John Gardner

John S. Gardner is Vice President, Public Policy, at CED. He served President George Bush as Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Staff Secretary at the White House, the deputy in the office responsible for managing the flow of paper in the White House and the execution and implementation of Presidential decisions. At the beginning of the Administration of President George W. Bush, he served as Deputy Assistant to the President in a similar role. From 2001-2005, he served as General Counsel for the U.S. Agency for International Development, where he was responsible for all aspects of legal work, especially statutory analysis and administrative law. He worked extensively on international health issues and served as U.S. member of the Governance and Partnership Committee of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria and as a founding member of its Ethics Committee. President Bush also appointed Mr. Gardner to the Board of Governors of the U.S. Postal Service.

Prior to joining CED, Mr. Gardner consulted for private sector clients. Earlier in his career, he was Vice President – Government Affairs & Policy at AT&T and Vice President of the Schwab Washington Research Group, a research analyst providing analysis to institutional investors on transportation industries and on antitrust mergers and cases and U.S. and EU competition policy issues. He was among the first research analysts to report on European competition law. After law school, he was associated with the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York.

He has particular experience in telecommunications and related fields, economic and international development, healthcare, foreign policy, antitrust, and transportation. He has a special emphasis on U.S. and EU economic regulation, Japan, and Southeast Asia.

He was graduated from Harvard Law School cum laude in 1995, where he was the Articles Editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy and a pre-law and public service tutor at Lowell House, Harvard College. He studied advanced European law, was a Food and Drug Law Institute scholar, and his paper “The Still More Difficult Task” was the first published academic paper on the European Medicines Evaluation Agency. He earned an M. Litt. in Modern History from Oxford University in 1989 and received an AB in history cum laude from Harvard in 1984, with a concentration in American and East Asian history. He is married; a member of the bar of New York State; and resides in Alexandria, Virginia.