of the Congressional Budget Office; and as a budget analyst at the General Accounting Office. Anderson also helped governors as the Deputy Director of the National Governors Association. Internationally, he was the head of the Budgeting and Public Expenditures Division in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, and before that a budget advisor at the International Monetary Fund. He has also been a member of the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board, and has taught courses on the U.S. budget process for George Washington University and the Office of Personnel Management. He is currently an independent consultant on both domestic and international budget issues. 

Erskine Bowles served as the director of the Small Business Administration, deputy chief of staff (1994-95) and chief of staff (1996-98) under the Clinton Administration. He served as president of the University of North Carolina system from 2006 until 2010. Most recently, he was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve as co-chair of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform with fellow CRFB board member Senator Alan Simpson. He is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business and began his business career at Morgan Stanley & Co. in New York. He later returned home to North Carolina, where he founded and served as chairman and CEO of a Charlotte-based investment banking firm. 

Saxby Chambliss is currently a partner in the Atlanta Office of DLA Piper. Previously, he served two terms in the U.S. Senate and four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. During his tenure in the Senate, he was a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee; the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry; and the Senate Rules Committee. Additionally, his leadership and experience on homeland security and intelligence matters earned him an appointment to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, where he served as vice chairman from 2011 to 2014. His previous role as chairman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security made him one of the leading congressional experts on those issues. Throughout his legislative career, he has been recognized numerous times by the public and private sectors for his work on agriculture, defense, budget and national security issues.

Kent Conrad is a former United States Senator who represented North Dakota from 1992 to 2013. He served as Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee from 2001 to 2003, and again from 2007 to 2013. He served as Ranking Member of the Committee from 2003 to 2007. In addition, he served as Chairman of the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Taxation, IRS Oversight, and Long-Term Growth. He previously served as Tax Commissioner of North Dakota. Conrad served on the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (Bowles-Simpson Commission), and supported the Commission's final recommendations. He currently serves on the board of Genworth Financial.

Jim Cooper represented Tennessee’s 4^th congressional district from 1983 to 1995, later returning to represent Tennessee’s 5^th congressional district from 2003 until 2023. During his time in Congress, he chaired the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces and served on several on committees, including the House Budget Committee, the Committee on Oversight and Reform, and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He authored the 2012 No Budget, No Pay Act, which became law in modified form in 2015. In the interim between his terms in Congress, Cooper co-founded Brentwood Capital Advisors, a Nashville investment bank, and served as an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management. Since leaving Congress in 2023, he has been a principal at TVV Capital, a private equity firm, while teaching a class on Congress and lawmaking at Vanderbilt Law School.

Dan Crippen served as the director of the Congressional Budget Office from 1999 through 2003. Prior to his stint at CBO, Crippen was President George H. W. Bush's adviser on all issues relating to domestic policy, including the preparation of the federal budget. From 1981 to 1985, he served as chief counsel and economic policy adviser to Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker of Tennessee. In the private sector, he was a principal with the Washington Counsel, a consulting firm. He has also served as executive director of the Merrill Lynch International Advisory Council and as senior vice president of the Duberstein Group.

Esther L. George served as president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City from 2011 to January 2023, when she faced mandatory retirement from the Federal Reserve. As president of the Kansas City Fed, she served on the Federal Open Market Committee, which is responsible for setting monetary policy for the United States. George led a workforce of more than 2,000 employees located at the Bank’s Kansas City office and Branch offices in Denver, Oklahoma City, and Omaha who supported the Kansas City Fed’s role in national monetary policy, financial institution supervision, and the provision of payment and financial services to depository institutions and the U.S. Treasury. She joined the Fed in 1982 and served much of her early career in the Division of Supervision and Risk Management. She was also a chair of the Federal Reserve System's Community Banking Organizations Management Group and served as the acting director of the Federal Reserve's Division of Banking Supervision and Regulation.

Bill Gradison, Jr. served nine terms in Congress as a member from Ohio, where he was the ranking member of the House Budget Committee and the ranking member on the Health Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee. Prior to that, he was the assistant to the secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, the assistant to the under secretary of the Treasury, and mayor of Cincinnati. Since leaving Congress, he has been president of the Health Insurance Association of America, a member of the audit committee for Project HOPE, and the senior public policy counselor at Patton Boggs. Currently he is a Commissioner on MedPAC, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.

