David Rosen
Communications Officer
David Rosen has served as a communications officer for Public Citizen since 2015 and is the longest-serving member of the communications team. Many of the public policy issues he has worked on over the years came up in Star Trek episodes he grew up watching. He’s not even talking about the science fiction parts, which are now also coming up daily.
Rosen currently handles press relations for Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines, Health Research Group, and Congress Watch divisions. For most of his time at Public Citizen, he has led communications for two big-tent public interest lobbying coalitions that the organization leads: the Coalition for Sensible Safeguards, which is fighting for a federal regulatory system that protects all of us and holds corporations accountable, and the Clean Budget Coalition, which every year fights off hundreds of poison pill policy riders that do not belong in the annual federal spending bills.
Rosen holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Tufts University and master’s degrees in political management and political psychology from George Washington University, where he studied under the late Dr. Jerrold Post, founder of the CIA’s psychological profiling unit. Before joining Public Citizen, Rosen spent several years as a freelance consultant developing groundbreaking models of political ideology and generations in Congress that received national press attention.
A fifth generation Texan born and raised in Dallas, Rosen began his career running statehouse races in Michigan and Texas, and was a key player in the 2006 campaign that flipped Dallas County permanently from red to blue. He moved to Washington, D.C. in 2007 and for the first four years raised money to protect whistleblowers at the Government Accountability Project, where he helped topple Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz from the World Bank and expose the Bush administration’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program. He’s worked at a top political staffing firm and served on a messaging strategy team at Media Matters Action Network, where he coined the phrase “don’t double-down on trickle-down.”
He’s a proud dog owner, on a Five Year Mission to get in shape, and he’s the author of Books of the Emissary, a fan-made adaptation of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.