From Yale to the White House: Q&A with Elizabeth Wilkins on Careers in Policy and Public Service
A graduate of both Yale College and Yale Law School, Elizabeth Wilkins recently returned to campus to share insights from her experiences working in public service across both local and federal government—including the Obama and Biden White Houses, the Washington DC Attorney General Office, and most recently, as Chief of Staff to the Chair and Director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
In a wide-ranging Q&A discussion led by Tobin Center Co-Faculty Director Zack Cooper, Elizabeth provided career insights for aspiring policy professionals, emphasized the importance of work-life balance, and highlighted concrete steps for the government to address power imbalances in society. Wilkins delved into her policy work advancing economic justice, and provided a compelling argument for the potential of government work to effect positive change and make it work better for those who feel left behind.
Throughout the event, jointly hosted by the Tobin Center and Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS), Elizabeth highlighted pivotal experiences and values that have guided her throughout her career:
Making government work better for people who don't feel that it works for them: “Instead of becoming the expert and doing things on behalf of other people—It is important for me to use my skills in service of other people building power and expertise and capacity for themselves to do whatever they want…If we really believe in democracy as a political system, we need to have commitments to giving people the material conditions and autonomy in their economic and social lives to be able to meaningfully participate.”
The importance of working for people who share your values: “[At the DC AG Office], I knew my boss was coming in with a mission and sense of justice. It was less about where I was, but this was a leader who had vision and courage, and in a government context, was someone who deeply believed the job of government is to help people, and somewhat intolerant of obstacles to this mission. [Chair Lina Khan] at the FTC is like this too…She had an orientation towards public service that was urgent, demanding, and energetic. She was really interested in what the government can do about power imbalances in society, which is fundamentally what I am interested in.”
How local government can lead to big impact: “I am a HUGE fan of state and local government service. As a junior lawyer in the DC city government—no one thought that was cool, but it was a huge job. We could actually write laws and get them passed. I wrote a law to give us enforcement authority over the city workers' rights laws, and civil rights law. By the time I left we had built a 50-person public advocacy division that focuses on workers' rights, tenants' rights, civil rights, consumer protection, elder justice, antitrust, public fraud, and more. We were like a government-funded public interest law firm for the residents of DC…Local government is amazing—I could go to a building and meet the tenants when I was suing a landlord. It was small enough to see the people, but big enough to have systemic impact.”
Prioritizing work-life balance to sustain positive social justice work: “One thing that people don’t talk about enough in school, particularly in the fields of public service and social justice, it’s not just about what you care about or what’s important and necessary, but it’s also about what makes you happy…I am finally trying to learn: What are the things I can build into my life that can sustain me? That can bring me joy? The things that'll allow me to do 30 more years of social justice work. And give myself to it. These are extraordinarily hard lessons to learn and ones we don’t talk about enough.”
How to use each day well: “[My dad] said to me every day before school: ‘use this day well,’ and I think he meant that with all the gifts I had, I had an obligation to use them well, and put them in service to others. I don't think I would have been who I am or done what I've done without that. If I were talking to my younger self, I might have said: yes, use this day well, but also take care of yourself. You can do both. I say to my kids: ‘use this day well, but also have a good day and I love you.’”
Below, we present the full Q&A between Zack Cooper and Elizabeth Wilkins:
Zack Cooper (ZC): What led you to your current career path in public service?
Elizabeth Wilkins (EW): In undergrad, I showed up in an econ class, and liked it, but I was puzzled why there were certain spaces where I was the only black person in the room. In a lot of econ classes, that was true, but to me, economics was a really important way of understanding the world, and understanding some of the social problems I was interested in. Despite there not being a whole lot of ‘Me’s in these spaces, economics and the Ethics, Politics and Economics (EPE) major in particular seemed like it got at problems I was interested in from multiple angles.
Another really formative experience was the summer before senior year, in 2004, when I went to Columbus, Ohio to do voter registration in low-income black communities. Right when I got there, all the organizers had quit, so instead of voter registration, they said: “you’re going to be a community organizer.” It completely opened my eyes. I come from a family of civil rights lawyers, and thought of law as one of, if not the, mechanism for social change, but the experience of going door to door in this neighborhood—to spend the summer talking to people whose houses were filled with mold. Kids with asthma. Streets with potholes. People who grew up the way my mom grew up, in segregated public housing in the south in the 1940s. To understand the frustration they had about the lack of control in their lives, and alienation they felt from many sources of power that exert control over the material conditions of their life. That was one of the most meaningful experiences for me, and showed me a different mechanism for social change.
