Grace L. Mastalli, is the president of Ethos International, Inc. which she co-founded in 2007 following an extensive federal career, primarily in the U.S. Department of Justice.
During her federal service, Ms. Mastalli had the distinction of serving under six Attorneys General and of becoming one of the highest ranking career officials not only of the Justice Department but also of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In the Justice Department she held three of the most senior positions available to non-political appointees--Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Associate Deputy Attorney General, and Deputy Associate Attorney General.
Ms.Mastalli served the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from 2003-2007 where, as the highest ranking career official in the Office of the General Counsel, she helped to manage the work of the more than 1700 lawyers serving the new 180,000 person agency. At Homeland Security, Ms. Mastalli had substantive responsibilities in Ethics, Privacy, Intelligence, National Security, Immigration, Procurement and Regulatory matters among others. As Director of the DHS Information and Collaboration Office, she chaired the Interagency Working Group on Sensitive But Unclassified (SBU) Information and developed comprehensive recommendations for sweeping reform of federal policy with regard to the protection of controlled unclassified information.
Ms. Mastalli was instrumental in the development of the original 1991 Organizational Sentencing Guidelines, as well as of federal law and regulations related to employment, violent crime and drug control, fraud, money laundering, terrorism, national security, infrastructure protection, and information management. Her responsibilities at the Justice Department ranged from oversight of the Office of Information and Privacy, which provided the government-wide administration of the Freedom of Information Act, to supervision of activities of the DEA, federal Bureau of Prisons and FBI.
An expert on cultural transformation, performance management, compliance and law enforcement, as well as on matters of policy implementation, Ms. Mastalli has served on and advised numerous intergovernmental advisory boards and working groups. She has testified before Congressional committees and addressed many trade and professional organizations, frequently appearing as an organizational spokesperson.
Ms. Mastalli also served in a number of other key operational and policy positions, including as a trial attorney, legal advisor for a Presidential Advisory Council and as the Senior Counsel for Civil Rights in the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). At Justice, she was tapped to become one of the youngest members of the career Senior Executive Service, serving as a deputy first in the Associate Attorney General’s Office and then successively in the Office of Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs, Office of Policy Development, Office of the Deputy Attorney General, Office of Legal Policy, and Foreign Terrorism Tracking Task Force.
For more than a quarter-century at the Justice Department, she managed a broad portfolio of strategic legal policy matters, including law enforcement, criminal justice, environmental and civil rights matters. She specialized in coordinating interagency and public/private sector teams of lawyers and subject matter specialists to better represent client agencies and officials before the United States Congress, regulatory bodies, the media, public interest groups and business organizations.
She participated on and chaired numerous interagency task forces, including coordinating the Department’s District of Columbia Revitalization efforts from 1997-2001. She coordinated innumerable other budget, management, organizational transformation, and policy implementation initiatives within the Executive Branch and with Congress and the Judiciary.
Ms. Mastalli attended Reed College, the University of Denver, University of Maryland College of Law, and Georgetown University Graduate School of Government. She is an active Member of the Bar of the District of Columbia and serves as an adjunct professor at American University specializing in Public Policy and American Legal Culture.