Xavier de Souza Briggs
Associate Director for General Government Programs, Office of Management and Budget, The White House
Also of Interest |
|
|
Xavier de Souza Briggs is associate director of General Government Programs in the Office of Management and Budget in the White House, overseeing a wide array of policy, budget, and management issues for roughly half the cabinet agencies—Commerce, Treasury, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Justice, and Homeland Security—as well as the Small Business Administration, GSA, financial regulators, and other agencies, totaling about $200 billion in annual discretionary spending. As a senior member of the President’s domestic policy team, his portfolio thus runs the gamut from economic competitiveness to criminal justice and border security, from neighborhood revitalization and poverty reduction to the financial markets, environmental sustainability, and more. He is also a tenured associate professor of Sociology and Urban Planning (on leave) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
A former community planner, Briggs’ award-winning research is about economic opportunity, effective democracy and governance, and racial and ethnic diversity in cities and metropolitan regions. He is the editor of The Geography of Opportunity (Brookings, 2005), which won the highest book award in planning and Democracy as Problem-Solving: Civic Capacity in Communities across the Globe (MIT Press, 2008), which examines efforts in the U.S. and other democracies—Brazil, India and South Africa—to lead change on unsustainable urban growth, regional economic restructuring, and the healthy development of the next generation. His latest book, with co-authors Sue Popkin and John Goering, is Moving to Opportunity: The Story of an American Experiment to Fight Ghetto Poverty (Oxford University Press, 2010). Briggs is founder of The Community Problem-Solving Project @ MIT and Working Smarter in Community Development, two popular and innovative online resources for people and institutions worldwide.
A former faculty member in public policy at Harvard, he has designed and led major leadership development, strategy, and other training programs for change agents in the public, private, and nonprofit/nongovernmental sectors. A frequent speaker on innovation and urban and metropolitan policy, he has also consulted on urban strategy to leading national and international organizations, such as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and he has been an expert witness in civil rights litigation. In the public sector, he ran the urban policy research and development unit at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the late 1990s. He is a member of the Aspen Institute’s Roundtable on Community Change and other advisory groups, and his views have appeared in The New York Times, Salon.com, National Public Radio, and other major media. Briggs holds an engineering degree from Stanford, an MPA from Harvard, and a Ph.D. in sociology and education from Columbia University.
The National Building Museum provides biographies of speakers, program participants, and exhibition subjects. Learn more about our programs and lectures.
