William Waddington Chip, Esq.

William Waddington Chip, Esq., served as Senior Counselor to the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security under the Trump Administration from 2020-2021. His appointment followed 40 years of international tax law practice, concluding with his 2019 retirement as the senior international tax partner at the international law firm of Covington & Burling, practicing in the firm’s Washington, DC office.

Mr. Chip’s Covington tenure was preceded by service as partner or senior counsel at three other eminent law firms – Ivins, Phillips & Barker; Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft; and Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan. Like other leading tax lawyers of his generation, his career included a detour at a “Big Four” accounting firm, Deloitte & Touche, where he played leadership roles in Deloitte’s transfer pricing and financial services practices. Mr. Chip was active in the global tax community, serving as a member of the OECD’s Business & Industry Tax Committee and holding leadership positions in the U.S. Council for International Business, the European American Business Council, and the Trans-Atlantic Business Dialogue. His clients spanned the energy industry (e.g. Saudi Aramco), the financial services industry (e.g. French bank Natixis), and the commodities industry (e.g. Bunge).

Mr. Chip’s success in law practice was founded on academic success. In 1971, Yale University (where he studied as a National Merit Scholar) awarded him a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science & Economics (magna cum laude, phi beta kappa) along with the Mellon Fellowship, which enabled him to study for two years at Clare College, Cambridge University. In 1973 Cambridge awarded him a Master of Arts in Economics with First Class Honours. His studies at Cambridge, where he met his wife Sylvia Martin Moreno, were followed by three years of active duty in the U.S. Marine Corps, where he attained the rank of Captain and was awarded the National Defense Service Medal. Upon completion of his military obligation, Mr. Chip entered Yale Law School, where he was a Yale Law Journal editor and was awarded a Juris Doctor degree in 1979.

While practicing law, Mr. Chip provided pro bono legal services to indigent citizens and immigrants as a volunteer in the Washington DC Archdiocesan Legal Network and also to a number of nonprofit organizations, including the National Football League Alumni, FINCA, and the Marine Toys for Tots Foundation (on whose board he now serves). Since 1980 he has been actively involved in the immigration reform movement, serving the Federation for American Immigration Reform as its first General Counsel and later as a member of its Board of Directors and more recently serving on the Board of the Center for Immigration Studies. Mr. Chip’s articles on immigration and other public policy matters have been published, inter alia, by The National Interest, The American Conservative, and First Things. His articles on immigration policy may be found at https://cis.org/Chip, and many of his articles on law, economics, foreign policy, and other matters may be found at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=328153.

Mr. Chip was raised as a “military brat,” his father serving as a career Marine Corps officer, retiring as a Major General. (His father’s father, George Chip, was a Pennsylvania coal miner who became Middleweight Boxing Champion of the World!). As Mr. Chip’s father was restationed every three years, Mr. Chip had the privilege of growing up in a number of locations, spending his last two years of high school in Naples, Italy. Prior to his time in Naples, Mr. Chip had been educated by nuns and brothers at parochial and private Catholic schools, and he remains today a practicing Catholic. Mr. Chip and his wife Sylvia have a daughter, Francine, and a son, Alexander, each of whom has married and also has a daughter and son.