Timothy M. Westmoreland J.D.
Research Professor of Public Policy
Professor of Law from Practice
Georgetown University Law Center
Email: westmort@law.georgetown.edu
Discipline: Law
Expertise: Politics and Policymaking
Investigator Award 
Rules Over Policy: The Impact of the Federal Budget Process on the Modernization of American Public HealthAward Year: 2001 Individuals working to improve public health and health care are often stymied by the federal budget process. This project will illuminate the arcane nature of federal budgeting, its unintended impact on formulation of health policy, and the absence of health-based measures to balance the process. Mr. Westmoreland will study the origin and development of the formal budget process, assessing the ostensible neutrality of budgeting principles and how they actually drive health policymaking. He will focus on mandatory spending programs (usually reserved for health insurance) and how they are treated differently from discretionary spending programs (typically used for public health activities, clinic- and population-based services) and examine financing disparities. The results will describe how health-related proposals are scrutinized and recommend ways that health-oriented measures might be used to advance federal policymaking.
Background 
Tim Westmoreland holds a joint appointment at Georgetown University (2001-present), as a professor of law and a research professor of public policy, teaching about legislation and statutory interpretation, health law, and budget policy. He is also a Senior Scholar at the O'Neill Institute. From 2002-2005, Westmoreland was awarded the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Investigator Award in Health Policy Research, and in 2002, he received the American Foundation for AIDS Research Award of Courage. Prior to his appointment at Georgetown, Westmoreland was the Director of the Medicaid program at the Health Care Finance Administration, in President Clinton's Department of Health and Human Services. In his last year of service, Westmoreland received the Secretary's Award for Distinguished Service. From 1995 to 1999, he was a senior policy fellow at the Georgetown Law Center, teaching in the clinical program on federal legislation. During that same period, he served as a counsel to the Koop-Kessler Advisory Committee on Tobacco Policy and Public Health, as a senior advisor on HIV/AIDS to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and as a lobbyist for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. From 1996-1997, he was awarded the Atlantic Fellowship in Public Policy from the Commonwealth Fund-New York and the British Council-London. Westmoreland spent the first 15 years of his career (1979-1995) at the same desk, working for the Subcommittee on Health and the Environment of the United States House of Representatives, under the chairmanship of Congressman Henry Waxman. In that job, he staffed hearings and legislation on public health, reproductive health, biomedical research, biomedical ethics, and health regulation. Tim Westmoreland is originally from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. He went to college at Duke and law school at Yale.
- Westmoreland, T.M., Watson, K.R. Redeeming Hollow Promises: The Case for Mandatory Spending on Health Care for American Indians and Alaska Natives. AJPH, 2006, 96(4): 600-5.
- Feder, J., Nichols, L., Thorpe, K., Westmoreland, T., Glied, S., Bilheimer, L., Folz, C.E. Health Policy Roundtable - Policy by Numbers: The Role of Budget Estimates and Scoring in Health Care Reform. Health Services Research, 2005, 40(2): 347-59.
- Mann, C., Westmoreland, T. Attending to Medicaid. J of Law, Medicine and Ethics, 2004, 32(3): 416.