Jennifer Burnszynski

Jennifer Burnszynski is the Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Services Policy. She leads a team of highly skilled and committed analysts who apply research evidence, policy analysis, and critical thinking to increase the effectiveness of human services policies and programs and improve the wellbeing of the most vulnerable Americans. She provides executive leadership of HHS’s human services policy development and research and coordinates across the federal government on issues including poverty and economic mobility, early childhood education, reentry, child welfare, fatherhood, family strengthening, and youth development. She is the HHS Executive Lead for the U.S. Interagency Council on Economic Mobility, which is coordinated by her office.

Previously, Jennifer was the first Director of Program Innovation in the HHS Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE), where she oversaw program development, including state and Tribal technical assistance, competitive grants, national evaluations, and strategic planning. She also served as Senior Advisor to the OCSE Commissioner, where she helped to lead execution of a new family-centered, evidence-based approach to child support enforcement nationwide. In her more than 20 years at HHS, she has developed national child support legislation and managed influential research on child support and family policy, as well as national evaluations of fatherhood, employment, and family strengthening initiatives. She guided establishment of the National Center for Family and Marriage Research and served as its first Program Officer. Her prior experience includes working for the Minnesota Legislative Commission on the Economic Status of Women, the Minnesota House of Representatives Research Department and the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. She holds a B.A. from Gettysburg College and a M.A. from the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.