I realized that instead of becoming the expert and doing things on behalf of other people—It’s important for me to use my skills in service of other people building power and expertise and capacity for themselves to do whatever they want. That shifted my conception of what democracy is supposed to look like: That if we really believe in democracy as a political system, we need to have commitments to giving people the material conditions and autonomy in their economic and social lives to be able to meaningfully participate.
ZC: You’ve worked in two White Houses, as well as for the Biden-Harris transition team—Can you talk a bit about what that was like and what you were doing there?
EW: In the Obama White House, as a 25-year-old, I was on the Domestic Policy Counsel doing anti-poverty and urban policy work, and honestly, I said I’d never go back. For me personally, it felt so far away from the people I was interested in helping, and at the time, didn’t feel emotionally satisfying. One thing that people don’t talk about enough in school, particularly in the fields of public service and social justice, it’s not just about what you care about or what’s important and necessary, but it’s also about what makes you happy. You need people who want to be in the White House, as well as people who are working on the ground. And for me, it’s about finding something that’s electrifying to you, that’s where you will be the most impactful.
But my perspective changed later on after the pandemic started—I was home with a 7-month old, and a 3-year old, and not working, and reports were coming out on the extreme racial disparity in the death rates for COVID. My kids went to a community preschool that served predominantly low-income Latinos, and I knew 3 people who had died—All people of color. I was feeling really devastated, overwhelmed, and upset. I got a text from a friend who had been asked to run the Biden-Harris transition team, and after speaking with him for a while about a potential position, it felt like the right thing to do at the time. I couldn’t imagine anything more urgent than figuring out how this White House is as prepared as humanly possible to take over on day one. I joined as employee ten, as chief of staff for domestic and economic policy.
We had to hire 400 people in 3 months, develop a COVID plan for White House, make sure the President doesn't get COVID, and do everything so the entire White House can walk in on day one as fully staffed as humanly possible. Those weeks, from election to inauguration day were insane. It was a million things. Ron Klain’s job was everything, and my job was to take as much off his plate as humanly possible. So he can focus on really big things. It was fire fighting every day—I would take whatever problem Ron gave me, and not come back until I had a solution. My job was to work with people, to exercise high EQ, high management skills, super high problem-solving skills, good systems management skills, to set up the White House in such a way that we weren't doing firefight decision making every day. I told him I’d do it for a year, and I did it for a year, and it was wild—making sure the White House could run the country—I wasn’t sure there was a higher, better use of my time.
ZC: How did you sustain yourself throughout all this work?
EW: I’m glad you asked—I don’t think that’s asked enough. The answer is I didn’t, and I think in social justice work there is a tendency to feel like everything is urgent. In this case, it was pretty urgent, but everything is always urgent. I was not sleeping at the end of the transition. I’d drive to and from work and was falling asleep at red lights, which of course should never happen. I was carrying around so much weight. We all were. We didn't give ourselves enough time to realize how much stress we were carrying.
Then I went to the FTC, and didn’t realize how stressful that would be—I left 3 months ago, and it’s because I hit a wall. I didn’t stop, and didn’t know how to. I didn’t know how to see the enormity of the situation and be able to say my sanity is worth protecting. My time with children is worth protecting. I realized that the same high EQ emotional problem solving skills at work were the same muscles I need to parent my children, and I didn't have anything left for them. That wasn't the way I wanted to live, but I also didn't want to leave. We had just put out a proposal to ban non-compete clauses in labor contracts, which I think is probably one of the more important issues I could work on there, but it wasn’t sustainable, and I’m glad I left. I was sick. I was run down. I left it all on the field.
I have told myself I am not going to take a full-time job for a year, and am finally trying to learn: What are the things I can build into my life that can sustain me? That can bring me joy? The things that'll allow me to do 30 more years of social justice work. And give myself to it. These are extraordinarily hard lessons to learn and ones we don’t talk about enough.
ZC: You’ve had a lot of different roles in government. Talk to us about the difference in experiences you’ve had at the local vs. federal level.
EW: I am a HUGE fan of state and local government service. I was in the DC Attorney's General office for almost 5 years. I grew up in DC and always wanted to work in city government, and the AG’s office had recently changed its mandate to protect the public interest. When I interviewed, I knew my boss was coming in with a mission and sense of justice. It was less about where I was, but this was a leader who had vision and courage, and in a government context, was someone who deeply believed the job of government is to help people, and somewhat intolerant of obstacles to this mission. [Chair Lina Khan] at the FTC is like this too.
As a junior lawyer in the DC city government—no one thought that was cool, but it was a huge job. We could actually write laws and get them passed. I wrote a law to give us enforcement authority over the city workers' rights laws, and civil rights law. By the time I left we had built a 50-person public advocacy division that focuses on workers' rights, tenants' rights, civil rights, consumer protection, elder justice, antitrust, public fraud, and more. We were like a government-funded public interest law firm for the residents of DC.
