Jack Spittell arrived at Northwestern University in 2002, planning to study pre-medicine. Physics ended that plan. He left with dual degrees in psychology and political science — and a conviction, quietly forming, that flexibility was itself a strategy.

That conviction has guided every major decision he's made since.

A 2002 graduate of Galesburg High School, Jack grew up in a household where civic engagement was self-evident. His father, a Kellogg MBA who had come to Galesburg to run Distillers and Brewers — a regional distributorship for Coors and other beverages — sat on the city's planning commission and was active in Rotary. His mother began as a substitute teacher when Jack was in second grade, eventually became dean at Lombard Elementary while he was a student there, and later served as principal at Gale. Growing up with a parent on the administrative side of a school system gave Jack an early behind-the-curtain view of institutions — how they were led, how decisions got made, the world that existed beyond the classroom. He didn't fully understand it at twelve, he said. But it registered.

At Northwestern, he joined A&O Productions, the student organization that books concerts for campus — negotiating with agents, managing contracts and logistics, meeting the musicians he'd been listening to for years. Most of his colleagues in that group went on to work at talent agencies. Jack was the only one who didn't. "They have some pretty fun Instagrams," he noted. But the work had planted something: a taste for contracts, negotiation, and problem-solving that would eventually point him toward law.

After graduation came internships — MTV one summer, a political internship in D.C., another, a Harvard biology course the first. Then two years as a project assistant at Kirkland & Ellis in Chicago, essentially a paralegal role, designed to test whether big law was the right fit. It confirmed that law school was the right direction. Whether big law itself was, he wasn't yet sure.

He enrolled at DePaul University College of Law in 2008, became editor-in-chief of the Business and Commercial Law Journal, made the moot court team, and pursued a public interest law certificate focused on constitutional law. Two summer positions gave him early courtroom experience: one externing for a federal judge, the other at the U.S. Trustee Program, where a 711 student license allowed him to argue actual motions before actual judges — a level of access that lawyers at big firms might not see for years.

Graduating into a difficult market, Jack cast a wide net. He was accepted to business school — including Washington University's Olin program, in which he enrolled. He was also accepted as a Presidential Management Fellow, one of roughly 400 placed annually from a pool of 10,000 applicants. The PMF program — shut down under the current administration but a cornerstone of federal talent development for decades — offered two-year fellowships across government agencies. 

Jack accepted a position with the Department of Energy's budget office, negotiated a leave of absence with Wash U, and moved to D.C.

Four months into the fellowship, he met his wife. He never went back to finish the MBA.

At DOE, he worked on federal budgeting across energy portfolios — solar, fossil fuels, nuclear, and loan guarantees — before transitioning into the General Counsel's office, where he built expertise in appropriations law, a specialty so particular to government that it isn't taught in law schools at all. The practice covers how congressional funding is passed, interpreted, and executed: from billion-dollar energy projects to the logistics of retrieving old nuclear material from Germany. In 2019, he moved to the Office of Management and Budget, part of the Executive Office of the President, where appropriations questions from across the federal government ultimately land. He has now worked through four administrations — Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump again — each with different priorities, each illuminating a different facet of how the government actually moves money and policy.

The work has occasionally been historic in scale. During the pandemic, he worked on the CARES Act. When the infant formula shortage hit, he worked on Operation Fly Formula — figuring out how to fund emergency flights to bring formula from abroad. These aren't abstractions. They're the problems that land on the desk when no one else can answer them.

Jack and his wife married in 2019 after seven years together. They live in Alexandria, Virginia, with their son — who turned five the day before this interview — and their two-year-old daughter. His parents are still in Galesburg. His sister lives in Door County, Wisconsin.

He stays in daily contact with his close friends from Galesburg — texting about the Knicks the night before the interview, same as always. He credits no single teacher as the pivotal influence. It was all of them, he said, each contributing a different method, a different style, a different way of showing that problems can be solved more than one way. That's not a small lesson. It's arguably the one his career has proven most thoroughly.

Asked what he'd tell his younger self, Jack didn't offer a career strategy.

"Keep an open mind, keep your eyes open, keep your ears open, and keep your heart open."

Simple advice. As it turns out, it goes a very long way.