Rachel West

Rachel West is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. Previously, she served as the special assistant to the president for labor and workers, Domestic Policy Council at the White House. Before that, she was senior advisor to U.S. Senator Bennett, and before that the senior economic policy advisor to the Committee on Education and Labor.

Before joining the government, Rachel West was the director of research for the Poverty to Prosperity Program at American Progress. Previously, she was an economic policy researcher at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, where her work focused on minimum-wage policy and public assistance programs. West began her career as an economist at the U.S. Department of Transportation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and worked as a fiscal policy intern at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

She is co-author of the report The Effects of Minimum Wages on SNAP Enrollments and Expenditures and the related study Raising the Minimum Wage to $10.10 Would Cut Taxpayer Costs in Every State.

West holds a master’s degree in public policy from the University of California, Berkeley, Goldman School of Public Policy. She received a bachelor’s degree in economics and physics from Mount Holyoke College in 2008.