I'm commenting here to make this post easier for me to find in the future, and also so that I'll be reminded of at random intervals in the future.
I'm commenting here to make this post easier for me to find in the future, and also so that I'll be reminded of at random intervals in the future.
Over the summer, about a dozen very cool policy professionals shared their takes on impactful US policy careers. The sessions were not recorded, so—in hopes that others find the content as useful as I did—here’s Part 1 of what I learned (companion post here). My main personal takeaways:
This is Part 1 of a 2-part series; the companion post is here.
Most of the information here is my personal takeaways from what was shared in this summer’s US policy careers speaker series. To respect speakers’ privacy and fill in a little context, I’ve removed their personally identifying details and mixed in some information from other sources.
Discussion focuses on US policy careers, but I’d guess there are significant similarities to policy careers in other countries.
Caveats:
I’m thankful to the speakers and my co-organizer for sharing their time and experience, as well as to Fiona Pollack, Felipe Calero, and especially for help with note-taking and comments.
We’ll start off with a few points of broad context, and what they mean for doing impactful policy work.
The US federal government is made up of many different individuals and agencies; policy design and advocacy will tend to be much more impactful if it’s informed by relevant actors’ unique interests and authorities.
The US federal government is big and complicated. The executive branch of the government is especially big and complicated. Here’s a relatively simple chart of how the government as a whole is structured (source):
Don’t worry about memorizing all of this now, but for a taste of the complexity, here’s a more detailed chart (source):
And as if that’s not enough complexity, the 15 executive departments on here all have their own agencies.
Why so many agencies? Largely because doing all the things the US government likes to do is a ton of work; someone has to deliver mail, negotiate treaties, build spacecraft, train soldiers, collect taxes, persecute interstate criminals, manage federal land, help fund schools, and so on.
Different agencies tend to have different interests, as well as different authorities (things they can do, levers they can pull). It’s not just that the different branches work very differently from each other; so do different committees and executive departments. For example, the House Science committee and an intelligence committee are interested in very different aspects of AI, and what they’re able to do about it is very different. Even different agencies within the same executive department can be very different from each other.
Understanding these differences within government is very helpful for doing impactful advocacy. If you want someone to fund pandemic preparedness, you probably won’t get much done by calling the Office of Science and Technology Policy; they aren’t in charge of much funding. And if you want someone to fund AI interpretability research, how much you emphasize its relevance to algorithmic bias vs robustness should probably depend on whether you’re talking to the National Science Foundation or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The government interacts with many non-governmental agencies, so there are many ways to influence government policy without being a government employee.
The US government also regularly interacts with a bunch of organizations outside of government. These organizations help fill gaps that government employees aren’t able to fill, due to e.g. government employees’ limited time, expertise, and authority. For example, think tanks are places for slower, more deliberate thinking than policymakers have time for, and they’re ways people can get jobs when the politicians they support are out of power. Other government-adjacent organizations include advisory bodies, philanthropic foundations, more technical research institutes, and contractors.
People with power tend to be super busy; this explains a lot.
People with power tend to be super busy. As one speaker put it, they have much bigger portfolios and more crises than they have time to think about. This seems to be a central fact of much US policy making, in the sense that it seems to contribute heavily to many other trends:
(Should policymakers expand their staff capacity, to spread out their work? Probably, but they haven’t done that recently. Maybe they’re too busy.)
Now that we have more context on the policy ecosystem, let’s take a closer look at some specific parts of it, as well as some activities that influence the government.
People usually think of working in Congress as working for a Congress member or committee. But it’s also possible to work for some other government agencies that are heavily involved in the legislative process: Congressional Research Service (CRS), Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congressional Budget Office (CBO), legislative affairs offices throughout the executive branch.
On political polarization:
A staffer explains that partisanship is what usually kills people—people get burned out on wanting to accomplish something and having that fail (sometimes at the last moment) for frustrating reasons of partisan politics.[2]
At the staff level, it’s not as partisan as it appears from the outside.
Media coverage makes people feel locked in and unable to change positions.
Ideas being labeled as Dem or Rep ideas often has little to do with ideology and much to do with which members introduced/advocated for them.
Congressional support agencies are strictly non-partisan.
