He served as head of the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under Michael Leavitt.
He was introduced to the LDS Church by V. Dallas Merrell, who would later be a member of the Second Quorum of the Seventy, at a Republican meeting in 1981.
He ran a cleaning company in the mid-1990s and then moved to Utah where he worked in the human resource department of the LDS Church.
In 2002 he made an unsuccessful campaign for the Republican nomination for the Utah Second congressional district.
[3] After leaving the HHS position, Wilkinson ran again for the Salt Lake County Council.