Reid Cramer

Reid Cramer is director of the Asset Building Program at the New America Foundation, which aims to promote policies and ideas that significantly broaden access to economic resources through increased savings and asset ownership, especially among lower-income families. The Program has championed innovative public policies designed to enable families in the U.S. and around the world to accumulate savings, access wealth-building financial services, develop financial capability, and build and protect productive assets across the life course. Previously, he served as the program's research director and as a co-director of the New America Foundation's Next Social Contract Initiative, an effort to examine the delivery of social policy for the 21st century. His work has provided analytical support for the development of a range of policy proposals, including the ASPIRE Act, a bipartisan proposal to create a savings account for every newborn child in America, AutoSave, a unique model that automatically diverts payroll into flexible savings accounts, and The Saver's Bonus, which provides a targeted incentive to contributed to savings products at tax time. He is an author of the Assets Agenda and the Assets Report 2012, which respectively highlight innovative policy proposals and federal policy initiatives related to asset building opportunities.

Prior to joining New America, Dr. Cramer served as a policy and budget analyst at the Office of Management and Budget, where he helped coordinate policies on housing, savings, economic development, and program performance evaluation. He has worked for a range of nonprofit housing and community development organizations, the National Research Council, and the Urban Institute. He has a doctorate in public policy from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as a master' degree in city and regional planning from the Pratt Institute and a bachelor of arts degree from Wesleyan University.