Dorothy Robyn serves as Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and is a senior staff member of the National Economic Council (NEC). Her primary responsibilities include transportation and aviation, aerospace, and international telecommunications. She also handles economic regulation and competition policy, technology policy, and defense economic issues, including privatization and procurement reform.
In the aviation area, Dr. Robyn served on the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security (for former NEC Director Laura Tyson) and was NEC liaison to the National Civil Aviation Reform Commission. As the White House point person on aviation, she has worked extensively with the Department of Transportation, industry and labor to develop Administration policies to promote domestic airline competition, expand service to smaller communities, and enhance U.S. airlines' competitiveness. Together with National Security Council staff, Dr. Robyn coordinates with DOT and the State Department, and advises senior White House officials, on negotiations to liberalize international competition in civil aviation. She also handles commercial aerospace issues for the White House, including ongoing U.S.-EU trade disputes over subsidies, export financing and regulatory issues. She recently coordinated the Administration's interagency activity on the EU's controversial "hushkit" regulation.
Before joining the NEC staff in 1993, Dr. Robyn was with the Joint Economic Committee of Congress and the congressional Office of Technology Assessment, where she specialized in science and technology policy. From 1983-1987, she was an assistant professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. She taught courses in public management and the business-government relationship, and directed the Kennedy School Case Program, which develops case studies for teaching management and economics.
Dr. Robyn is the author of Braking the Special Interests: Trucking Deregulation and the Politics of Policy Reform (University of Chicago Press, 1987). Her book presents the case for economic decontrol of interstate trucking and analyzes the success of President Carter and other deregulators in overcoming fierce political opposition. Robyn was a book review editor for Issues in Science and Technology (1986-89) and associate editor of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (1990-93). She co-authored the 1988 OTA report, Commercializing High-Temperature Superconductivity and wrote the 1995 White House report, Second to None: Preserving America's Military Advantage through Dual-Use Technology.
Dr. Robyn's undergraduate degree is from Southern Illinois University; she has a master's and a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of California at Berkeley.
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