Many staffers leave / burn out after a few years, but a significant minority sticks around for a long time.
What are the different roles in a Congressional office? See footnote.[3]
The big ideas tend to start from lobbyists or the White House, not Congress.
According to a staffer, the show Veep is pretty spot-on in terms of “how absurdist the process can be," "West Wing is not... it's quite idealistic," and Miss Sloane is “realistic on lobbying.”
The executive branch is where most of the money and people in government are. The Department of Defense is a very big part of it.[4]
It’s a very diverse place, with many “little kingdoms.” So getting things done often requires much interagency cooperation, through e.g. budgetary influence, charm, authority, political appointees in charge and alliances between them, political capital, other connections, etc. As one government official put it, big interagency coordinations have “complicated success, if they have success at all.”[5]
Here are just a few of the many spheres in the executive branch. They’re relevant to issues of concern to this community, and they illustrate the differences between different parts of government.
The national security (NatSec) space:
The Intelligence Community (IC):
The R&D ecosystem of government:
Agencies outside of the White House matter; a government official recounts that many decisions in the White House are deliberated on in (and had most important aspects of decided in) sub-agencies.
One speaker mentioned that the think tank where they work uses reports mostly as excuses to get meetings with policymakers. Policymakers typically don’t have time to read long reports, so they get briefed in these meetings. The think tank and its employees use their relationships with people who work with the policymaker to get these meetings.
Some US states and cities let people run ballot initiatives: people can propose legislative changes, and if these proposals get enough signatures from people in that jurisdiction (and are within the scope of what ballot initiatives are allowed to do in that jurisdiction), they go on the ballot for voters to vote on in the next election. Then, if over 50% of voters approve of a measure, it passes.
Getting a ballot initiative on voter’s ballots is mostly a matter of money, according to people with lots of relevant experience. If you pay enough people to collect signatures, you’ll get enough signatures.
Currently, long-term-oriented work in running ballot initiatives and related activities is very young, so it involves lots of trying new things and trying to think of new (adaptations of) ideas.
Notes from a professional with relevant experience:
Roughly, lobbying means asking government officials to make or change government policies.[8]
Broadly, US policy work can be very impactful because the US federal government moves lots of money (several trillion dollars each year), and because it’s the only organization with the authority to do certain things.
Before diving into the specifics of certain policy jobs, I’ll start with two more generally applicable takeaways.
_I was very pleasantly surprised by how often speakers have achieved big impact wins, and by how big some of these wins have been. _
It seems to be a common idea in the community that policy work, especially if it’s focused on emerging technologies, is high-risk. For example, the 80,000 Hours article on US AI policy work claims:
Your chances of having a large social impact by working in AI policy is highly uncertain. You would be intentionally taking a big, low probability bet, not just with regard to your own contribution (which is generally uncertain in any cause), but also with regard to the overall case that this area is promising to work in.
Hearing from the speakers makes me more skeptical of that first claim—that even if we assume AI policy or biosecurity policy are promising to work in, an individuals’ chances of making a contribution are slim. Speakers’ experiences seem to suggest that long-term-oriented US policy work is often high-risk in the sense that one may not have impact for a few months or years. But over a whole career, people who are (very) strong fits seem likely to have numerous huge wins.
(A speaker notes: Impact is highly dependent on fit. If someone is an OK fit—if they’re the kind of person who would survive in government—the expected value of their work in government is some value. If someone is an excellent fit—if they’re the kind of person who would thrive and be a policy entrepreneur, figuring out how to create high counterfactual marginal expected value and executing on it—then the expected value of their work is much higher.)
Why do I think this?
In just a few years, at least a handful of people who are very concerned with improving the impacts of emerging technologies have reached positions in the US government from which they are well-placed to contribute.
We heard from three speakers in the executive branch; of the two who discussed their impact so far:
Another speaker, over the course of just a few months, very plausibly counterfactually secured billions of dollars in government spending for a cause most of us would agree is very important. (And this speaker wasn’t even selected to give a talk based on this—I didn’t know it when I reached out to them.)
Another speaker made a case that they have a nontrivial chance of having swung a very influential election. (And this speaker wasn’t even selected to give a talk based on this—I didn’t know it when I reached out to them.)