Keith Hall served as the director of the Congressional Budget Office from 2015 to 2019. Prior to directing CBO, he served as chief economist of the US International Trade Commission and, from 2008 to 2012, as the 13^th Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Before that, Hall served as chief economist for both the White House Council of Economic Advisers and the US Department of Commerce. Hall also served as a special advisor to the Secretary of Commerce and regularly conducted and supervised research projects on a wide range of economic and policy issues. He has been a full-time faculty member in the economics departments at the universities of Arkansas and Missouri and has published a number of papers on international trade and international trade policy. He is currently a distinguished visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Jane Harman previously served as the director, president and chief executive officer of the Woodrow Wilson Center. Prior to assuming her current role, she represented California’s 36^th congressional district from 1993 to 1999 and from 2001 to 2011. She is a member of the Defense Policy Board, the Homeland Security Advisory Committee, and the Presidential Debates Commission. A product of Los Angeles public schools, Harman is a magna cum laude graduate of Smith College, and Harvard Law School.  Prior to serving in Congress, she was staff director of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, deputy cabinet secretary to President Jimmy Carter, and special counsel to the Department of Defense. 

Heidi Heitkamp served as the first female senator elected from North Dakota from 2013 to 2019. During her tenure, Heitkamp was a leading advocate for affordable housing, including reform of the nation’s housing finance system, and she sponsored initiatives aimed at addressing the health and safety of Native American tribal communities and indigenous peoples. She served as Ranking Member on several Senate subcommittees, including the Subcommittee on Economic Policy and Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs and Federal Management. After leaving the Senate, Heitkamp helped found the One Country Project, an organization focused on addressing the needs and concerns of rural communities. She currently serves as director of the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, and serves on the boards of the McCain Institute, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, the Renew Democracy Initiative and the German Marshall Fund. She is also an on-air contributor on politics and public affairs for ABC News and CNBC.

William Hoagland, who currently serves as the Senior Vice President at the Bipartisan Policy Center, served as the director of Budget and Appropriations in the Office of the Senate Majority Leader. From 1982 until 2003, Hoagland was a staff member of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, serving as staff director from 1986 to 2003. He also was the administrator of the Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service and as a special assistant to the secretary of Agriculture and at the Congressional Budget Office. He currently is an affiliate professor of public policy at the George Mason University.

James Jones currently serves as a co-chairman and chief executive officer of Manatt Jones Global Strategies, a business consulting firm, and is senior counsel to the law firm of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. Prior to joining the firm, he served as U.S. ambassador to Mexico from 1993 to 1997. Jones has also served as president of Warnaco International and chairman and CEO of the American Stock Exchange. As congressman of Oklahoma from 1973 to 1987, he was chairman of the House Budget Committee and a ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee. When he was only 28, President Lyndon Johnson selected him as chief of staff, making him the youngest person in history to hold this position. Jones serves on a number of Boards including those of Anheuser Busch and the Kaiser Family Foundation.

John Kasich served two terms as the 69^th Governor of Ohio from 2011 to 2019, during which he focused on Ohio’s fiscal stability, diversifying the state’s economy, expanding health care coverage for low-income Ohioans, protecting vulnerable residents, and leading reforms to protect the environment. Kasich ran for President during the 2016 Republican primary. He also served in Congress for nine terms, representing Ohio’s 12^th congressional district from 1983 to 2001. During his time in Congress he served as Chairman of the House Budget Committee and worked across party lines to pass the first federally balanced budget in decades, which has not been seen again since. He also served on the Armed Services Committee where he played a role in every major national security effort that helped end the Cold War. Today, he runs the Kasich Company and serves as a commentator with NBC and MSNBC.

Lou Kerr is an active leader in the community of Oklahoma City as well as the state and the country. She is president and chair of The Kerr Foundation, Inc. Kerr is involved in many activities, boards and philanthropic endeavors. She sits on many national and local boards, including International Women’s Forum Leadership Foundation, United Methodist Higher Education Foundation, Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, OU International Studies, Oklahoma City University, Oklahoma Schools of Science and Mathematics, Oklahoma International Women’s Forum, Oklahoma Women Presidents’ Organization, Capitol Preservation Commission for Oklahoma, and Allied Arts.  She also serves on the Advisory Boards of NPR, National Symphony Orchestra, Oklahoma Health Center Foundation, and Oklahoma Commission for the Status of Women.  President Clinton appointed her to the 1995 Oklahoma City Scholarship Fund Advisory Board. She is a national trustee for the National Symphony Orchestra, has served on the Truman Foundation Scholarship Selection Committee, and is an Honorary Fellow for National Academy of Public Administration. Kerr founded the Annual Women’s Business Leadership Conference with Oklahoma State University. She has been inducted into the OCSW Women’s Hall of Fame, has received Lifetime Achievement Awards from The International Women’s Forum and the Association for Women in Communications. Kerr holds two honorary Doctorates from Oklahoma universities.

