Tracy S. Gruber | Most Influential Women 2024
Executive Director | Utah Department of Health and Human Services
Tracy S. Gruber’s path to becoming executive director of the Utah Department of Health and Human Services was definitely not a straight line.
After getting her undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she was an analyst for the Illinois Senate and oversaw a public employee retiree organization. Then her career took a turn — she had two children and stayed at home with them for seven years.
“I thought of stopping my career at one point when we had our first child. I thought I was going to be a full-time parent indefinitely,” Gruber says. “But then I realized that I wanted to go back to school and continue to both be a parent and pursue my value of improving outcomes for other people.”
She got her law degree from the Chicago-Kent College of Law and then moved to Utah, where she became the director of the Utah State Bar New Lawyer Training Program. Eventually, she felt drawn to return to policy work and accepted a position as the senior policy analyst and director of state fiscal policy at Voices for Utah Children.
Gruber’s work with policy and children led her to become director of the Office of Child Care at the Utah Department of Workforce Services and senior advisor for the Intergenerational Poverty Initiative. Gruber helped refocus state efforts on making child care more accessible and affordable. She served as the chair of the National Association of State Child Care Administrators.
As part of the Intergenerational Poverty Initiative, Gruber worked on changing the dialogue around poverty — it’s a multifaceted experience that is more than just a lack of financial resources, and it has a lasting impact on children even as they move into adulthood. The initiative led to a significant decrease in the percentage of children living in poverty in Utah from 2014 to 2021.
In 2021, Utah Gov. Spencer J. Cox asked Gruber to serve in his cabinet as the inaugural executive director of the Department of Health and Human Services. Gruber oversaw the merger of the health department with the human services department, making it easier for Utah residents to get through the government bureaucracy and access the services and resources they need.
“We brought together two departments with very significant overlap to better serve people in the state of Utah and create efficiencies and a more customer-centered structure,” Gruber says. She also currently represents Utah on the Education Commission of the States.
Gruber says the common thread of her career is her fundamental belief that everyone should have opportunities to be successful regardless of circumstances, whatever that means to them and their families.
“Family is very important to me. I’m very proud of our two kids and who they’re becoming,” she says.