Reed Rubinstein

Reed Rubinstein served in the Trump administration as Deputy Associate Attorney General, General Counsel for the U.S. Department of Education,and Senior Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury. Rubinstein is currently Senior Vice President of America First Legal (AFL), a Project 2025 Advisory Board member and litigation group that engages in “lawfare designed to defeat the ever-pervasive woke agenda infiltrating Big Business, Big Education, and Big Government.” Rubinstein, a contributor to Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, was among the lawyers named by Stephen Miller as having the “spine” to “aggressively implement Trump’s orders and skeptically interrogate any career government attorney who tells them their plans are unlawful or cannot be done.”

Rubinstein joined Donald Trump’s presidential campaign’s legal team in February 2016. Following Trump’s victory in November, Rubinstein served on Trump’s transition team at the Department of Treasury and joined the Department officially in the first week of the administration. He held numerous other roles inside the Trump Administration, serving as senior counsel to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of the General Counsel (until January 2018), then senior counsel to the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Policy (until June 2018), when he became a Deputy Associate Attorney General for the DOJ.

In April 2019, Rubinstein was appointed as acting general counsel to the Department of Education under Betsy DeVos, a role he held until the end of Trump’s first term. In this role, Rubinstein led a project attacking American universities for colluding with and receiving funding from foreign governments such as the Chinese Communist Party, part of a broader right-wing agenda targeting public universities. The Association of American Universities said it was “ a partisan and politically driven attack on America’s leading research universities… While the Department of Education purports to be concerned about threats, it has consistently failed to respond to repeated requests for clarity, transparency, and guidelines.”

In late January 2021, Rubinstein signed an eight page memo addressed to Betsy DeVos, (despite her resignation as Education Secretary which aimed to create “a bureaucratic roadblock” to the Progressive push for incoming President Biden to cancel student debt. Rubinstein asserted that “the Secretary does not have statutory authority to provide blanket or mass cancellation, compromise, discharge, or forgiveness of student loan principal balances, and/or to materially modify the repayment amounts or terms thereof, whether due to the COVID-19 pandemic or for any other reason.”

Rubinstein joined AFL in 2021 as Senior Counselor and Director of Oversight and Investigations. A Project 2025 advisory board member, AFL’s activities include defending Trump’s extreme claims of immunity, organizing MAGA RAGA (Republican Attorneys General Association) Attorneys General against perceived executive branch abuses, and filing lawsuits against the government and educational institutions.

Rubinstein served as lead counsel on AFL’s brief in Trump v. Thompson. His brief urged the court to “rein in” the January 6 select committee, comparing it to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “red scare” hysteria and persecution of political enemies. “The very real threat of communist subversion did not justify the federal government abusing its power during the Cold War. The January 6, 2021 riot, which pales into insignificance by comparison, does not justify it now.” Rubinstein’s brief also downplayed the violence of the January 6 insurrection, stating, “The collective disorder on January 6, 2021 was a tragic and terrible day for our Nation. However, political violence was a daily fact of life in Washington, D.C., and across the nation during the annus horribilis of 2020. Empirically, the January 6 riot was not comparable in organization, funding, sophistication, size, scope or damage to the riots of preceding months in Minneapolis, New York City, Kenosha, and other cities. Rather, the data suggests that the January 6, 2021 riot is more comparable in scale to the riot on January 20, 2016, against President Trump’s inauguration…”

For AFL, Rubinstein has also submitted FOIA requests to government agencies to dredge up materials that are then disseminated into the right-wing disinformation ecosystem, followed by lawsuits to release records. Rubinstein, who has downplayed the January 6th insurrection and Trump’s campaign rhetoric of political retribution, stated, “Biden and his DOJ are playing a very cynical and dangerous game with our democracy. They must be stopped.”

Among other actions attacking the Biden administration and shielding Trump at AFL, Rubinstein has also targeted so-called “woke” corporations. He signed a letter to the EEOC accusing the Kellogg Company of engaging in “illegal discrimination” due to its workplace diversity programs. AFL also criticized the company for marketing campaigns featuring RuPaul and celebrating Pride Month, stating, “Management has discarded the company’s long-held family friendly marketing approach to politicize and sexualize its products.” AFL has also sued Target and other corporations over DEIJ and ESG policies.

A steadfast Trump ally, Rubinstein has downplayed the former president’s public statements that he may prosecute his political enemies if he returns to power for a second term. “These hypotheticals—to me that’s virtue signaling. That’s not serious. If they just don’t like Trump and they don’t want to be associated with him, that’s fine. Free country, be honest, own it. You don’t have to manufacture these false fires.” Trump has made political retribution a central pillar of his 2024 presidential campaign. Rubinstein has also stated that Trump’s Schedule F order, which would make it easier for Trump to fire protected Civil servants perceived as disloyal to the administration, will return if he is re-elected, according to Bloomberg. “‘Schedule F or something like it’ will return if there’s a new administration next year…”

Prior to Trump, Rubinstein served as Senior Vice President of Litigation for the Cause of Action Institute from 2012 to 2016. Cause of Action, a right-wing litigation center deeply connected to and funded by Charles Koch, was behind a key legal challenge to Chevron in Loper Bright v. Raimundo, which overturned the 40-year Chevron precedent. In 2021, he briefly worked for the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a 501(c)(3) litigation center created in 2017 and also heavily funded by Charles Koch to challenge long-settled administrative law. NCLA was behind Relentless v. Department of Commerce and has pursued other litigation, such as challenging President Biden’s modest student debt relief plan and opposing government agencies’ ability to protect public health by limiting the spread of disinformation about treatments for the deadly COVID-19 virus.