Biography of Benjamin E. Sasse, Ph.D.

Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Benjamin E. Sasse, Ph.D., was nominated by the President and unanimously confirmed by the Senate in 2007 to be the assistant secretary for planning and evaluation (ASPE) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the federal government’s largest civilian agency. He also continues to serve as counselor for policy and strategic initiatives to HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt, a role he has held since 2006.

ASPE oversees policy and legislative development, research, strategic planning, economic analysis, and policy coordination functions for the $700B Department. With a personal staff of 108 and budget of $42M, Sasse leads priority projects across the Department’s eleven operating divisions, with a special focus on Medicare, Medicaid, and the Food and Drug Administration. Representative initiatives include:

• capturing drug and adverse event data on more than twenty-five million seniors for use in the FDA's new post-market drug and device safety efforts;
• evaluating the comparative risks across categories of imported food and drugs, with an eye toward better allocation of limited inspection resources both in the U.S. and overseas;
• accelerating molecular diagnostics and genetically personalized health care;
• formulating a national health IT strategy, including rewarding doctors for delivering higher-quality care via electronic health records, and penalizing them for failing to prescribe electronically;
• sizing and developing strategies to combat waste, fraud, and abuse across the Medicare and Medicaid programs; etc.

In addition, Sasse takes a particular interest in efforts to modernize payment systems in American health care to eventually migrate from "paying for more" to "paying for better," in ways that will stimulate greater entrepreneurial innovation among doctors, hospitals, and adjacent industries. The seventy-city competitive bidding process for durable medical equipment, which is due to be rolled out this summer at projected savings of more than 20% across the $9B Medicare category, is one such example.

Dr. Sasse is on leave from a public policy professorship at the Lyndon B. Johnson School at the University of Texas. Previously, he served as chief of staff to U.S. Congressman Jeff Fortenberry (Nebraska). Prior to that, he was chief of staff to U.S. Assistant Attorney General Daniel Bryant.

Sasse’s consulting firm first sold work to the federal government following 9/11. He began his career with the Boston Consulting Group and has advised a wide variety of organizations at moments of strategic crisis – working with airlines, utilities, major manufacturers, the Dept. of Homeland Security, the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the Republic of Iraq, and a number of nonprofit and educational institutions. While at the U.S. Department of Justice, he received the Attorney General’s Special Act Award for helping “manage White House and inter-agency communications related to the creation of a National Intelligence Director” structure.

A Nebraska native and historian by training, Sasse was educated at Harvard, Oxford, and St. John's (Annapolis) before receiving his Ph.D. from Yale. His doctoral dissertation on conservative politics during the Cold War won both the Theron Rockwell Field Prize (best dissertation) and the George Washington Egleston Prize. He and his wife, Melissa McLeod Sasse, have two daughters.