Experts

Mark Mazur left the Urban Institute in January 2021.

Mark J. Mazur is the Robert C. Pozen director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and a vice president at the Urban Institute. His research interests cover all aspects of tax policy. From 2012 until early 2017, he was the assistant secretary for tax policy at the US Department of the Treasury. Mazur served in the federal government for 27 years in various positions, including policy economist at the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, senior economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers; senior director at the National Economic Council; chief economist and senior policy adviser and director of policy at the US Department of Energy; acting administrator of the Energy Information Administration; director of research, analysis, and statistics at the Internal Revenue Service; and deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis in the Office of Tax Policy. Before entering public service, Mazur was an assistant professor in Heinz College at Carnegie-Mellon University. He has a bachelor’s degree in financial administration from Michigan State University and a master’s degree in economics and a PhD in business from Stanford University.

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. Gale is the author of Fiscal Therapy: Curing America’s Debt Addiction and Investing in the Future (Oxford University Press, 2019).

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.

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.

Donald Marron is an Institute fellow and director of economic policy initiatives at the Urban Institute. He conducts research on tax and budget policy and identifies opportunities for Urban to develop policy-relevant research on economic and financial issues. From 2010 to 2013, he led the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

Before joining Urban, Marron served in senior government positions, including as a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers and acting director of the Congressional Budget Office. He has also taught at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, consulted on major antitrust cases, and been chief financial officer of a health care software start-up.

Marron has broad experience in economic policy issues, including America's fiscal challenges, tax reform, energy and environment, and the financial crisis. He has testified frequently before Congress, appears often at conferences and in the media to discuss economic policy, and works to popularize economics through his blog and writings. He is the editor of 30-Second Economics, which introduces readers to 50 of the most important ideas in economics, and 30-Second Money, which does the same for finance.

Marron currently serves on the boards of FairVote, Pomona College, and the Concord Coalition, advises Fair Observer and YieldStreet, and is a senior research fellow at the Climate Leadership Council. He studied mathematics at Harvard College and received his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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.

Robert A. Weinberger is a nonresident fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. His research focuses on tax administration, practitioner regulation, and refundable tax credits. Prior to joining TPC, he spent eight years as a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute’s Financial Security Program. Weinberger was an executive at H&R Block, Unilever, and Continental Bank. Earlier in his career he served in state government as general counsel to the Illinois state comptroller, and in federal government at the Departments of Commerce and Transportation and at the White House. Weinberger is emeritus board chair of the Center for Responsive Politics, a past board member of the National Tax Association, and a past member of the IRS Advisory Council and the U.S. Department of State Advisory Committee on International Investment. Weinberger has a bachelor’s degree in government from Oberlin College and a J.D. from the University of Illinois College of Law. He was a fellow at the University of Illinois Institute of Government and Public Affairs and studied at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.