Constance Horner

Constance Joan Horner (born February 24, 1942) is a scholar, foundation trustee, and businesswoman who served in various appointed capacities in the administrations of U.S. Presidents Ronald W. Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush.

A native of Summit in Union County in northern New Jersey, Horner (maiden name missing) holds Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in English literature, which she received in 1964 and 1967, respectively, from the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia and the University of Chicago.

Her husband, Charles Horner, served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and as Associate Director of the U.S. Information Agency in the Reagan administration and is a historian of China. The Horners have two married sons and four grandchildren. After long-term residence in Washington, D.C., they have relocated to Lexington, Virginia. Horner is a former faculty member at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and the Center for the Study of American Government at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

In his first term President Reagan named Horner as the director of Volunteers in Service to America, or VISTA, the "domestic" Peace Corps anti-poverty program. In his second term, Reagan appointed Horner as the director of the United States Office of Personnel Management. In 1989, the first President Bush named her deputy secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. In this capacity, she exerted an administrative role over Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, various welfare programs, and medical and health concerns.

In 1991, Bush made Horner a presidential assistant with duties over White House personnel. In 1993, in the last days of his administration, Bush named Horner to succeed Esther Buckley, the Hispanic Reagan appointee from Laredo, Texas, on the United States Commission on Civil Rights. The commission was established under the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Horner remained on the panel until 1998. From 1993 to 2005, Horner was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

In business, Horner has been since the early 1990s an independent director of three major corporations, Pfizer, Prudential Financial, and Ingersoll Rand. She is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration in Washington. She is a trustee of the Annie E. Casey and the Prudential foundations.

Horner has contributed articles on public policy for such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The American Spectator.