I couldn’t have done that in the federal government. The combination of flexibility and responsibility were amazing. Local government is amazing—I could go to a building and meet the tenants when I was suing a landlord. It was small enough to see the people, but big enough to have systemic impact. We could think strategically about an enforcement program, and what’s going to be maximally effective. With tenants' rights, for example, you can sue slumlords then maybe there isn’t more money to run the building better. But if you pick a building where there's a tenants' organization, you can work to create leverage instead. If there’s a law in place where tenants have the first right of refusal for buying a building, you can create conditions to bring landlords to the table to sell to a nonprofit developer to actually solve the problem, and to create more affordable housing in the city.
I could look a person in the eye and see that things were working, but also see that we were affecting the market in a 700,000 person city. I can also say, for me personally, I felt tremendous satisfaction from working in my own community.
ZC: After working across many different levels of government, what led you to the FTC?
EW: When someone put me in touch with the FTC, I spoke with [Chair Khan] and immediately knew that THIS is the person I wanted to work for. She had an orientation towards public service that was urgent, demanding, and energetic. She was really interested in what the government can do about power imbalances in society, which is fundamentally what I am interested in. We don't talk about power enough when we talk about policy, and you don't meet a lot of people who see that. Here is a person who is running an agency, who thinks like I do, wants to get things done, be creative, and wants to give leeway and a wide runway. I knew she wanted to do something about non-competes, and that one single project was worth it. That single piece of policy could make a huge change in people's lives.
ZC: Can you say more about the non-compete law?
EW: In the labor context, a non-compete is a contract between an employer and worker that says that the employee can't leave and go to a competitor within a certain amount of time or geographic scope. People think of them as primarily for high wage earners, but in fact, one in five American workers have had non-compete clauses. Lots of hourly workers and something like 35% of people who make $40K or year or less had had non-competes—including security guards, hairdressers, and sandwich makers—Jimmy Johns was a big case, for example.
It's literally a contract that says you cannot compete, which is, on its face, a restraint on trade. In terms of economic outcomes, there’s been a huge wealth of economic studies coming out looking at increased enforceability of non-competes. It turns out that banning non-competes would result in an additional $300 billion dollars for American workers. Because if they can't leave, they can't exercise the exit option and go for a job offer with a better salary. It’s also a way for employers to increase their exploitative power over workers. Now workers might not be able to find a job with work hours that they need or a job away from a dangerous work environment. The core of the law is to preserve a measure of liberty and freedom from coercive economic and corporate power.
To me, this is one of the most exciting ways the government could say: Here’s an issue you have in life that's meaningfully detrimental to who you are and what you want to be, and for something you have no power to change—That's exactly what our job is. Democratic legitimacy comes from people seeing that the government will in fact work for them. In general, I think we underrate the danger of doing too little for the overall project of people having faith in our government.
ZC: You’ve talked about how your dad used to say to you: “use this day well.” How did that influence you, and what are you going to say to your kids?
EW: This is an emotional one for me. My mom and dad are my total inspiration. I get a lot of my public values from my dad. He had a lifelong dedication to civil rights, and to using his privilege, even in a world that saw a black man as someone who didn't have privilege, in service to people that didn't have it. He said to me every day before school: “use this day well,” and I think he meant that with all the gifts I had, I had an obligation to use them well, and put them in service to others. I don't think I would have been who I am or done what I've done without that. If I were talking to my younger self, I might have said: yes, use this day well, but also take care of yourself. You can do both. I say to my kids: “use this day well, but also have a good day and I love you.” I want them to know they are special to me and are perfect and don't have to be anything else to be perfect and special to me, and also have an obligation to use their gifts, and I hope they learn that lesson easier than me.
My dad, in his autobiography, had this great line that he got from his grandmother, that his purpose in life was to make his life a tool for justice. That’s what I get from him. But don’t forget that tool is a person too! It’s ok to have love in your life, and kindness, and frivolity. In fact, these are going to be the things that help sustain you as you do important work.
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Elizabeth Wilkins was most recently the Chief of Staff to the Chair and Director of the Office of Policy and Planning at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Before joining the FTC, Wilkins served as Senior Advisor to the White House Chief of Staff. Prior to that, she worked in several senior leadership roles at the Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia, including Senior Counsel for Policy and Chief of Staff. Wilkins also previously served as a law clerk to Associate Justice Elena Kagan of the U.S. Supreme Court, and to then-Chief Judge Merrick Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Before law school, Wilkins was a policy advisor in the White House Domestic Policy Council, a state field director for the 2008 Barack Obama presidential campaign, and a political organizer at SEIU 32BJ. She graduated magna cum laude from Yale University and holds a J.D. from Yale Law School.