Mr. Jack Howard
Jack Howard brings nearly 25 years of experience at the highest levels of Congress and the White House to Wexler & Walker. He is the only person in Washington who has served as a senior strategic and policy advisor to the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate Majority Leader and as a key member of President Bush’s White House staff.
Mr. Howard just completed two years in the White House as Deputy Assistant for Legislative Affairs to President George W. Bush. He was the second ranking official in the Legislative Affairs operation, which is responsible for dealing with Congress and pushing the President’s legislative agenda. He worked with other senior White House staff as well as all the Cabinet Departments and agencies to coordinate activities related to legislation moving through Congress.
During the 1990s, he worked as a senior staff advisor to several House and Senate Republican Leaders, including Speakers of the House Dennis Hastert and Newt Gingrich and former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. He was Deputy Chief of Staff to both Speaker Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Lott, after having served in senior staff positions for Speaker Gingrich.
He was instrumental in passage of nearly every major piece of legislation since Republicans took control of the Congress in 1995. He has a demonstrated ability to work across party lines and forge alliances, resulting in enactment of laws such as welfare reform legislation, the Balanced Budget Act, and the securities litigation reform bill. In addition, he was the leadership staffer responsible for passage of other significant legislation such as the Telecommunications Act, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley banking deregulation bill, tax cut and IRS reform efforts, and the Africa Free Trade bill.
This was Mr. Howard’s second stint in a Bush White House, having served President George H.W. Bush from 1989 to 1992 as Special Assistant for Legislative Affairs. Prior to that, he worked for 10 years on Capitol Hill as a member of the House Republican Leadership staff and as an aide to former Representative and Wexler & Walker Chairman Robert S. Walker.
His experience has earned him recognition in several influential publications that focus on Washington. National Journal named him one of the “Top 50 Bush White House staff members,” and he was regularly listed as one of the “Top 50 Congressional staff members” by Roll Call, a leading Capitol Hill newspaper. He was profiled in The Almanac of the Un-elected, a book about, in their words, key people who are essential to the functioning of the Congress, the ones who “labor behind the headlines; not the headline makers.”
Mr. Howard graduated from Gettysburg College in 1979 with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. He lives in Olney, Md., with his wife, Kelly, and two children, Ben and Molly.