Experts

Tracy Gordon is co-director and the acting Robert C. Pozen director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, where she researches and writes about fiscal challenges facing state and local governments, including budget trade-offs, intergovernmental relations, and long-term sustainability. Before joining Urban, Gordon was a senior economist with the White House Council of Economic Advisers. She was also a fellow at the Brookings Institution, assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, and fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. Gordon was a member of the District of Columbia Infrastructure Task Force and the District of Columbia Tax Revision Commission. She serves on the board of trustees for the American Tax Policy Institute and the California Budget and Policy Center.

Gordon has written extensively on state and local government finances, including taxes, budgeting, intergovernmental relations, municipal debt, and pensions. She has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post and on C-SPAN, Fox Business News, and NPR. Gordon holds a PhD in public policy with a concurrent MA in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Eric Toder is an Nonresident Fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute.  In his current position, he oversees the modeling team at the Tax Policy Center; serves as its leading expert on corporate and international tax and tax compliance issues; and authors and directs research studies. 

Toder has published articles on a wide variety of tax policy and retirement policy issues, including corporate tax reform, distributional effects of tax expenditures, carbon taxes, value-added taxes, net benefits of Social Security taxes and spending, tax compliance, and the effects of saving incentives.

Before joining Urban, Toder held a number of senior-level positions in tax policy offices in the US government and overseas, including service as deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Tax Analysis at the US Department of the Treasury; director of research at the Internal Revenue Service; deputy assistant director for the Office of Tax Analysis at the Congressional Budget Office; and consultant to the New Zealand Treasury.  He has also served as a part-time consultant to the International Monetary Fund and serves as treasurer of the National Tax Association.

Toder received his PhD in economics from the University of Rochester in 1971.

William G. Gale is the Arjay and Frances Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. His research focuses on tax policy, fiscal policy, pensions and saving behavior. He is co-director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. He is also director of the Retirement Security Project. From 2006 to 2009, he served as vice president of Brookings and director of the Economic Studies Program.

Prior to joining Brookings in 1992, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush.

He is the co-editor of several books, including Automatic: Changing the Way America Saves (Brookings 2009); Aging Gracefully: Ideas to Improve Retirement Security in America (Century Foundation, 2006); The Evolving Pension System: Trends, Effects, and Proposals for Reform(Brookings, 2005); Private Pensions and Public Policy (Brookings, 2004); Rethinking Estate and Gift Taxation (Brookings, 2001), and Economic Effects of Fundamental Tax Reform (Brookings, 1996).

His research has been published in several scholarly journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Quarterly Journal of Economics. In 2007, a paper he co-authored was awarded the TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson Award Certificate of Excellence.

He has also written extensively in policy-related publications and newspapers, including op-eds in CNN, the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post.

Gale serves on the editorial board of several academic journals, and has served on advisory boards for the Government Accountability Office, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Joint Committee on Taxation, and on the Board of the Center on Federal Financial Institutions.

Gale attended Duke University and the London School of Economics and received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1987. He lives in Washington, DC, is an avid tennis player, and is a person who stutters. He is the father of two grown children.

Howard Gleckman is a senior fellow in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where he edits the fiscal policy blog TaxVox and the daily news summary The Daily Deduction. He is also affiliated with Urban’s Program on Retirement Policy, where he works on long-term care issues.

Before joining Urban, Gleckman was senior correspondent in the Washington bureau of Business Week, where he was a 2003 National Magazine Award finalist. He was a 2006–07 media fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation and a visiting fellow at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College from 2006 to 2008.

Gleckman writes two regular columns for Forbes.com, on tax policy and elder care. He is author of the book Caring for Our Parents and speaks and writes frequently on long-term care issues.

Steve Rosenthal, a senior fellow in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute, researches, speaks, and writes on a range of federal income tax issues, with a particular focus on business taxes. In 2013, he also was the staff director of the DC Tax Revision Commission.