Ron Kind represented Wisconsin’s 3^rd congressional district from 1997 to 2023. During his 26 years as a member of the House, Kind was engaged at the highest level on a broad range of sensitive and complex legal and policy issues. He was involved in the passage of the Affordable Care Act and most other major healthcare legislation of the last 20 years, the Inflation Reduction Act, the 2021 infrastructure package, the CHIPS Act, multiple free trade agreements—including the U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement—major tax and pension reform, and retirement legislation. Kind served as a member of the House Ways and Means Committee and its subcommittees on Health and Trade and was a member of the House Natural Resources, Budget, Education & Labor, and Agriculture Committees. He is currently a senior policy advisor for Arnold & Porter.

Marjorie Margolis is president of the Women’s Campaign International (WCI).  From 1993 to 1995, she represented Pennsylvania’s 13^th congressional district and had the distinction of being the first woman elected to Congress from Pennsylvania in her own right. She founded WCI in 1998 after serving as the director of the United States delegation to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. In addition to her work with WCI, Marjorie taught at the University of Pennsylvania for 20 years. In 2016, she was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve on the Presidential Commission for the Preservation of American Heritage. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and a CBS News Foundation Fellow at Columbia University, Marjorie began her career as a journalist winning five Emmy Awards for her reporting.

Dave McCurdy represented Oklahoma's 4th district in the House from 1981 to 1995. In his time in the House, he served as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee from 1991 to 1993. He was also the chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council from 1993 to 1995. Prior to being elected to the House, McCurdy served as the Assistant Attorney General of Oklahoma. He currently serves as President and CEO of the American Gas Association.

James McIntyre, Jr. joined the Carter administration as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, becoming director later that year. Prior to that, he was general counsel for the Georgia Municipal Association, serving until appointment as deputy state revenue commissioner in 1970. While serving as deputy state revenue commissioner, he was appointed director of the Office of Planning and Budget for the State by Governor Carter. After he left government, he established the McIntyre Law Firm. McIntyre is a trustee of Young Harris College.

Michael Nutter served as Mayor of Philadelphia from 2008 to 2016. Prior to that, he served almost 15 years on the Philadelphia City Council. During the Obama Administration, he served on the Advisory Council of the Obama Foundation subsidiary My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, and in 2018 the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia announced his appointment as a Member of the Economic and Community Advisory Council. He also serves as a political contributor on CNN, and holds Fellow appointments at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Brookings Institute, Drexel University and the University of Chicago. He is currently Senior Advisor for the What Works Cities Program, Advisor to the African American Mayors Association and Board of the Urban Institute, and the David N. Dinkins Professor of Professional Practice in Urban and Public Affairs at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

June O'Neill served as director of the Congressional Budget Office from 1995 to 1999. Prior to that, she held positions as director of policy and research at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, senior economist on the President's Council of Economic Advisers, senior research associate at the Urban Institute, and research associate at the Brookings Institution. She was elected vice president of the American Economics Association in 1998. Currently, she is the director of the Center for the Study of Business and Government at Baruch College, CUNY. She is also an adjunct scholar of the American Enterprise Institute.

Marne Obernauer is a member of the Board and an equity partner of Breakthru Beverage Group.  He was formerly Vice Chairman and Director of Applied Graphics Technologies, Inc. and Chairman and CEO of Devon Group, Inc. from 1982-1998 before that company merged with Applied Graphics. He spent nearly a decade as an investment officer with Citibank and then Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette.  He is a member of the Board of the Barrow Neurological Foundation and a founding member of the American Business Conference.  He is also a member of the Leadership Council of the Yale School of the Environment and Director Emeritus of LIFT, a national non-profit anti-poverty organization.

Rudolph G. Penner is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. Previously, he was a managing director of the Barents Group, a KPMG Company. He was director of the Congressional Budget Office from 1983 to 1987. From 1977 to 1983, he was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Previous posts in government include assistant director for economic policy at the Office of Management and Budget, deputy assistant secretary for economic affairs at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and senior staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisors.

Franklin Raines is Executive Chairman and Co-founder of the digital services companies XAPPmedia and Bespoken.io, and since 2020 is a member of the Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents. The first African American CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation, Frank retired as Chairman and CEO of Fannie Mae in 2004. He previously served as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton Administration where he led the negotiations that resulted in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Frank began his professional career working for Senator Moynihan in the White House. He later became the assistant director of the White House Domestic Policy Staff in the Carter administration and followed that role becoming associate director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget from 1978-1979.  Frank later joined investment bank Lazard Freres & Co where he served as partner from 1985 -1991. Frank has served on the board of Directors of six Fortune 100 companies, and also served as Co-Chairman of the Business Roundtable and Vice Chairman of the Business Council.

Dr. Robert Reischauer was the director of the Congressional Budget Office from 1989 to 1995. Before that he served as the Urban Institute's senior vice president from 1981 to 1986. He was the Congressional Budget Office's assistant director for human resources and its deputy director between 1977 and 1981. After leaving government, he was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Currently, he is the president emeritus of the Urban Institute and serves on the boards of several educational and nonprofit organizations.

