As Director of the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies, Alison Acosta Fraser oversees Heritage Foundation research on a wide range of domestic economic issues including federal spending, taxes, energy and environment, retirement savings and regulation.
One of the Roe Institute's priorities is reform of the federal retirement programs – Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. Under Fraser's leadership, Heritage research has helped define and communicate the long-term fiscal threats from spending and taxes and identify solutions and proposals for reforms.
Fraser is a member of the Fiscal Wake-Up Tour, designed to educate Americans about the nation's true long-term financial condition and large and growing fiscal imbalance and to encourage Americans to demand action. The tour conducts of town hall forums, business roundtables and editorial board briefings across the country. By uniting with analysts from across the political spectrum on the Fiscal Wake-Up Tour, Heritage hopes to encourage the spirit of bipartisan honesty and discussion that will be necessary to preserve the strength of the American economy for posterity. Unless Congress fundamentally recasts Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security, Americans within two generations will be saddled with European levels of taxation and economic stagnation.
Sponsored by the Concord Coalition, the tour features experts from Heritage, the Brookings Institution and U.S. Comptroller General David Walker. The tour of budget and fiscal experts has visited nearly two dozen cities in since its inception in the fall of 2005. Fraser is one of those touring fiscal experts and she carried that same message direct to journalists in 2006, highlighting two National Press Foundation budget seminars for West Coast reporters.
Following Hurricane Katrina, she took the lead in preparing Heritage's comprehensive special reports on disaster recovery. These reports were the first and only such policy works published in the weeks following the disaster, making Heritage a leader in solutions on Capitol Hill in the media.
Fraser has appeared on all CNBC, CNN, FOX and MSNBC news channels, Bloomberg, PBS and the BBC. Her commentaries on fiscal issues have appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Philadelphia Enquirer, National Review Online, Washington Times and USA Today.
Before joining Heritage in 2003, Fraser was Deputy Director of the Oklahoma Office of State Finance where she directed economic research and developed tax and fiscal policy recommendations for then-Gov. Frank Keating. Prior to that, she was a budget manager for Orange County, Calif., where she developed recommendations for bankruptcy recovery.
February 22, 2007
