Daren Bakst is the director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CEI) Center for Energy and Environment and a visiting senior fellow at Pacific Legal Foundation.
Before joining CEI in 2023, Daren was a senior research fellow in Environmental Policy and Regulation at The Heritage Foundation, where he played a leading role in the launch of the organization’s new energy and environment center and created and hosted The Heritage Foundation’s energy and environment podcast, PowerCast. During his decade at Heritage, he wrote about energy and environmental policy, food and agricultural policy, regulation, and trade, among other topics.
He also worked on environmental policy and regulation at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he was a policy counsel and served as the executive to the association’s Government Operations, Oversight & Consumer Affairs Committee. Daren has significant state-level experience, working for seven years at the Raleigh, N.C.-based John Locke Foundation, one of the largest state-based, free-market think tanks. As director of legal and regulatory studies there, his broad portfolio included energy and environmental policy, regulatory reform, and property rights.
Daren has testified numerous times before Congress, regularly submits comments to federal agencies, and has appeared in, or been quoted by, a wide range of media outlets, such as The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Times, CNN, Fox Business News, Al-Jazeera America, and U.S. News & World Report. He is a member of The Federalist Society’s Environmental Law & Property Rights Executive Committee and serves on the College Advisory Board for Constituting America, an organization that informs and educates about the importance of the U.S. Constitution.
Daren, who hails from Florida, received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from George Washington University. A licensed attorney, he holds a JD degree from the University of Miami and an LLM degree from American University.