It is with the deepest sorrow that we announce the death of Elise J. Bean, Director of the Washington Office of the Carl Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy. Elise died of pancreatic cancer on January 14th. At the end she was surrounded by her beloved family. She was 68.

Elise has been called a titan in the field of congressional oversight, and it’s a title she well deserves. From 1985 to 2014, Elise Bean worked as an investigator for Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), including 12 years as staff director and chief counsel for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI). In that capacity, Elise led numerous in-depth investigations into money laundering, offshore tax abuse, corruption, shell companies and corporate misconduct. She documented much of that work in her 2018 book, Financial Exposure: Carl Levin’s Senate Investigations into Finance and Tax Abuse. In 2011 and 2013, Washingtonian magazine named her one of Washington’s 100 most powerful women. In 2015 and 2016, she was included in the Global Tax 50, a list compiled by the International Tax Review of the year’s top 50 individuals and organizations influencing tax policy and practice and was recognized as a leader in tax justice matters by Global Witness in 2018.
After Sen. Levin retired in 2015, Elise helped to establish the Levin Center at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit in his honor. From its inception, Elise has been the lifeblood of the center. Not only has she served as director of the Levin Center’s Washington, D.C., office, she has helped train over 400 House and Senate staffers from both parties on bipartisan, fact-based investigative techniques; she initiated and oversaw the development of our Oversight Scholar’s listserv; she initiated, researched, and wrote “Portraits in Oversight” – a collection of 24 brief histories of significant congressional investigations; and she initiated and oversaw the center’s Congressional Oversight Records Database (CORD) – a unique database of congressional oversight reports and records designed to spur research and public accountability around how Congress carries out oversight.
Elise did all these things because she believed deeply in the responsibility of Congress to bring facts to light for the benefit of all. She devoted her prodigious talent and energy to helping others to understand how and why to undertake bipartisan, fact-based oversight.
For those of us at the Levin Center, Elise was a mentor, inspiration, and friend who found the best in people and the light in even the darkest of times. She always had time to offer guidance and to hear another point of view. She was the hardest working person any of us has ever met. We will miss her brilliance, her energy, her positivity, and her kindness. The Levin Center and the country were blessed by her presence.