Even if you have a career in policy that doesn’t have much direct impact, there’ll likely be lots of room for you to use policy experience and connections to advance the efforts of other very thoughtful and altruistic people.
Caveat: there were significant selection and attention effects going on—I was disproportionately likely to hear from, hear about, and remember people with unusually impactful US policy careers (that is, unusually impactful even for people in this community, which is already trying to be unusually impactful). But that caveat is mainly applicable to the first two bullet points above; the others still make a strong case.
How do people have these big wins? That brings us to our next point:
Big impact wins typically require identifying/creating, and taking, non-obvious opportunities. To have these wins, it’s critical to often ask yourself, “What would be good to see in the world that probably wouldn’t happen by default / if I weren’t there? How can I make it happen?” In fast-paced jobs, you won’t have the time or attention for that unless you very intentionally make sure you do, e.g. by blocking off some sacred time in a day or week for it.
Speakers from a wide range of policy backgrounds—the executive branch, Congress, think tanks, journalism, advocacy, running for office—seemed to generally agree on how counterfactual impact in policy works: most of the time, your work has little to no value relative to what would have happened without you, and occasionally you find/create opportunities to do extremely valuable things.
Those occasional high-value moves aren’t obvious; they won’t smack you in the face, as an impact-driven government official put it. So they require a sense of what would be good to see in the world that probably wouldn’t happen by default / if you weren’t there.
There may be high-value moves both within your job and outside of it.
In very fast-paced jobs, finding ways to pay time and attention to that is crucial for having impact wins—it’s very easy for all your attention to instead go to putting out fires.
(Note that the importance of this for impact doesn’t seem to be at all unique to US policy work; see, for example, a highly successful community builder’s discussion of a similar mindset.)
It’s typically very difficult to predict in advance which relationships will open high-impact opportunities,[10] so building a broad professional network—making many bets, in a sense—is often useful.
Ways of having positive impact in the executive branch include:
Improving the allocation of funding[11]
Improving the allocation of attention (e.g. by raising important issues in meetings)
Improving regulations
Improving US interactions with other countries
Improving who works at government (e.g. through hiring and supporting others’ careers)
Building career capital (connections, experience, reputation, etc)
For a few additional details, see footnote.[12]
Adding to that:
Broadly, working in Congress can be a promising path to positive impact because Congressional action is necessary for some important policy changes. After all, Congress has a monopoly on some influential powers (e.g. the authority and resources to shift much funding, the authority to create new agencies). On top of that, Congressional action is harder to reverse than presidential action—the next administration can’t easily undo legislation. As a rule of thumb, big, bold, long-term change tends to require Congressional action.
There’s usually just two kinds of substantive bills that Congress passes. If you want to get something done, the best way is usually to get it into one of these kinds of bills:
Big spending bills[13]
Obscure bipartisan bills
Many other bills get dropped “for stupid reasons” or are never pursued with dedication in the first place (they’re mostly for showmanship).
See footnote for additional details.[14]
People in power have no time to think; the think tanks do it for them—they make the ideas and hand them to them. Broadly, think tanks have two paths to influence:
As an example of the latter, one think tank corrected the misconception that China was far outspending the US on AI spending. The think tank was pretty sure this wasn’t true, did research and produced a better estimate, and then this stopped being a talking point.
Because people in power are super busy, they won’t read your 50 or even 15-page report. They might read a 1-page executive summary in your report, or tell one of their staff to read your report. So it’s really valuable to them if you can take ideas and make them very concrete/shovel-ready/easy to execute on. (E.g. “spend this much money on these specific things with these criteria,” not “fund this broad thing”). To be able to do this well, it’s helpful to have a good understanding of which levers different pieces of government can pull.
Another point: as discussed above, impact is often hard to predict, so it’s often more impactful to brief lots of people about research findings than to try to identify and target the few most impactful briefings.
Policy journalism has multiple paths to impact. Here are some that seem especially promising:
Making connections, by getting to know people as sources[15]
Learning a lot about how policy processes happen
Additional advice on doing impactful journalism:
A political data scientist sees three main ways in which their work has been positively impactful:
Helping politicians of one political party get elected:[19]
Thinking of new ideas: In collaboration with a few others, this data scientist drew on their expertise to think of new things they could help make happen.
