Merrill Matthews, PhD, was for 25 years a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation. He is a public policy analyst specializing in health care, entitlements, and energy issues and is the author of numerous public policy studies. He is past president of the Health Economics Roundtable for the National Association for Business Economics, the largest trade association of business economists.

Dr. Matthews served for 10 years as a medical ethicist for the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center’s Institutional Review Board for Human Experimentation. He is the co-author of On the Edge: America Faces the Entitlements Cliff (2019) and has contributed chapters to several books, including Physician Assisted Suicide: Expanding the Debate, The 21st Century Health Care Leader and, in 2009, Stop Paying the Crooks (on Medicare fraud). And for several years he co-authored a column on dental ethics for the Texas Dental Journal.

He also served as chairman of the Texas Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

He is a weekly columnist for The Hill and has been published in The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Forbes, USA Today and the Washington Times. In 2008 and again in 2014, the BBC invited him to star in a program on welfare reform in Great Britain, specifically Wales.

Dr. Matthews received a BBA in Economics from the University of Texas at Arlington, an M.Div. from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and he has a Ph.D. in Humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas. He is an 8th degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do, and he can be reached at: MerrillMatthewsPhD@gmail.com.

Holly Randall serves as Associate Counsel with the First Liberty Institute.

Holly graduated summa cum laude from the Oklahoma City University School of Law, where she was recognized as the Outstanding Graduate for the Class of 2021 and a Sumners Foundation Scholar. During law school, she externed at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, worked as a research assistant to Dean Jim Roth, served as president of the OKC Student Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society, and published her Note, From Peyote to Parenthood: Why Employment Division v. Smith Must(and Might) Go, as a member of the Oklahoma City University Law Review. Holly spent her summers as a legal intern at the First Liberty Institute.

Holly received her bachelor’s degrees in Political Science and Spanish from Oklahoma City University in 2018, graduating summa cum laude, cum honore, and was a member of the OCU Women’s Volleyball team.

Holly is licensed to practice law in Oklahoma.