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NC Family’s 2021 Major Speakers Dinner in Winston-Salem, NC on November 9, 2021 featured former Director of the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Roger Severino. Mr. Severino spoke about the work he and his colleagues at the Office for Civil Rights did for life and religious liberty under the Trump Administration, and how his work has been rolled back by the new administration.

Roger Severino:

Roger Severino is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he directs EPPC’s HHS Accountability Project. Mr. Severino is a national authority on civil rights, conscience and religious freedom, the administrative state, and information privacy, particularly as applied to health–care law and policy. 

Before joining EPPC, Mr. Severino was the Director of the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (OCR), where he led a team of over 250 staff enforcing our nation’s civil rights, conscience and religious freedom, and health information privacy laws. He served from 2017 to 2021 and was the longest serving OCR Director of the past three decades.  

Prior to joining HHS, Mr. Severino served as Director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation, was a trial attorney for seven years in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, and started his legal career at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.