Connections: This person’s job connected them to people who are very competent in policy work, which has been helpful for:
This data scientist notes that lots of value in their own career required certain choices that could easily have gone other ways, so they wouldn’t recommend political data analytics for most people for impact. Political data analytics work can involve less counterfactual impact, e.g. if it consists of making state-of-race predictions and sorting voter lists. For more details, see the section on personal fit for political data analysts.
How hard is it to win an election for federal office? I don’t know. Some relevant information:
Drawing on some relevant statistics, a political data scientist guesses that, for certain people (including a nontrivial number of people reading this), chances of getting elected to Congress if they try are about 25%.
An old 80,000 Hours article estimates, with significant guesswork, that Congressional staffers who are interested in becoming a Congress member have about a 1 in 40 chance of doing so,[20] while interested top law school graduates have about a 1 in 10 chance.
(These apparently different estimates are compatible; the political data scientist was talking about a reference class that the article wasn’t considering.)
One policy professional shared an anecdote of meeting a Congress member who had “no charisma,” and they suggested that elected officials’ talents aren’t as insurmountable as one might guess.
Another point: if you win election to Congress the first time, this doesn’t just get you into office for that term; it also gives a massive boost to your chances of winning future elections. For the past several decades, reelection rates in the US Senate and House of Representatives have hovered around 90%. So the above odds aren’t just estimated odds of someone winning one term in office—they’re close to being estimated odds of someone winning a career as a Congress member.
If you manage to win federal elected office (e.g. become a Congress member), you’ll have plenty of room for counterfactual impact. This is because many people reading this would have both the personal assets and the political wiggle room to help solve pressing problems.
Personal assets:
A professional with relevant experience explains that, while there are plenty of good-hearted people in office, Congress is in short supply of people with certain qualities: people who are evidence minded, careful thinkers, who care about the consequences of their actions, and who have strong truth-seeking drives, as well as people who can prioritize time and effort based on considerations of scale, neglectedness, and tractability.
It also helps (for one’s ability to do better than the person who would otherwise hold the seat) that elected office filters heavily for qualities other than policy making competence; this leaves open plenty of room for improvement along competence dimensions.
Political wiggle room:
As discussed above, elected Congress members—especially those in safe states—are very safe in primaries and general elections. And it’s not like they’re barely scraping by in these elections; of the 435 general elections for US House of Representative seats in 2020, for example, only 77 were decided by margins of less than 10%.
Comfortable prospects of reelection give elected officials some wiggle room in what they do. For example, politicians can often choose whether to be allies or champions of causes. This wiggle room is especially available when it comes to obscure issues; as a political data scientist puts it, you won’t get primaried (defeated in a primary election) for spending political capital on some technocratic thing.
Plenty of politicians in fact do this (spend some political capital on obscure bills). For example, lots of Senators put political capital into the recent tech and manufacturing bill, which isn’t making many headlines. See Matt Yglesias’ discussion of “Secret Congress” for more discussion of these dynamics.
As noted earlier, getting ballot initiatives on voter’s ballots mostly just requires paying enough signature collectors. That doesn’t mean impact-driven communities should put every ballot initiative they can afford onto ballots; there’s risks to watch out for, including risks of reputational damage, risks that a good-seeming proposal is actually harmful, risks that a good proposal will crowd out even better alternatives, and risks of motivating counter-initiatives (initiatives that try to reverse earlier initiatives).
Still, ballot initiative campaigns can be powerful levers for city-level and state-level change (there are no nationwide ballot initiatives). They’ve been very successful in advancing animal welfare, and they may soon help secure about $50 million in funding for pandemic preparedness research. Ballot initiatives may be promising tools (or inconvenient thorns?) for emerging technology safety research and governance more broadly, given that California and Massachusetts—two states that are home to many leading research universities and tech companies—allow ballot initiatives. It would be easy for such ballot initiatives to accidentally cause harm (e.g. by incentivizing companies to move to different states), so anyone interested in this would be wise to collaborate closely with experts who’ve thought carefully about relevant risks.
What does one need to run a ballot initiative campaign that has lots of positive impact? According to someone who has done this, a campaign director should coordinate several kinds of domain experts, to draw on legal, political, issue-specific, and campaign expertise—see footnote for more details.[21]
In addition to the above coordination, you need funding, and you need to actually run the initiative (e.g. get signatures).
