Team Players: Professors Help Transition to Obama's New Administration

March 2, 2009

Professors Phil Weiser and Helen Norton both recently served on the Presidential Transition Team. In particular, both served as team leads of the agency review process. The role of the teams was to review key federal departments, agencies, and commissions, and to provide brief memos addressed to the President and his administration containing information needed to make strategic policy, budgetary, and personnel decisions.

Professor Weiser was a lead agency reviewer at the Federal Trade Commission and helped write the team memo. During his time on the transition team, Professor Weiser talked to well over 100 people, ranging from those at the agency to former agency officials to consumer and business groups to academics in an effort to gather different perspectives and ideas.

Professor Norton is no stranger to transition. Before joining the Colorado Law faculty, she spent more than 15 years in Washington, DC, in various capacities, including a stint as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice under the Clinton administration. This past fall, Professor Norton was asked to take the lead on the six-person transition team charged with reviewing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the nation’s largest civil rights enforcement agency. After extensive document review and interviews both inside and outside the agency, her team put together a series of strategy memos that identified the Commission’s key policy, management, and budgetary opportunities and challenges.