Reed Hundt

Biography

Hundt attended high school in Washington D.C at St. Albans School, graduating in 1965. He went to Yale College, where he majored in history, and worked on the Yale Daily News. Hundt taught school for several years before graduating from Yale Law School in 1974. He clerked for Harrison Lee Winter, a Baltimore judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, before moving to Los Angeles, where he became the 85th lawyer at Latham & Watkins, one of the top law firms in the world.

In 1980, Hundt moved to the Latham & Watkins' Washington, D.C., office. In his litigation career at the firm, Hundt appeared in court in 48 states and the District of Columbia, argued appellate cases in almost all circuits, and handled cases in many topic areas, although he specialized in antitrust.

Meanwhile, from 1983 and onwards, Hundt played many diverse roles in helping Al Gore's political career. In 1992-3 he was part of the Clinton-Gore transition team, and chaired the committee that draft that partly successful carbon tax introduced and passed in the House of Representatives in 1993. It was not passed through the Senate. The issue remains alive to this day. In 1993 President Clinton, who Hundt had known in law school, nominated Hundt to be chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. He was confirmed in November 1993, which was approximately the same time that the Internet was commercially invented as a practical matter because of the confluence of the first popular browser, Mosaic,and the decision of the CERN laboratory to release for free the now famous Berners-Lee software protocols that enabled any connected computer to join the Internet. Serendipitously, that same month saw Congress empower the FCC to create the structure and function of the digital cellular market in the United States by means, among other things, of spectrum auctions, then having previously been tried only in isolated cases in small countries.

Congress gave the FCC vast powers to regulate and de-regulate all digital markets when it passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed by digital signature of President Clinton in the Library of Congress in February 1996. The FCC then essentially re-wrote the regulatory landscape for wireless and wireline communication. Not everything predicted actually occurred, in Hundt's view, but all knew that somehow the communications sector was responsible in large part for the great boom in the American economy and stock market that marked the Clinton Administration's two terms.

Hundt currently serves on the audit committee of Gore's chief non-profit. Hundt himself is CEO of the Coalition for Green Capital, a non-profit he helped found in the wake of his service on the Obama transition team in 2008-9. Between 1998 and 2008, Hundt was a senior advisor to McKinsey, the consulting firm. He also served on many technology company boards from 1998 to the present, co-founded four firms (none of which was wildly successful), gave many speeches, wrote four books, and penned numerous articles. He has written "You Say You Want A Revolution: A Story of Information Age Politics" (Yale:2000) and "In China's Shadow: The Crisis of American Entrepreneurship" (Yale: 2006) as part of the Future of American Democracy Foundation's Future of American Democracy Series. Most recently, Hundt published e-books entitled Zero Hour: Time to Build the Clean Power Platform (Odyssey, 2013) and, along with Blair Levin, The Politics of Abundance: How Technology Can Fix the Budget, Revive the American Dream and Establish Obama's Legacy (Odyssey: 2012).

Recent articles include:

Personal life

He is married to Elizabeth "Betsy" Katz. He is the father of Adam, Nathaniel and Sara Hundt.