Dorothy Robyn

As PBS Commissioner, Dr. Robyn leads one of the largest and most diversified public real estate organizations in the world.  The Public Buildings Service is responsible for providing superior workplaces for federal customer agencies at good value for the American taxpayer.

Dr. Robyn manages the nationwide asset management, design, construction, leasing, building management and disposal of approximately 375 million square feet of government-owned and leased space, accommodating over 1 million federal workers, and covering all 50 states, six U.S. territories and the District of Columbia. Additionally, Dr. Robyn oversees an annual budget of more than $9.4 billion and a workforce of almost 6,800.

Immediately prior to joining GSA, Dr. Robyn served as the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Installations and Environment at the Department of Defense. At DoD, she was the senior real property officer and provided department-wide oversight of US military bases around the world. These assets are valued at $850 billion and include 29 million acres of land, 300,000 buildings, and 2.2 billion square feet of building space.  Dr. Robyn led DoD’s facility energy initiative, which is designed to reduce the Department’s $4 billion-a-year facility energy bill and improve the energy security of military bases that are largely dependent on the commercial electric power grid. She also oversaw the final implementation of the 2005 round of base realignment and closure (BRAC), the largest BRAC round undertaken by DoD, and she led DoD’s effort to get additional BRAC rounds in 2013 and 2015.

From 1993 to 2001, Dr. Robyn served as Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and a senior staff member of the White House National Economic Council. She was responsible for issues in transportation and infrastructure, aerospace and defense, science and technology, and competition policy. Before she joined the DoD in 2009, she was a principal with The Brattle Group, an economic consulting firm that specializes in competition and antitrust, energy and the environment.  In the 1980s, Dr. Robyn was an assistant professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she taught management and business-government policy.

She is co-author (with William Baumol) of Toward an Evolutionary Regime for Spectrum Governance: Licensing or Unrestricted Entry? (Brookings Press, 2006) and author of Braking the Special Interests: Trucking Deregulation and the Politics of Policy Reform (University of Chicago Press, 1987).

Dr. Robyn holds a B.A. from Southern Illinois University and a Ph.D. and M.P.P. in public policy from the University of California at Berkeley. She is a native of St. Louis, Missouri.