[2][5][6] Blank was the Robert S. Kerr Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

[7] During her service at ESA, Blank played an important role in overseeing a decennial Census operation that was both timely and under budget – netting $1.6 billion in 2010 savings.

In that role, she focused on management and policy matters for the department's 12 bureaus, functioning as Commerce's chief operating officer.

Following her resignation, Cameron Kerry was designated as Acting Secretary of Commerce, pending the Senate confirmation of Penny Pritzker.

[19] Throughout her time as Chancellor, Blank had to contend with an in-state undergraduate tuition freeze, in addition to hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to state funding.

[20] She additionally worked to minimize faculty departures following the removal of statutory tenure protections by the Republican-controlled Wisconsin State Legislature[20] as well as legislation shifting away power from a long established faculty/student shared governance arrangement to the politically-appointed Board of Regents.

[20] Blank engaged in several efforts to highlight the history of marginalized populations at the university, which included the establishment of a Public History Project and efforts to acknowledge the Ho-Chunk Nation, on whose ancestral land the UW-Madison campus sits,[21] as well as the presence of Divine Nine fraternities and sororities on campus.

[23] She also faced criticism for the removal of a campus landmark that had been historically referred to by a racial epithet,[24] as well as the renaming of the university's Fredric March Play Circle because of its namesake's brief membership as an undergraduate in the "Ku Klux Klan" an interfraternity society composed of leading students formed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1919 and 1920 which is not believed to have been affiliated with the white supremacist organization of the same name.

The University report that found no evidence of an affiliation with the KKK also said that “Still, the ... choice of a name signals an identification—or, at the very least, no meaningful discomfort—with the widely known violent actions of the Reconstruction-era Klan as it was remembered, celebrated and given new cultural and institutional life in the early 20th century,”[25][26] Blank defended both moves in a New York Times opinion letter, written in response to conservative linguist John McWhorter, arguing that "Universities are not static places; they live and breathe, grow and change and reinvent themselves with new energy and approaches every fall, as new students arrive ... if we do not acknowledge both the good and the bad parts of our history, we cannot construct a better present for current students, or future for the next generation.

Jennifer Mnookin, dean of the UCLA School of Law, was selected to replace Blank as UW chancellor.

[37] Blank wrote extensively on the interaction between the macro economy, the labor market, government social policy programs, and the behavior and well-being of low-income families.