The Ethics and Public Policy Center, where I’m a visiting fellow, announced today that Roger Severino will be joining our team of scholars — a welcome and gratifying addition, and the first hire we’ve made at EPPC since Ryan Anderson succeeded Ed Whelan as president earlier this week.
Roger joins us at EPPC after three years as director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services, where he founded the government’s first division to monitor conscience and religious-freedom compliance and enforcement.
At EPPC, he’ll be putting that experience to good use heading up the HHS Accountability Project, which will monitor the work of HHS from the outside. Among the goals of the project: ensuring that all human beings are protected from conception until natural death and ensuring that abortion and assisted suicide are never considered health care. The project will also focus on conscience and religious-freedom rights in the health-care system.
Before HHS, Roger directed the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation and spent several years before that in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. His expertise will be a boon to EPPC, especially as conservatives navigate the policy challenges presented by the Biden administration, and I’m grateful to welcome him as a colleague.