Director, GW Regulatory Studies Center & Distinguished Professor of Practice, Trachtenberg School of Public Policy & Public Administration, The George Washington University
Susan Dudley is the Founder and Director of the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center, established in 2009 to raise awareness of regulations’ effects and improve regulatory policy through research, education, and outreach. She is also a distinguished professor of practice in the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration. She is past-president of the Society for Benefit Cost Analysis, a senior fellow of the Administrative Conference of the United States, and on the Regulatory Transparency Project Regulatory Practice Working Group. Her book, Regulation: A Primer, with Jerry Brito, is available on Amazon.com.
From April 2007 through January 2009, Professor Dudley served as the Presidentially-appointed Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and was responsible for the review of draft executive branch regulations under Executive Order 12866, the collection of federal-government-wide information under the Paperwork Reduction Act, the development and implementation of government-wide policies in the areas of information policy, privacy, and statistical policy, and international regulatory cooperation efforts.
Prior to OIRA, she directed the Regulatory Studies Program at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and taught courses on regulation at the George Mason University School of Law. Earlier in her career, Professor Dudley served as an economist at OIRA, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. She was also a consultant to government and private clients at Economists Incorporated. She holds a Master of Science degree from the Sloan School of Management at MIT and a Bachelor of Science degree (summa cum laude) in Resource Economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Vice President of Domestic and Economic Policy, The Heritage Foundation
Roger Severino is Vice President of Economic and Domestic Policy, and the Joseph C. and Elizabeth A. Anderlik Fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
Severino is a national authority on civil rights, conscience and religious freedom, the administrative state, and information privacy, particularly as applied to health care law and policy. Find his tweets at @RogerSeverino_.
Severino spearheaded the HHS Accountability Project while a Senior Fellow at EPPC from 2021 to 2023. Previously, Severino was Director of HHS’ Office for Civil Rights, where he led a team of over 250 staff enforcing our nation’s civil rights, conscience and religious freedom, and health information privacy laws. He served from 2017 to 2021 and was the longest-serving OCR director of the past three decades.
Prior to joining HHS, Severino served for two years as Director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at Heritage, advocating for life, family, and religious-freedom policies. Before that, he was a trial attorney for seven years at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division where he enforced the Fair Housing Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Severino started his legal career at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, where he was Legal Counsel and Chief Operations Officer and defended the rights of people of all faiths under federal and international law.
Severino has been profiled in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and The Hill and has appeared on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS, among others. In 2020, The New York Times dubbed him and his wife Carrie, “a conservative power couple” to be reckoned with.
Severino holds a JD from Harvard Law School, a master’s degree in public policy, with highest distinction, from Carnegie Mellon University, and a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of Southern California. He was appointed by President Trump to the Administrative Conference of the United States and is a member of the District of Columbia and the Commonwealth of Virginia bars.
As OCR director, Severino founded the federal government’s first division dedicated exclusively to conscience and religious freedom compliance and enforcement. He enforced the Weldon Amendment for the first time against a state (California) after it coerced families and religious organizations into paying for abortion insurance coverage, leading to a $200 million federal funding disallowance. He also enforced laws protecting pro-life pregnancy resource centers from discrimination by states hostile to their message and enforced laws prohibiting forced participation in abortions by medical professionals.
With respect to civil rights, Severino protected older persons and people with disabilities from being denied life-saving care due to discriminatory “quality of life” judgments, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. He also achieved a landmark sexual harassment resolution with Michigan State University in the wake of the Larry Nassar sexual assault scandal and protected the rights of non-English speakers to have equal access to health and human services.
In the area of health privacy, he secured the largest HIPAA monetary settlement in history and achieved the largest number of enforcement resolutions both in a single year and across four years. He also facilitated the transformational use of Skype, Zoom, and Facetime for delivery of telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
His regulatory reform activities resulted in a comprehensive conscience protection regulation and proposed a life-affirming disability rights regulation. He achieved regulatory savings of $3.6 billion in health care industry costs over five years and identified and proposed an additional $3.2 billion in cost savings from the repeal of ineffective and unnecessary regulatory burdens.
Severino is a Spanish speaker who teaches salsa and west coast swing in his spare time.
Partner, Dechert LLP
In a career spanning both private and public practice, Steven A. Engel is a leading litigator and counselor, acting as an advocate in high-profile trial and appellate matters and advising clients on their most sensitive and complex legal issues. Mr. Engel is the Chair of Dechert’s Appellate and Regulatory Litigation Group and has appeared in courts across the country, handling a wide range of civil litigation matters, including administrative law, commercial litigation, constitutional law and securities cases. He regularly counsels clients on challenges to agency regulations and in connection with government, congressional and internal investigations.
Until January 2021, Mr. Engel served as the Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel. As the head of the office, Mr. Engel served as the chief counsel to the Attorney General and the principal legal adviser to the Executive Branch, providing legal advice to the President and cabinet secretaries on the most critical constitutional and statutory questions, including matters pertaining to national security, administrative law, criminal law, congressional oversight, and executive orders. In December 2020, Mr. Engel was awarded the Department of Justice’s highest honor, the Edmund J. Randolph Award, for outstanding service to the Department.
