About AWC

John S. Gardner is a consultant and writer working in the fields of strategic communications, policy communications, policy analysis, research, opinion writing, speechwriting, and editing. He works primarily in telecommunications and related fields, healthcare, financial services, transportation and travel, international development, litigation communications consulting, and extractive industries and has a special emphasis on U.S and EU economic regulation and a special interest in East and Southeast Asia.

In government, Mr. Gardner served as Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Staff Secretary at the White House during the Administration of President George Bush from 1989-1992, where he was the deputy in the office responsible for managing the flow of paper in the White House and the execution and implementation of Presidential decisions. He held a similar position at the beginning of the Administration of President George W. Bush, with the title of Deputy Assistant to the President. From 2001-2005, he served as General Counsel for the U.S. Agency for International Development, where he was responsible for all aspects of legal work at USAID, especially statutory analysis, administrative law, and government contracts law. In this capacity, he worked extensively on international health issues and served as U.S. member of the Governance and Partnership Committee of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria and as a founding member of its Ethics Committee.

In 2006, Mr. Gardner was appointed to the Board of Governors of the U.S. Postal Service, where he served on the Strategic Planning and Capital Projects Committees. In the Reagan Administration, he was the speechwriter for the Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission and for the Administrator of the Health Care Finance Administration.

In the private sector, Mr. Gardner was Vice President – Government Affairs & Policy at AT&T and Vice President of the Schwab Washington Research Group, where he was a research analyst providing analysis to institutional investors on transportation industries and on antitrust mergers and cases and U.S. and EU competition policy issues. He covered U.S. v. Microsoft and was one of the first analysts to report intensively on European competition law, including the Microsoft investigation and the proposed mergers of MCI/Bell Atlantic, Boeing/McDonnell Douglas, and GE/Honeywell. After law school, he was associated with the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York. He also served as a Senior Director of the White House Writers Group in Washington.

He was graduated from Harvard Law School cum laude in 1995, where he was Articles Editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy and a pre-law and public service tutor at Lowell House, Harvard College. He studied advanced European law, was a Food and Drug Law Institute scholar, and his “The Still More Difficult Task” was the first published academic paper on the European Medicines Evaluation Agency. He earned an M. Litt. in Modern History from Oxford University in 1989 and received an AB in history from Harvard in 1984, with a concentration on American and East Asian history.

He is a member of the bar of New York State and resides in Alexandria, Virginia.