Claudine Schneider (née Cmarada; born March 25, 1947) is an American politician and executive who served five terms as a Republican U.S. representative from Rhode Island from 1981 to 1991.

In subsequent House floor debate on the project, she called it a “boondoggle” pushed by corporate special interests, costing taxpayers billions of dollars.

This bill kicked off the legislative process that resulted in the passage into law of the Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act of 1984, illustrating the “successes that can be achieved when state and federal agencies and Congress join forces to rebuild coastal fisheries.” A longtime advocate of environmental protection and hazardous waste-prevention measures,[7][8] Schneider was responsible in 1985 for creating the first economic incentive to reduce hazardous waste production.

Schneider’s other legislative initiatives included the cofounding of the Congressional Competitiveness Caucus[9] in 1987 together with Hewlett Packard CEO John Young.

Initially dubbed “CongressBridge,” the goal of Schneider and her congressional colleague Rep. George Brown was “to break the 27-year public silence between Soviet and American politicians since the 1959 Moscow ‘kitchen debate’ between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev.” In the United States, the series of forums between the two countries’ legislators aired on ABC in 1987 as Capitol to Capitol, and Schneider went on to receive an Emmy Award for her role in initiating and co-producing with Peter Jennings these live and unedited programs.

Fulfilling a ten-year exit strategy, the company was sold to ERGA, which at the time was the world's largest producer of energy from renewable sources.

[11] Schneider enlisted 50 Fortune 500 corporations, including Raytheon, Bank of America, Target and Tiffany’s, as partners in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Climate Leaders Program, leading to her nomination by EPA as a “Climate Leader.” Schneider has served on the boards of various companies and advocacy groups, and her consulting clients have included National Grid and other utilities, EPA, DOE, INBio (Costa Rica), the Policy Center for Marine Biosciences and Technology, Wheelabrator Technologies as well as the Smithsonian Institution and the U.S. Air Force.

Schneider has contributed to numerous journals and books, including “The Planetary Interest’ from Oxford University Press, in which former elected officials from a variety of countries were asked to address a particular challenge.