Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, United States Department of Housing and Urban Development
Craig Trainor is Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity at the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. President Trump nominated Mr. Trainor for this position on February 11, 2025, and the United States Senate confirmed him on October 7, 2025.
A “Day One” Trump-Vance Administration official, he previously served as Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the United States Department of Education, where he spearheaded the Department’s efforts to reorient America’s civil rights regime from an unjust spoils system to one that protects the rights of all Americans. Mr. Trainor’s February 14, 2025, “Dear Colleague” letter is widely considered the Trump Administration’s blueprint for enforcing civil rights laws and restoring the Constitution’s promise of equal protection.
Prior to serving in the Trump-Vance Administration, he was Senior Special Counsel with the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary under Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), and Senior Litigation Counsel with the America First Policy Institute under the Honorable Pam Bondi.
For over ten years, Mr. Trainor was a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer in New York City, litigating cases in New York state court and the United States District Court for the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York.
Prior to founding his law practice, he served as a New York City prosecutor, an associate attorney at a white collar criminal defense firm, and a law clerk to Chief Judge Frederick J. Scullin, Jr., United States District Court for the Northern District of New York.
Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Professor Emeritus of Public Policy, Univ. of Maryland Baltimore County
George R. La Noue is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Professor Emeritus of Public Policy at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He has served as a trial expert in twenty cases involving public procurement preferences. For thirty years, he was Director of the Project on Civil Rights and Public Contracts at UMBC which recently contributed 289 public contracting disparity studies to the Library of Congress. He has been a consultant to nine governments and trial expert in thirty cases where the validity of disparity studies was at issue.
Prof. La Noue can be reached by email at glanoue@umbc.edu.
Vice President for the Program on Technology, Criminal Justice and Civil Liberties, Lincoln Network
Arthur Rizer is the Vice President for the Program on Technology, Criminal Justice and Civil Liberties at Lincoln Network. In addition to his work at Lincoln, Arthur is a visiting lecturer at University College London, and an adjunct professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. Arthur is also a member of Columbia University Justice Lab’s Executive Session for the Future of Justice Policy, the Federalist Society’s Executive Committee of the Criminal Law Practice Group, the Virginia Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and other advisory bodies.
Before joining Lincoln, Arthur was founding director of the R Street Institute’s program on criminal justice and civil liberties. Prior to that, Arthur taught at West Virginia University’s College of Law, and was a visiting professor at Georgetown University Law Center. He also served as a trial attorney with the U.S. Justice Department, primarily as a federal prosecutor in the Criminal Division, where he targeted command-and-control drug cartel leaders and narco-terrorists. He also served as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California and in the civil division. Earlier in his career, Arthur served in the U.S. Army, originally enlisting as a private before later receiving a commission. He served as an armor officer, later becoming the commander of a military police company and a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps assistant professor. He deployed to Fallujah, Iraq, with the mission to train the Iraqi Infantry and served as an MP acting battalion commander and executive officer. He retired as a lieutenant colonel from the U.S. Army (WVNG). During his Army career, Arthur received the Bronze Star, Purple Heart, Meritorious Service and Iraq Campaign medals.
Arthur is the author of three books: Lincoln’s Counsel (2010); The National Security Implications of Immigration Law (2013); and Jefferson’s Pen: The Art of Persuasion (2016).
Arthur earned his bachelor’s degree in political science from Pacific Lutheran University; a master of laws, with distinction, from Georgetown University’s Law Center; and his JD, magna cum laude, from Gonzaga University School of Law. He is also a graduate of the U.S. Marine Corps’ Command Staff College. He is in the final stages of a doctorate at the University of Oxford, Faculty of Law, Centre of Criminology that focuses on policing.
Partner, Bell Giftos St. John LLC
Kevin St. John is a partner with Bell Giftos St. John LLC in Madison, Wisconsin. From 2011 to 2015, he served as Wisconsin’s Deputy Attorney General. Prior to his government service St. John practiced law with the Madison office of Michael Best & Friedrich LLP and the Washington D.C. office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP. St. John is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and earned his law degree from the University of Chicago.