Some insights from a professional with relevant experience:
Detailed knowledge of what’s going on inside relevant decision-making bodies is very useful for advocacy/lobbying.[22]
Some issues—especially those for which potential benefits would be highly diffused—have many people willing to be allies, but few or no champions, i.e. people dedicated to taking initiative and pushing on the issue. So such advocates can make a huge difference. As one experienced advocate put it, for ensuring good things happen, sometimes “you need someone in the room yelling about how important this is.”[23]
Promising tactics for advocacy can include the following, if they are done well—see footnote.[24]
As discussed in the above section, personal fit is very important for how much impact one has in policy careers.
Before we get into specific policy jobs, these things make someone a good fit for policy work generally:
Being willing and able to work well with—and ideally get along well with—people who have very different views than you (very important)
Strong communication skills
People skills
Self-censorship skills[26]
Writing well
Communicating verbally well (both in informal and formal settings)
Being able to keep an eye on—and carve out time for—what matters most (see the above discussion of this).[27]
Being fine with clustered impact, i.e. with occasionally doing very valuable things and usually working on things you may not see as especially high-priority
Having a high hedonic setpoint[28]
Analytical skill (ability to analyze an issue, use evidence to reach conclusions)
Willingness to operate with mainstream conventions (e.g. wear nice clothes, network)
I was surprised that speakers didn’t much more heavily emphasize social skills/charisma. From their advice, it seems that people can be strong fits for policy work—even if they're not exceptionally charismatic—if they can get by with the social stuff (are pleasant to work with, not shy about reaching out to and talking with people), are OK with the quirks and warts of policy world culture, and are good at job-specific skills (e.g. writing for some jobs).[29]
A relatively low-cost test way to test your personal fit for policy work is spending time in government-adjacent DC think tanks. You’ll spend time with folks with government experience.[30] In addition, you’ll get to see how the policy process works; you get a better sense of how the process works end-to-end than you would even in some agencies.
What makes think tank work a good fit for someone?
One person at a think tank explains that they really like their work because they really enjoy interacting with people and learning about different issues.[32]
It can require a tolerance for dealing with issues around funders (depending on the think tank).
Traditionally, think tank work (at least in one professional’s experience) required tolerance for being frequently interrupted in your work, as well as being present for others’ work.
The cliche image of a DC think tank: vague talking around issues and never really saying anything of substance, while saying nice things and wearing nice clothes
Your experience will be determined by your manager and your team—it’ll be hard to get info from their website/what others have said online.
What makes political data analytics a comparative advantage for someone? These things help:
One professional with relevant experience suggested that, while not everyone in this community is a good fit for running for office in the US, some people definitely are.
What makes someone a good fit for being a US political candidate? These things are important, they explain:
These things are also good signs about your chances of being elected (they help, but they are not necessary):
Personal fit is very individual-dependent, so talking with someone who has relevant experience is very helpful for assessing fit and getting started—a relevant professional’s #1 recommendation for people who might be good fits (e.g. some of the above things apply to them) is to talk to them. Message me on this forum, and I might be able to put you in touch. Also message me / fill that out if reading this section makes you think of someone who might be a good fit.
If you’re on the fence about getting in touch, please go for it!
Generally, typical day-to-day work for policy professionals seems to consist largely of meetings and emails. Some jobs also involve different things; as you might expect, research jobs tend to involve more writing and research, while more senior roles can involve hiring and project/people management. Some policy jobs (e.g. some Congressional staffer / national security jobs) are very fast-paced and involve long hours; others policy jobs (e.g. many research roles in some think tanks and Congressional support agencies) are more moderate-paced and offer better work-life balance. Within a job, busyness varies somewhat depending on current events.
Here’s how a handful of people described their own experiences in various policy jobs:
Edit: When writing Part 2, I realized a little of that content would fit better in this post. To make it easier for people who already read the above to find this extra content, here it is.
More on paths to impact:
More details on personal fit:
More details on what the policy world is like:
A companion post with more concrete advice on how to take steps toward these careers is available here.
If you have an additional/different perspective on policy careers that you’d like to share in the comments, please do so!
