Bert Kaufman is Senior Adviser in Secretary Pritzker’s Office of Business Liaison at the U.S. Department of Commerce.  He also serves as the inaugural co-Director of the Presidential Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship (PAGE) initiative.  PAGE is a public-private partnership chaired by Secretary Pritzker that deploys 17 of America’s most respected entrepreneurs to promote and foster business creation across the United States and around the world.

Prior to joining the Obama Administration in 2013, Bert served as Executive Director of Business Forward, a non-profit organization he co-founded in 2009 that brings more business leaders into the policymaking process in a more transparent and collaborative way.  Business Forward engages tens of thousands of business leaders from across the country on public policy issues and draws support from more than 60 mostly Fortune 100 corporate members.

Concurrent with Business Forward, he served as Vice President of Portico Policy Advisors, a Washington, D.C.-based policy research firm where he advised auto industry clients and venture-backed start-ups in the food and consumer product sectors.  Prior to Business Forward, Bert served as a law clerk in U.S. District Court. He also worked for CNN in Washington, D.C. and London. 

Bert also helped start and is on the board of Press Pass Mentors, an educational non-profit where journalists from The Washington Post mentor inner-city high school students to prepare them for college.

While in law school, Bert co-founded the Institute for the Study of the Judiciary, Politics, and Media (IJPM), a first-of-its-kind interdisciplinary center that produces scholarship and national programming on the interaction between courts, politics, and the press.

He received his undergraduate, Masters (in Media Management) and law degrees from Syracuse University. He is a member of the Bar of the District of Columbia.