Sean R. Keveney

As the FDA’s Chief Counsel, Sean Keveney leads more than 150 attorneys in the Office of the Chief Counsel (OCC), which provides counseling and litigation support for the agency. He provides legal counsel to the FDA Commissioner and FDA leadership, the HHS General Counsel and Departmental leadership on FDA regulatory and litigation matters.

Mr. Keveney comes to the FDA from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), where he served most recently as Acting General Counsel, leading the Department's legal team in advancing key administration priorities and ensuring rigorous legal standards across public health programs. For six years prior to assuming that position, Mr. Keveney was Deputy General Counsel at HHS.

As HHS Acting General Counsel, Keveney’s work spanned major litigation, civil rights enforcement, and regulatory reform. He led the Department's effort in one of the most successful discrimination crackdowns in American history, finding that Harvard University and Columbia University through their medical schools violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He also led Title VI investigations of Brown University and Duke University. As a consequence, the Trump Administration reached settlements with Columbia and Brown, requiring Columbia to undergo three years of independent monitoring for compliance with federal law, and prohibiting Brown from performing gender reassignment surgeries on minors or prescribing puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to them.

An experienced attorney and career public servant, Keveney previously was Acting Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) during the first Trump Administration and before that, was a trial attorney at DOJ for 13 years. Prior to his work at DOJ, Keveney served as a law clerk for Judge William Garwood on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Mr. Keveney received his law degree, Magna Cum Laude, from The University of Texas at Austin and his B.S. from the University of Tulsa. He has a master’s degree in in modern history from the University of Oxford in the U.K.