The People Behind
the Work.

Maurice House is a Senior Advisor to House Strategies Group and a retired member of the United States Senior Foreign Service, where he served for 38 years with the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service at the rank of Minister Counselor. He brings to HSG a rare combination of executive leadership, international negotiation, and public-finance stewardship developed at the highest levels of the federal government and across five continents.

Maurice led U.S. agricultural and trade missions in Beijing, Brussels, Bangkok, Islamabad, Lagos, and Algiers, directing teams of up to 52 professionals and overseeing market-access and trade-policy portfolios worth billions. As Minister Counselor in China — then the largest overseas agricultural market at over $20 billion per year — he monitored WTO compliance, reopened markets for U.S. poultry, beef, and wheat, and helped drive a 34% increase in U.S.–China agricultural trade in a single year, while directing 52 professionals across five cities.

Earlier, as manager of the FAS $1.2 billion export-credit guarantee portfolio, he oversaw the financial structuring and risk management of one of the federal government's largest agricultural credit programs. As Principal Officer for the European Union, he led trade-policy and market-access coordination across all 27 member states, supervised seven regional offices, and represented the United States in SPS, TBT, and WTO negotiations.

In 2007, as Special Assistant to the Administrator and Deputy Administrator for Global Analysis, Maurice led the agency-wide task force on the global food-price crisis — developing a strategic response adopted by the President, the Secretary of Agriculture, and the National Security Council, and designing the FAS's new agency-wide assignment system. He holds an M.S. in Agricultural Economics from the University of Illinois and a B.A. from Carleton College.

Jelani House is the Founder and Principal Consultant of House Strategies Group — an SBA-certified 8(a) advisory firm delivering finance, real estate, and management consulting to federal agencies and private sector clients. He brings over 20 years of experience leading high-visibility engagements across housing finance, credit markets, real estate portfolios, and workforce modernization.

Jelani has worked at the intersection of policy, financial analysis, and program execution across some of the federal government’s most consequential institutions — including HUD, Ginnie Mae, the Department of Veterans Affairs, USDA, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His career spans roles at Guidehouse (Big 4-caliber consulting), NOVAD Management Consulting, and Emax Partners. In 2024 he committed full-time to House Strategies Group — the family firm he co-founded with his father, Maurice, in 2015, conceiving it as the way to realize a vision his father had long held.

As an Engagement Manager and Associate Director at Guidehouse, Jelani led over $43 million in federal contract work — including a $12.9M Ginnie Mae capital markets analytics engagement that he personally captured, staffed, and managed end-to-end across four partner firms. He has managed teams of 30+ senior professionals, directed investor roadshows, facilitated interagency working groups with Treasury and the Federal Reserve, and built some of the federal government’s most sophisticated financial performance dashboards.

Earlier in his career, he spent nearly a decade at NOVAD as the client-facing Project Manager for HUD’s Program Financial Advisor contract — responsible for valuation models, loan sale strategies, and transaction analytics across multifamily, healthcare, and single-family asset classes. He also originated and secured a $1M BPR engagement for HUD’s Office of Housing Counseling entirely through his own business development effort.

At HSG, Jelani combines that institutional depth with entrepreneurial speed — leveraging AI-enabled automation, practitioner-grade tools like the Federal Policy Tracker, and a direct-delivery model that brings Big 4 quality without Big 4 overhead. He holds a Master of Science in Finance from Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and a B.A. in Economics and English Literature from the University of Virginia.