Josephine Tetreault Allen

Jodie T. Allen, a former Washington Post Outlook editor, columnist and editorial writer, died on the 15th of September. She was born on September 1, 1938. Mrs. Allen’s career began as a management intern in the Executive Office of the President, Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization. She later worked as a computer model developer and programmer, a then rare skill in high demand, for a succession of employers including the Army’s Mathematical Computation Laboratory, the National Planning Association, the Research Analysis Corporation (then the Army’s Rand-like think tank), and the Brookings Institution. At the Department of Health, Education and Welfare she supervised development of TRIM, a microsimulation model then used to produce cost and caseload estimates for the Nixon Administration’s proposed welfare reform, the Family Assistance Plan and supervised the department’s income maintenance field experiments in Seattle, Denver and Gary, Ind. Her next job was at the Urban Institute where she continued working on microsimulation applications and assisted Senate Finance Committee staff in developing the Earned Income Tax Credit. From there she joined the Princeton-based firm Mathematica Policy Research where, as a senior vice president, she established and managed the Washington, D.C. office. She returned to government to help develop the job component of the Carter welfare reform as special assistant to the Secretary and later, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy, Evaluation and Research.

Her journalism career had its start while, at the Urban Institute, she drafted a Washington Post op-ed for then deputy Editorial Page editor Meg Greenfield. The August 1972 article, entitled “Backdoor Revenue Sharing: How the Feds bought Mississippi,” revealed the explosion of the open-ended Social Services program which, with the help of energetic consultants, was already funding a substantial part of the California budget and was rapidly spreading to other states. The article was extensively quoted on the floors of Congress which, in short order, closed the open end. She continued to write occasional op-eds over the next several years until in 1980 she was invited by Miss Greenfield, then the editorial page editor, to join her staff. She drafted editorials for the next five years—one set was submitted by the Post for consideration for a Pulitzer Prize and then took a year or so off to work for Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca then considering a run for president. She returned to the Post to work for then Outlook editor David Ignatius and assumed his position in 1990. In 1996, she left the Post to join Michael Kinsley in launching the on-line magazine Slate. Her next move, in 1999, was to U.S. News & World Report where she worked on the national staff throughout the election and thereafter became the business section editor and columnist and, subsequently, managing editor. In 2005 she joined the then-new Pew Research Center as a senior editor and remained there until July 2011.

Her husband, George Venable Allen Jr., predeceased her in December 2014. She is survived by her son Theodore T. Allen of Amherst, MA, his wife Emily S. Patterson and two grandsons, Andrew Pierce Allen and Henry George Allen, and a sister, Elizabeth Knake.