St. John has contributed to Federalist Society as a speaker and in commentaries on topics including redistricting, free speech, and separation of powers.
Executive Director & Secretary, American Civil Rights Project
Dan Morenoff is the executive director at the American Civil Rights Project and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
His work focuses on protecting and, where necessary, restoring the primacy of all Americans' shared civil rights against the identitarian alternative.
Before practicing law, Morenoff served on the legislative staff of Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX). Morenoff holds a B.A. from Columbia College of Columbia University in the City of New York and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School. He has also served as an officer or director of several community organizations in Dallas, Texas.
Professor of Law, Notre Dame Law School
Professor Derek Muller is a nationally-recognized scholar in the field of election law. His research focuses on the role of states in the administration of federal elections, the constitutional contours of voting rights and election administration, the limits of judicial power in the domain of elections, and the Electoral College.
He has published more than two dozen academic works, and his op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He has testified before Congress, and he is a contributor at the Election Law Blog. He is a co-author on a Federal Courts casebook published by Carolina Academic Press. He is also the co-reporter on a new Restatement of the Law, Election Litigation, an effort led by the American Law Institute.
Professor Muller teaches Election Law, Civil Procedure, and Evidence.
Board Member, Center for Equal Opportunity
Roger Clegg is a Board Member at and former President and General Counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity. He focuses on legal issues arising from civil rights laws--including the regulatory impact on business and the problems in higher education created by affirmative action. A former Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Reagan and Bush administrations, Clegg held the second highest positions in both the Civil Rights Division (1987-91) and in the Environment and Natural Resources Division (1991-93). He has held several other positions at the U.S. Justice Department, including Assistant to the Solicitor General (1985-87), Associate Deputy Attorney General (1984-85), and Acting Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy (1984). Clegg is a graduate of Yale University Law School (1981).
Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow, The Heritage Foundation
Mike Gonzalez, the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, writes on critical race theory, identity politics, diversity, multiculturalism, assimilation and nationalism, as well as foreign policy in general. He spent close to 20 years as a journalist, 15 of them reporting from Europe, Asia and Latin America. He left journalism to join the administration of President George W. Bush, where he was speechwriter for Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox before moving on to the State Department’s European Bureau.
Gonzalez, who joined Heritage in March 2009, became a Senior Fellow in June 2014 and a chaired fellow in 2019. He is a widely experienced writer and public speaker. He has written for National Affairs, The American Interest, Foreign Policy, The Claremont Review of Books, City Journal, Quillette, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Time.com, The Hill, Forbes.com, USA Today, The Guardian, The National Interest, The Daily Signal, National Review and others. Gonzalez has appeared on Fox, MSNBC, PBS, the BBC, CNBC, NPR, C-SPAN, The Voice of America, Television Española, Canal Plus, as well as many other networks and stations in the United States, Europe, Asia and Latin America.
Gonzalez got his first regular reporting beat in 1981, covering high school sports for one summer for The Boston Herald. He went to work for Agence France-Presse in 1987, reporting from around the globe for the news agency for six years, including covering the war in Afghanistan, where he traveled with the Mujahedeen in the late 1980s. In his first foreign assignment, in Panama in 1987, he was arrested, jailed overnight and expelled by the dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega.
After taking off two years to earn a master's in Business Administration from Columbia Business School, he next logged 11 years with The Wall Street Journal, writing a column on the stock market in New York before being posted to Hong Kong in 1995 as Deputy Editor of the editorial pages of the newspaper’s Asia edition. Between 1998 and 2003, he served in the same capacity for the European edition in Brussels, before returning to Hong Kong as chief editorial page editor.
Gonzalez holds a bachelor’s degree in Communications from Boston’s Emerson College, and a master's in Business Administration from Columbia Business School.
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Note from the Editor: The Federalist Society takes no positions on particular legal and public...
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Note from the Editor: The Federalist Society takes no positions on particular legal and public...
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Note from the Editor: The Federalist Society takes no positions on particular legal and public...
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