Karl Zinsmeister (born 1959) was appointed by U.S. President George W. Bush in June 2006 to serve as Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and director of the Domestic Policy Council. Zinsmeister lives in rural upstate New York with his wife and three children.
Zinsmeister is a graduate of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut and has also studied history as a special student at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. He won college rowing championships in both the U.S. and Ireland. His first job in Washington was as a legislative assistant to U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New York Democrat. He was later the J. B. Fuqua Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a prominent conservative Washington DC think tank, where he researched a range of topics extending from social welfare and demographics to economics and cultural trends.
Before becoming the White House Domestic Policy Adviser, he was Editor in Chief from 1994 to 2006 of The American Enterprise, a national magazine covering politics, business, and culture.