Before joining Urban, Rosenthal practiced tax law in Washington, DC, for over 25 years, most recently as a partner at Ropes and Gray. He was a legislation counsel with the Joint Committee on Taxation, where he helped draft tax rules for financial institutions, financial products, capital gains, and related areas. He is the former chair of the Taxation Section of the District of Columbia Bar Association.

Rosenthal holds an AB and JD from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MPP from Harvard University.

Elaine Maag is on leave from the Urban Institute and Tax Policy Center from December 2023 to January 2025.

Elaine Maag is a senior fellow in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute and a codirector of Innovations in Cash Assistance for Children. She is an expert on the taxation of low- and middle-income families. Her work examines the interactions between tax and transfer programs, the impact of cash supports, how well taxes support families, and the administration of tax and transfer programs.

Maag has testified before state and federal congressional committees and advised congressional staff members and administration officials on the taxation of families with children and on higher education and work incentives in the tax code. Maag codirected the creation of the Net Income Change Calculator, a tool that allows users to understand the trade-offs between tax and transfer benefits and changes in earnings or marital status. 

Before joining Urban, Maag worked at the Internal Revenue Service and at the Government Accountability Office as a presidential management fellow.

Maag holds an MS in public policy analysis from the University of Rochester.

Maag is a board member of the Commonwealth Institute (Virginia), a member of the Code for America Tax Benefits Advisory Committee, and a member of the Humanity Forward Policy Council.

Len Burman is Institute Fellow at the Urban Institute, the Paul Volcker Professor and a Professor of Public Administration and International Affairs at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, and senior research associate at Syracuse University’s Center for Policy Research. He co-founded the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, in 2002. He was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis at the Treasury from 1998 to 2000 and Senior Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office from 1988 to 1997. He is past-president of the National Tax Association.  Burman is the coauthor with Joel Slemrod of Taxes in America: What Everyone Needs to Know and author of The Labyrinth of Capital Gains Tax Policy: A Guide for the Perplexed, and co-editor of several books.  He is often invited to testify before Congress and has written for scholarly journals as well as media outlets such as the Washington Post, New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.  He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and a B.A. from Wesleyan University.

Richard C. Auxier is a senior policy associate in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. His work focuses on state and local tax policy, budgets, and other finance issues. Before joining Urban, Auxier was on the staff of the DC Tax Revision Commission and helped write the commission's final report on recommendations for improving the District's tax system. He also was previously a researcher and editor at the Pew Research Center. Auxier attended the University of Maryland for his undergraduate degree and his master's degree in public policy.

Eugene Steuerle is an Institute fellow and the Richard B. Fisher chair at the Urban Institute. Among past positions, he was deputy assistant secretary of the US Department of the Treasury for Tax Analysis (1987–89), president of the National Tax Association (2001–02), codirector of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, chair of the 1999 Technical Panel advising Social Security on its methods and assumptions, and chair of the 2015–16 National Academy of Sciences Committee on Advancing the Power of Economic Evidence to Inform Investments in Children, Youth, and Families. Between 1984 and 1986, he was the economic coordinator and original organizer of the Treasury’s tax reform effort.

Steuerle is the author, coauthor, or coeditor of 18 books, including Dead Men Ruling, Nonprofits and Government (3rd edition), Contemporary US Tax Policy (2nd edition), and Advancing the Power of Economic Evidence to Inform Investments in Children, Youth, and Families.

He is a founder and chair emeritus of ACT for Alexandria, a community foundation, and is or has been an elected, appointed, advisory panel, or board member for the Congressional Budget Office, Comptroller General of the United States, the Joint Committee on Taxation, Venture Philanthropy Partners, and the National Center on Philanthropy and the Law (chair).

Steuerle received the first Bruce Davie–Albert Davis Public Service Award from the National Tax Association in 2005, distinguished or outstanding alumnus awards from the University of Dayton and St. Xavier High School, and the TIAA-CREF Paul Samuelson award for his book Dead Men Ruling.