Ronald Utt

Herbert and Joyce Morgan Senior Research Fellow

Ronald Utt is Senior Research Fellow for the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation where he conducts research on housing, transportation, and the federal budget. Utt also specializes in the application of privatization, restructuring, decentralization and devolution of government programs, and works in cooperation with scholars across the United States to evaluate the success and failure of policies for urban revitalization, land use and growth management.

Utt is a veteran of budgetary politics in Washington, having served as director of the housing finance division at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and senior economist at the Office of Management and Budget in the early 1970s. In 1977, he became director of economic research at the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts. From 1980-87, he served as associate chief economist of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan appointed Utt to lead his Administration’s efforts to promote the transfer of some federal government functions to the private sector. Utt’s work helped Reagan present a variety of privatization proposals in his fiscal 1988 budget, including selling the Northeast corridor of Amtrak rail passenger service, some naval petroleum reserves and the Bonneville Power Administration.

From 1989-1990, Utt served as Senior Fellow in Political Economy at Heritage before being named Executive Vice President of the National Chamber Foundation, the research and education division of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. There, he created and edited the Journal of Economic Growth, a scholarly publication focusing on free market solutions to economic development and the Journal of Regulation and Social Costs, which investigated the economic costs of government’s social regulations. Utt returned to Heritage in 1994.

Utt is the founder and president of Potomac Renovations, Ltd., a northern Virginia real estate and residential renovation firm. Prior to forming the firm, he served as managing director for Novecon Ltd., a Washington D.C.-based company focusing on trade and business development with East Europe and the former Soviet Union. In that capacity, he served as the exclusive L.A. Gear distributor for Bulgaria, Romania, and Macedonia. He also has served as an economic and privatization consultant to government officials in Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Lithuanian, Estonia, and Slovakia.

Utt holds a doctorate in economics from Indiana University and a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Penn State University.