Reid Ribble served six years in Congress as the Representative from the 8^th district of Wisconsin. During his tenure, he served on the Agriculture, Transportation and Infrastructure, Budget and Finance, and Foreign Affairs Committees, where he was the vice chairman of the Committee on Emerging Threats. Reid fought to bring common sense back to government through his legislative work and introduced constitutional amendments requiring a balanced budget and mandating term limits.  Before running for Congress, Ribble was the president of his own roofing company in Kaukana, Wisconsin for more than 30 years and after his Congressional tenure, he became the CEO of the Roofing Contractors Association.  Ribble is currently the first Practitioner in Residence at the University of Wisconsin’s Green Bay Political Science Program, where he provides opportunities for students and the community to discuss critical topics in American democracy.

Charles S. Robb is on the faculty of George Mason University as a Distinguished Professor of Law and Public Policy in 2001. Previously he served as Lt. Governor of Virginia, from 1978 to 1982, as Virginia’s 64th Governor, from 1982 to 1986, and as a United States Senator, from 1989 to 2001. While in the Senate he became the first member ever to serve simultaneously on all three national security committees (Intelligence, Armed Services, and Foreign Relations). He also served on the Finance, Commerce, and Budget Committees. Since leaving the Senate in 2001 he has served as Chairman of the Board of Visitors at the United States Naval Academy, Co-Chairman of the President’s Commission on Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. He has also been a member of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, the Secretary of State’s International Security Advisory Board, the Iraq Study Group, and the Afghanistan Study Group, and was a Fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard and at the Marshall Wythe School of Law at William & Mary. 

Isabel Sawhill is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, working in the Center on Children and Families and on the Future of the Middle Class Initiative. Her research spans a wide array of economic and social issues, including fiscal policy, economic growth, poverty, social mobility, and inequality. She previously served as vice president and director of the Economic Studies program from 2003 to 2006, and as co-director of the Center on Children and Families from 2006 to 2015. Prior to joining Brookings, she was a senior fellow at The Urban Institute. She served in the Clinton Administration as an Associate Director of OMB, where her responsibilities included all of the human resource programs of the federal government, accounting for one third of the federal budget. She attended Wellesley College and received her Ph.D. from New York University.

Alan Simpson served as United States Senator from Wyoming for 18 years. While in Congress, Simpson served as Chairman of the Veteran’s Committee, Immigration and Refugee Subcommittee of Judiciary, the Nuclear Regulation Subcommittee, the Social Security Subcommittee and the Committee on Aging. He served for 10 years as Assistant Republican Leader under Senator Bob Dole. In 2010, Simpson was appointed as co-chair to President Barack Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform with co-chair Eskine Bowles. During his time at the Fiscal Commission, he and fellow co-chair Erskine Bowles were able to garner a bipartisan majority of 11 out of 18 Commission members to support a final debt reduction plan.

Eugene Steuerle is Institute Fellow and Richard B. Fischer Chair at the Urban Institute and a columnist for Tax Notes Magazine. In the past, he has served as deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for tax analysis, president of the National Tax Association, chair of the 1999 Technical Panel advising Social Security on its methods and assumptions, economic coordinator and original organizer of the 1984 Treasury study that led to the Tax Reform Act of 1986, and a columnist for the Financial Times. Dr. Steuerle is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of fifteen books.

David Stockman is the founding partner of Heartland Industrial Partners. He was formerly a senior managing director of The Blackstone Group. Prior to joining Blackstone, Stockman was a managing director at Salomon Brothers, Inc. He served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Reagan administration and was the youngest Cabinet member of the twentieth century. From 1976 to 1981, Stockman represented Michigan in the House of Representatives.

John Tanner was a representative from Tennessee for 22 years. While in Congress, he served on the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Committee on Ways and Means, and was one of the founders of the Blue Dog Democrats. Additionally, Tanner served as President of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. As a member of Congress, Tanner was a strong advocate of balancing the budget and paying down the debt.

Tom Tauke most recently served as executive vice president for Public Affairs, Policy, and Communications at Verizon. He represented Iowa's 2nd district in the House from 1979 to 1991. During his tenure, he served on the House Energy and Commerce, Education and Labor, Small Business, and Aging Committees. Prior to his time in Congress, he served in the Iowa General Assembly from 1975 to 1979. He sits on several for-profit and non-profit boards.

Carol Wait is president of Boggs Realty Company, a family owned real estate company that has done business in Bellflower, California since 1936. Previously, she served as the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. President George H.W. Bush appointed Wait to the Glass Ceiling Commission. Wait serves on the Board of CIGNA Corporation and is a past president of the International Women’s Forum. Currently, Wait serves as resident of the International Women’s Forum Leadership Foundation.