Susan Orr - Career

Career

Orr graduated from the University of Dallas with a degree in politics and received master's and Ph.D degrees in government from Claremont Graduate School.

She was a high school principal and adjunct professor at both American University and Regent University.

In 1995, Orr wrote Jerusalem and Athens, which examined Leo Strauss's ideas concerning the competition between reason and revelation arguing that if Strauss preferred one over the other, it would be revelation.

Orr served at the Administration on Children, Youth and Families from 1992-1998 during Bill Clinton's presidency as a special assistant to the commissioner and a child welfare program specialist at the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. From 1998-2001, she was senior director for marriage and family at the Family Research Council, a group that favors abstinence-only education and opposes federal money for contraception, according to the Wall Street Journal. Prior to 2001, she was a director of the Center for Social Policy at the Reason Public Policy Institute a think tank run by the Reason Foundation, a conservative research and policy group.

From 2001-2007, Orr headed the United States Children's Bureau, a federal agency organized under the United States Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families, as Associate Commissioner. The agency, with a $7 billion budget, is responsible for child abuse prevention, foster care, and adoption programs.