Mentor Spotlight: Alfredo Gomez, MPP’91

HOMETOWN:

Washington, D.C.

CURRENT ROLE:

Director, U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), Natural Resources and Environment Team

UNDERGRADUATE DEGREE:

Bachelor’s in chemical engineering, Rice University

PREVIOUS EMPLOYMENT:

• Analyst, GAO
• Legislative Analyst, Honolulu City Council
• Senior Analyst, GAO
• Assistant Director, GAO

Shortly after Alfredo Gomez’s family moved from Mexico to Houston, his fifth grade classmates elected him to student council. He didn’t speak any English but, he says, other students sensed he was smart and thought he’d be a good leader.

Their yardstick: he was one of the first students to put his pencil down when taking math quizzes.

A rigorous math program at his former school near Monterrey in Northern Mexico meant Gomez had already covered the material his new class was learning. Students took note.

“Because I became a math whiz, everyone elected me to student council,” he says. “I didn’t really follow the first meetings because I didn’t really understand the language.”

The learning curve didn’t deter him. Gomez went on to take student council leadership roles at his middle school and was elected to class officer positions in high school.

“I guess at an early age I was always involved in student organizations and ended up in government,” Gomez says. “For me it’s been a really good fit.”

Gomez’s appreciation of government, math, and science progressed into engineering pursuits in college, where he discovered their intersection with public policy and the impact it can have on people and the world.

Gomez, MPP’91, now a Director in the Natural Resources and Environment Team at the US Government Accountability Office in Washington, D.C., leads the federal agency’s environmental protection portfolio. There—and in another role important to him—he draws on his experience breaking barriers, like he did back in fifth grade. The other role Gomez cares so deeply about? Being a mentor.

Gomez serves as a mentor in the Harris Mentor Program for Harris students, offering support and guidance in the same way mentors helped guide him as an undergraduate and graduate student, both professionally and personally.

His own experience, where he struggled to identify mentors and leaders who looked like him, means he takes being a mentor seriously. As a gay Latino immigrant, Gomez often found himself in spaces where no one looked like him or shared his identity. At Rice University, he was the only Latino to graduate in his class of chemical engineers.

“To be honest, being a gay Latino, it was rare to find people like me that I could see as a mentor or leader,” Gomez says. “So, generally I was the first person—or only person—like me in any place that I went. I was driven to not let that stop me.”

A summer experience in the Public Policy & International Affairs Program at UC Berkeley after his junior year at Rice was a turning point in multiple ways. He found community as he was surrounded by people of color interested in the same field as him. He also found his calling in environmental policy, which blended his interest in science with his engineering background, and seemed like it could begin to answer the policy questions he was starting to ask, including what happens to the waste streams created by the products people designed and manufacture.

His inquiry led him to the Harris School of Public Policy, where he sought to learn about how to interpret data, and be articulate and effective in a policy role.

Today Gomez leads a GAO team of 30 people and has about 15 projects running concurrently. Duties include testifying before Congress and managing relationships with congressional, agency and non-governmental clients. The office is nonpartisan, objective, and conducts audits, investigations and analysis for Congress and the public.

He has has led multiple reports on environmental protections issues, including a report on elevated lead in drinking water, as well as one that examined the economic impacts of climate change. The latter study reported that climate change could result in significant economic effects in the United States that could affect some sectors and regions more than others.

“We believe that the federal government should take steps to limit its fiscal exposure by better managing climate risks. In our report we recommended that the federal government craft appropriate responses, such as a strategy to identify, prioritize and guide federal investments to enhance resilience against future disasters.”

He recently finished a large project examining the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, a $300 million per year effort managed by the Environmental Protection Agency. GAO made recommendations about how the EPA could improve its work with its partner agencies and organizations to improve the ecosystem of the Great Lakes.

“Our work matters because we are assessing government programs and services to make sure they are working properly and efficiently,” he says. “We are also working to safeguard federal tax dollars.”

After 23 years in government, Gomez hopes to encourage the next generation of public policy leaders to consider positions in government—and careers in environmental policy.

“Our job at the GAO is to support the Congress in meeting its constitutional responsibilities. We play an important role in the environmental protection arena as we provide Congress with timely information that is objective, fact-based, nonpartisan, nonideological, fair, and balanced.”