Rebecca Vallas is the Chief Executive Officer of the National Academy of Social Insurance. Rebecca brings two decades of experience shaping economic policy and social insurance, with a career that spans federal and state policy, legal advocacy, and narrative strategy. Most recently, she was a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, where she founded the organization’s disability economic justice work, and launched a national bipartisan campaign to modernize SSI’s outdated asset limits.
A former legal aid attorney and one of the founding architects of the Clean Slate criminal record-clearing model—now law in over a dozen states—Rebecca has testified before Congress numerous times and her work has been featured by a wide array of outlets including The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, MSNBC, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN. She also previously held leadership roles at the Center for American Progress, where she oversaw the organization’s antipoverty work and originated its disability work, and the National Organization of Social Security Claimants’ Representatives.
Formerly the host and creator of the Off-Kilter podcast, Rebecca is excited to be developing It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way, a forthcoming podcast exploring how we reimagine broken systems to better serve people and communities—featuring conversations with changemakers at the frontlines of policy and social change. In her personal practice, she is a trained astrologer, energy healer, and spiritual coach. When she isn’t in Washington, D.C., she spends her time on a farm in Charlottesville, Virginia, with her husband and four rescue cats