Before his appointment as Assistant Attorney General in 2017, Mr. Engel had been a partner at Dechert since 2009 and previously served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel. Mr. Engel clerked on the U.S. Supreme Court for Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit for Judge Alex Kozinski.
Mr. Engel is a member of the Advisory Committee on Rules for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and the Administrative Conference of the United States. He has been an Adjunct Professor at the Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University and the Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University of America and was formerly the Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State. He has been nationally ranked as a leading lawyer in The Legal 500 USA and Benchmark Litigation. Mr. Engel has frequently commented on legal subjects in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, and has appeared on national news programs as a legal analyst, including on MSNBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and the Fox Business Network. Mr. Engel has testified on several occasions before committees of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate.
Director of the Center on National Security, Fordham Law School
Professor Greenberg is a noted expert on national security, terrorism, and civil liberties. She is the author of Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State, out on May 24, 2016. She is also the author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days (2009), which was selected as one of the best books of 2009 by The Washington Post and Slate.com. She is co-editor with Joshua L. Dratel of The Enemy Combatant Papers: American Justice, the Courts, and the War on Terror (2008) and The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (2005); editor of the books The Torture Debate in America (2006) and Al Qaeda Now (2005); and editor of the Terrorist Trial Report Card, 2001–2011. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, The National Interest, Mother Jones, TomDispatch.com, and on major news channels. She is a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Professor of Law, University of Minnesota Law School
Professor James W. Coleman is a scholar of energy law. He specializes in North American energy infrastructure, transport, and trade. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute focused on energy policy.
Professor Coleman has testified before Congress on steps to speed up energy infrastructure permits. He also worked with a team of experts as part of Alberta's Royalty Review to revise the Canadian province's management of its vast oil and gas resources.
Before joining Minnesota, Professor Coleman taught at Southern Methodist University's Dedman School of Law, the University of Calgary’s law and business schools, and Harvard Law School. Earlier, he practiced environmental and appellate law at Sidley Austin in Washington, D.C., and clerked for the Honorable Steven M. Colloton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.
Professor Coleman received two degrees from Harvard University—a J.D. (cum laude) and B.A. in biology (magna cum laude with highest honors in the field). As a result of his undergraduate thesis on butterfly genetics, which required fieldwork in Central Asia, a species of lycaenid butterfly was named after him—Agrodiaetus ripartii colemani.
Attorney, Robinson, Bradshaw & Hinson, PA
Erik Zimmerman is a commercial and appellate litigator. He previously clerked for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court and the Honorable J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Aided by his experience in the judicial system, Erik represents clients at all levels of the federal and state courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, federal and state appellate and trial courts, and federal administrative agencies.
Erik has experience in a broad range of subject areas, including contract disputes, employment and labor law, ERISA, and health care and health insurance law. He also represents clients in cases involving constitutional law, communications law, fraud, the False Claims Act, product liability, punitive damages and federal preemption of state law.
Erik's representative matters include helping to secure dismissal of a multibillion dollar breach of contract action in federal district court. He also successfully represented a client in appealing a judgment of nearly $100 million to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in another contract dispute.
Erik also maintains an active pro bono practice. He has represented clients in federal and state appeals involving issues of criminal law, the Fourth Amendment and landlord-tenant law. Erik is admitted only in the District of Columbia.
Member, Miller & Chevalier Chartered
Timothy P. O'Toole defends individuals and companies in white collar criminal prosecutions, conducts internal corporate investigations, and represents potential witnesses and targets in government investigations. His white collar criminal defense practice includes matters involving the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, criminal tax, conspiracy, false representations to government agencies, bribery, illegal gratuities, obstruction of justice, and fraud.
Mr. O’Toole also handles complex litigation arising under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). His ERISA practice spans a broad spectrum, including fiduciary litigation, pre-emption matters, and cases arising under Title IV. He has represented plan sponsors in benefits litigation and has particular experience in defending breach of fiduciary duty claims. Mr. O’Toole also currently represents a number of retiree organizations in challenges to the manner in which the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) has handled the termination of their pension plans and administered their pension benefits.
Mr. O'Toole is experienced in handling criminal and civil appeals, having presented more than 25 appellate arguments in the state and federal courts, and represented parties and amici curiae before the United States Supreme Court in a Fourth Amendment case (Hudson v. Michigan), cases involving the Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses (Briscoe v. Virginia; Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts; Davis v. Washington; and Hammon v. Indiana), and cases involving federal court jurisdiction (Slack v. McDaniel; Whorton v. Bockting; Muhammad v. Close; and Rumsfeld v. Padilla).
Prior to joining Miller & Chevalier, Mr. O’Toole served as the Chief of the Special Litigation Division of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where he supervised and handled complex cases in the local and federal courts. He is a former Assistant Federal Public Defender in Las Vegas, Nevada, where he represented people under sentence of death in federal proceedings.
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