Joseph A. Neurauter

Housing and Urban Development
Joseph A. Neurauter
Chief Procurement Officer

Joseph A. Neurauter cuts a somewhat unusual figure for a chief procurement officer. He isn't a former accountant, or a business executive or even a consultant. He didn't navigate Washington's political machinery before arriving at the Housing and Urban Development Department in mid-August. Neurauter is a former Army trial and appellate judge and a retired colonel in the Judge Advocate General Corps. "We were looking for a good manager, because we have a young and diverse workforce," says A. Jo Baylor, Neurauter's predecessor at HUD.

During a distinguished military legal career Neurauter earned nearly a dozen awards and medals before retiring from the Army. In 1997, he presided over several of the high profile Aberdeen Proving Ground trials, in which five men were convicted of sexual misconduct or rape of female recruits at the Maryland facility in 1995 and 1996. His JAG career also exposed him to contract law. "I was lucky to be something of a generalist," says Neurauter.

After retiring from the Army in 1998, Neurauter spent three years working for the Pentagon as a civilian judicial adviser to the Army's Judge Advocate General.

Then it was on to the General Services Administration, where he was an acquisitions deputy and the agency's suspension and debarment official. In 2004, he investigated an information technology contract administered through the Interior Department that was used to supply the Army with civilian interrogators in Iraq.

HUD has had a chief procurement officer since 1998, but unlike the chief acquisition officer positions created governmentwide by Congress two years ago, the department's CPO is not a political appointment requiring Senate confirmation. The CPO title remains distinct from CAO, which belongs to multi-tasking HUD Deputy Secretary Roy Bernardi.