Steve Guertin provides strategic program direction and develops policy and guidance to support and promote program development and fulfill the Service mission.

He led the Mountain-Prairie Region as Regional Director for five years and successfully managed some of the Service’s most challenging landscape-level conservation issues, including the recovery of the gray wolf in the Northern Rocky Mountains and efforts to work with states and partners to develop conservation strategies for the greater sage-grouse.

He played a key leadership role in the Service's efforts to help fish, wildlife and plants adapt to the effects of landscape-scale challenges including climate change, energy development, water scarcity, fire and invasive species. He led and/or supported the development of six Landscape Conservation Cooperatives that brought state and federal agencies, conservation organizations and other partners together to establish conservation priorities at a landscape scale. He chaired the Great Northern LCC, a partnership effort with the National Park Service and the Provinces of British Columbia and Alberta to set trans-boundary landscape conservation priorities.

Under the America's Great Outdoors Initiative, he worked with others to pursue landscape scale conservation by forging working landscape partnerships. This included formally establishing the 2-million acre Dakota Grasslands Conservation Area; the 1.1-million acre Flint Hills Legacy Conservation area in Kansas; and the Sangre de Cristo Conservation Area in Colorado, including acceptance of the largest easement donation in Service history. In Montana's Crown of the Continent, he doubled the size of the Rocky Mountain Front Conservation Area and the Blackfoot Valley Conservation Area, and established the Swan Valley Conservation Area.

Steve served on the Service Regulations Committee, which works with state wildlife agencies and Flyway Councils to set the annual framework for migratory bird harvest. In addition, he developed strong working relationships with the states while serving on the Joint Federal/State ESA Task Force and the Joint Federal/State Policy Task Force, both critical to efforts to improve coordination of state and federal efforts. He chaired the Prairie Pothole Joint Venture, the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Implementation Committee, the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee, and the Missouri River Basin Interagency Roundtable, among others.

He served as Chief of the Service's Division of Budget for eight years, where he worked closely with the Service’s Congressional Appropriations Committee members and staff and spent nine years working in the Department of the Interior, where he recommended funding and policy options for the Service and the Bureau of Land Management. He previously served for eight years in the United States Marine Corps in Hawaii, California, Virginia, and overseas.

He earned a bachelor's degree from Norwich University in Vermont and a Master's of Public and International Affairs from the University of Pittsburgh, and was a Senior Executive Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Steve and his wife, Irene, have two young children.