Details:
A staffer worked on a policy for a few years, and then it failed because Alex Jones started talking about it. ↩︎
This Reddit post offers an engaging, informal description. ↩︎
Within the US executive branch, the largest department by number of employees is the Department of Defense (DoD). Employing about 3 million people in total, the DoD is also the biggest employer in the world. ↩︎
They add: Some relevant actors can and do just ignore you, some just pay lip service, and some work against your efforts. All different groups bring their “equities”: Their relevant interests as well as authorities. All these perspectives have to be taken into account. ↩︎
A policy professional mentioned that the Secretary of Defense (or of State?) should have 1-2 things they’re trying to accomplish, outside of putting out fires; if they can manage to do so, that’s considered a success. ↩︎
Major R&D agencies:
See this Reddit post for an engaging, informal primer. ↩︎
Caveat: some of these wins have not yet paid out, and for some it’s hard to be confident about the counterfactual. ↩︎
As one example of this, a policy professional went on a panel that seemed like a bad use of an afternoon, but that brought about an exciting collaboration over a year later. ↩︎
Congress allocates funding at a high level, but it still leaves a lot of room for executive branch agencies to decide precisely what to fund. ↩︎
Additional details:
One speaker said: Big appropriations (funding) bills are “roughly speaking the only thing Congress does” and a significant fraction of the impact of Congress. ↩︎
Additional details:
E.g. got to know economists who later became head economists for Trump. Knew others who’ve now been hired by Biden, they’re cagier now but you keep up those relationships. ↩︎
Some of their suggestions for picking good topics and approaches:
Advice:
Advice:
Of course, the value of this depends on which political party is better and by how much, and there’s inefficiencies from the zero-sum dynamics of campaigns. Still, maybe figuring that out isn’t quite as hard as some make it out to be. ↩︎
As the article notes, a key input into this estimate is guesswork. ↩︎
Experts that ballot initiative campaign managers should coordinate:
E.g. talking to Congresspersons and their staff helped a policy professional learn about an extremely promising advocacy opportunity. ↩︎
Holden Karnofsky makes a similar point about opportunities to help diffused beneficiaries here. ↩︎
Potentially promising advocacy tactics include:
I’d guess this is because this is especially challenging for many in this community, since many here strongly hold values that are relatively rare, e.g. caring (not just superficially/shallowly/occasionally) about people in other countries, animals, and distant future generations. ↩︎
One speaker chose journalism over policy work because policy work would require much more reputation caution/self-censorship than they’re able/willing to do. ↩︎
As a policy professional put it, this might not be crucial for succeeding at a day-to-day level, but it’s crucial for succeeding at counterfactual impact / the things that motivated you to go into government. ↩︎
This is useful because a lot of the work is pretty depressing (especially in e.g. national security), and lots of the work is a grind/not intrinsically rewarding. A professional in national security recounts: they and people they work with read lots of raw intelligence, and it’s always something unhappy (someone has a bioweapon, is producing a new kind of nuclear weapon, bad human rights abuse, etc). ↩︎
I asked a policy professional about this, and this paragraph seems accurate to them. They add: extraversion may be more needed for elected office and certain specific staff roles (it’s hard to say which ones in general), but extraversion isn’t a general requirement; many introverts succeed in DC. A supporting anecdote: the author of this post, who got an entry-level job in Congress, describes themselves as “neither highly extroverted nor highly charismatic.” ↩︎
In think tank settings usually pretty candid about experiences and good mentors ↩︎
Related details:
They add: people who prefer focusing independently on a single topic are less good fits. ↩︎
This is excellent and is amongst the most thoughtful reflections on impact via policy that I've read, so thanks for writing it up.
I lead a policy team in the UK Civil Service working on a classic EA cause area and lots of the content here about routes to impact chimes with my experience, though obviously the institutional set-up in the UK is different.
From my experience, the points under the heading: 'Big impact wins require taking the time to look for non-obvious opportunities' are incredibly important. There are often super exciting opportunities for impact that sit outside of what your boss directly expects you to be doing and these can be reasonably easy to achieve if you cultivate the discipline of lifting your head above the grind to reflect on available opportunities and also then protecting enough time to pursue them alongside your more standard obligations.