Shahira Knight is the Managing Principal in the Policy & Government Relations (PGR) group of Deloitte LLP. She joined Deloitte in June 2019.

Shahira has more than 20 years of experience in government, public policy and government affairs. Most recently, she was Assistant to the President and Director of White House Legislative Affairs where she served as the top liaison between the White House and Capitol Hill and was responsible for overseeing all aspects of the White House’s legislative strategy. She also helped coordinate legislative operations with executive agencies and departments.
 
Prior to assuming this role, Shahira was Deputy Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and the Deputy Director of the White House National Economic Council (NEC). In this role, she managed the NEC’s domestic policy team, which is responsible for coordinating and implementing the administration’s policy agenda on health care, tax, retirement policy, financial services, technology, cybersecurity, agriculture, infrastructure, and energy. She was previously the NEC’s Special Assistant to the President for Tax and Retirement Policy where she led the White House policy effort on tax reform, resulting in the first comprehensive tax reform law in more than 30 years.

Shahira spent 10 years in the private sector before joining the administration. She was Vice President of the Public Affairs and Policy Group at Fidelity Investments, where she represented the company before Congress and the administration during a time of significant legislative and regulatory change in the financial services industry. Prior to joining Fidelity, she was Managing Director at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), a trade association representing more than 600 securities firms, banks broker-dealers, insurance companies, and asset managers.

Shahira served on the Ways and Means Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives for eight years before joining the private sector. During her last three years on the committee, she was the Senior Advisor to the Chairman where she served as the chairman’s top policy advisor and directed all of the committee’s legislative operations. In this role, she was responsible for developing policy proposals, negotiating legislation, managing bills through all stages of the legislative process, and advising the chairman on legislative and political strategy. Prior to assuming this position, Shahira worked on the committee’s tax staff where she developed and drafted legislation dealing with retirement, insurance, health care, and a variety of business tax issues. Shahira also worked at the Joint Economic Committee where she wrote policy papers on tax, retirement, economic, and budget issues. Her research has been cited in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and on National Public Radio.

Professional Affiliations - Shahira serves on the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board and served as a Pritzker fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.

Education - She received her undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Virginia and her Master of Arts in economics from George Mason University.