Commissioner Bio
Bob Hale
Chair, Appointed by the Honorable Jack Reed, Chairman of Senate Armed Services Committee
Hon. Robert Hale is a currently a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a member of the board of the Air Force Aid Society.
Most recently, Hale served as Comptroller and Chief Financial Officer at the Department of Defense, where he managed a $600 billion budget in wartime and oversaw efforts by the Department to minimize the problems caused by the 2013 sequestration and government shutdown. He also made significant improvements in defense financial management, making tangible progress toward auditable financial statements and establishing a course-based certification program for defense financial managers.
Previously, Hale also served as the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force (Financial Management and Comptroller), managing the Department’s budgets and spearheading efforts to create a test-based certification program. Hale served as a Commissioner on the National Commission on the Future of the Army and is a past member of the Defense Business Board. Hale spent 12 years as head of the defense group at the Congressional Budget Office. He was also the Executive Director of the American Society of Military Comptrollers and held analytic and management positions at LMI government consulting and the Center for Naval Analyses. Early in his career, he served as a Navy officer.
Hale holds a Bachelor of Science in statistics and a Master of Science in operations research from Stanford University and a Master of Business Administration from the George Washington University.