States at the Helm: Utility Finance, Securitization, & Consumer Protection

David S. Lapp was appointed People’s Counsel in 2021 by Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh. David has 30 years of combined experience as a lawyer, policy analyst and writer focusing on public policy and corporate accountability in important segments of the economy. His positions have required mastery of complicated legal issues and competing public policy goals. As an attorney, his work has emphasized state and federal regulatory policy in the utility, tobacco, and healthcare industries. Until his appointment as People’s Counsel, David worked from 2004-2020 as an Assistant Attorney General in the Office of the Attorney General of Maryland (OAG). David served as Chief Counsel for OAG's tobacco enforcement unit, leading the state's litigation and enforcement of the billion-dollar multi-state tobacco settlement agreement, after which he served as Deputy Counsel for the Maryland Department of Health, addressing healthcare industry regulation and providing advice and representation to the State Medicaid Program. David graduated in 1998 from the University of Maryland School of Law, Order of Coif. He served as Articles Editor of the Maryland Law Review and received several academic awards. Following law school, he served as a law clerk on the Maryland Court of Appeals (now the Maryland Supreme Court) for Judge Howard Chasanow. He received his Bachelor of Arts with honors in 1989 from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana.

Severin Borenstein is E.T. Grether Professor of Business Administration and Public Policy at the Haas School of Business and faculty director of the Energy Institute at Haas. He is also Director emeritus of the University of California Energy Institute (1994-2014). He received his AB from UC Berkeley and PhD in Economics from MIT. His research focuses on business competition, strategy, and regulation. He has published extensively on the airline industry, the oil and gasoline industries, and electricity markets. His current research projects include the economics of renewable energy, economic policies for reducing greenhouse gases, and alternative models of retail electricity pricing. Borenstein is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, MA. He served on the Board of Governors of the California Power Exchange from 1997 to 2003. During 1999-2000, he was a member of the California Attorney General’s Gasoline Price Task Force. In 2010-11, Borenstein was a member of U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood’s Future of Aviation Advisory Committee. In 2012-13, he served on the Emissions Market Assessment Committee, which advised the California Air Resources Board on the operation of California’s Cap and Trade market for greenhouse gases. In 2014, he was appointed to the California Energy Commission’s Petroleum Market Advisory Committee, which he chaired from 2015 until the Committee was dissolved in 2017. Since 2015, he has served on the Advisory Council of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. In 2019, he was appointed to the Governing Board of the California Independent System Operator.

Heather Boushey is a professor of practice at Kleinman Center. Boushey is one of the nation’s most influential voices on economic policy and a leading economist who focuses on the intersection between economic inequality, growth, and public policy. She served in the Biden administration as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist to the President’s Investing in America Cabinet. She is also a non-resident fellow at the Reimagining the Economy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School. Boushey co-founded the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and served as the President & CEO and a Steering Committee member from its launch in 2013 until she joined the Biden-Harris Transition Team in 2020. Her latest book, Unbound: How Economic Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It (Harvard University Press), which was called “outstanding” and “piercing” by reviewers, was on the Financial Times list of best economics books of 2019. She is also the author of Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict, and co-edited a volume of 22 essays about how to integrate inequality into economic thinking called After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality.

The New York Times has said that Boushey “is at the forefront of a generation of economists rethinking their discipline” and called her one of the “most vibrant voices in the field.” Politico twice named her one of the top 50 “thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics.” Boushey writes regularly for popular media, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Democracy Journal, and she makes frequent television appearances on Bloomberg, MSNBC, CNBC, and PBS. She previously served as chief economist for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential transition team and as an economist for the Center for American Progress, the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and the Economic Policy Institute.