Oren Cass

Oren M. Cass (born 1983) is an American public policy commentator and political advisor. In 2024, he named himself "chief economist" at American Compass, a conservative think tank which he founded in 2020.

He previously worked on the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney in 2008 and 2012. According to a 2015 article in Politico, he is a "general policy impresario of the emerging conservative consensus on fighting poverty." From 2015 to 2019, he was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. He authored a book, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. In February 2020, Cass established American Compass, an organization aimed at the question of "what the post-Trump right-of-center is going to be."

Cass is Jewish, and grew up outside Boston, Massachusetts. He attended Williams College, where he received a BA in political economy.

After graduating from Williams College, Cass joined Bain & Company as an associate consultant, where he worked in the firm's Boston and New Delhi offices. He took a six-month leave to work on the Mitt Romney 2008 presidential campaign, in which Romney was defeated in the presidential primary. He then enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he said he sought "to deepen his understanding of public policy" and established contact with Romney's staff, which hired him as a domestic policy advisor when Romney again ran for president in 2012.

He worked for the next Romney operation in 2011 between his second and third years at Harvard, and ended up with so much in his portfolio that at the end of the summer "they sort of said, well, you have to stay". He became domestic-policy director while still in law school.

After Romney was defeated in the 2012 election, Cass returned to Bain, where he became a manager, but also "started writing on environmental and labor policy for National Review. U.S. Senator Marco Rubio credited Cass for his 2014 poverty-fighting plan, according to Politico. The following year, in 2015, he joined the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research as a senior fellow, and was named to Politico's list of the top 50 "thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics in 2015".

In 2018, Cass published his book, The Once and Future Worker, which reevaluated American society, economics, and public policy, and introduces what he called "the working hypothesis: that a labor market in which workers can support strong families and communities is the central determinant of long-term prosperity and should be the central focus of public policy." He argues that the obsessive focus of policymakers and economists on "consumer welfare" is misguided because, as workers and productive contributors, people flourish and build strong families and communities.

National Affairs editor Yuval Levin called it "the essential policy book for our time." National Review wrote that, "[t]his book and its policy proposals mark Oren Cass as one of the nation's most original and forceful policy thinkers." Jason Furman, chairman of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, described it as "a thoughtful, provocative, carefully argued book that made me change my mind on some issues that I thought I'd thought about quite a lot." The book was reviewed in The New Yorker, The Economist,, Foreign Affairs and by French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd.