What's new on emergingtechpolicy.org

Emergingtechpolicy.org got a revamp! We hope you enjoy the new look of our policy career resource site and some new content, written to help you navigate a career in tech policy.

Some highlights of the past year:

We’ve been expanding our repertoire of “policy lever” guides, exploring major policy tools that impact emerging technologies. This year, we added:

• Technical standards & evals

• Export controls

• Regulatory policy (a very broad category—but we try to break it down)

We also added profiles on two new federal agencies—NIST (housing CAISI), and the National Nuclear Security Administration. Keep an eye out for our upcoming Treasury profile as well, another agency that was assigned major AI security work in June’s executive order (more about this here).

We’ve also built out some of our foundational career advice:

• We added a PhD guide to tell you why you probably shouldn’t get a PhD to help you think through when it might make sense to pursue a PhD and how to optimize your PhD for a policy career.

• We overhauled our security clearance guide: Have you ever wondered if you’re eligible for a clearance, what’s involved in getting one, or why you should care? If so, you’re in luck. If not, you’re probably wondering those things now. In either case, you should check out the guide!

I’m also coming up on two years of working on emergingtechpolicy.org and living in DC, which is as good an excuse as any to share my biggest takeaways from writing career guides, talking with people across the AI policy world, and spending too much time deciding whether it’s DoE or DOE (it's DOE). Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Government is just normal people working on really big things.

When I first came to DC, places like OMB and OSTP felt like distant lands where Ivy Leaguers in expensive suits and shiny shoes deliberated on Important Issues at big oval tables in ornate buildings, with their security details in waiting.

Last fall, I interned at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the White House office that reviews major federal regulations before they’re finalized. Some parts of the West Wing depiction were true: I was interviewed at a (small) oval table, the White House campus was indeed beautiful, and there was the occasional Secret Service agent in our building. But for the most part, it was a lot of spreadsheet enthusiasts making wonky jokes over coffee and getting deep in the weeds on 100+ page regulatory proposals. We played “guess the executive order” at our holiday party, if that gives you a feel for how suave we all were.

If you think you have to be a Senator’s grandchild or ultra-networked Yale graduate to have major influence in DC, that’s thankfully not true.

2. Ask what the acronym means.

The way that policy gets made is pretty opaque from the outside (which is one of the things we’re hoping to change through emergingtechpolicy.org!). There’s inscrutable jargon to learn, legal precedents to follow, and mappings of political influence to track. Though no one stands a chance at knowing everything about government, I like to think I’ve developed a good system for getting up to speed on the corners that most interest me.

It’s not much of a secret that you can learn relevant information many times faster in conversations with the right people than online (with the possible exception of

I used to think I needed to come into these conversations having memorized every reorganization of their office since 1978, the position of everyone in their org chart, and the names of their last three predecessors, or it wouldn’t be worth their time. That’s not the case, though.

Of course, it’s good to come into conversations knowing the basics when you can, especially if you’re the one who asked to chat. But keep in mind that 1) the most important things about an office generally aren’t Googleable (e.g. “what do staff there prioritize?” or “how much sway does the office have?”), 2) people like explaining things they know a lot about, and 3) there are lots of “unknown unknowns.” In other words, you won’t always come into a conversation knowing the most important question to ask. You often figure that out by being really curious and asking dumb questions. Ask what the acronym means!

3. Take lots of notes, both on people you meet and things you learn.

It’s difficult to keep up with 200+ executive branch agencies. It’s also difficult to keep up with the hundreds of people you’ll start seeing more than once, especially if you (like me) aren’t the strongest in the names-and-faces department.

My best advice here: take 10 minutes after events, coffees, and the like to jot down (or dictate) whom you talked to and the most important things you discussed. It will strengthen your mental model of the ecosystem and make it easier to say things like “last time we talked, your office was thinking about X, what’s new?”. People will be glad to know you remembered.

You’ll get even more benefit from this practice if you’ve set up a system for tracking your professional connections (which could be as simple as a four-column spreadsheet or as elaborate as a personal CRM).

4. Build feedback loops and celebrate your wins.

Policy impact is often “fuzzy” and “lumpy”—that is, hard to see and predict. You might never interact with the people whom your work touches, assigning credit is difficult in such a collaborative field, and it can be hard to know which parts of your work will ultimately matter most.

This arguably applies even more to the impact of helping people build successful policy careers, which is another step removed from the concrete changes that flow from policy.1

I think there are two important things it’s worth trying to create for yourself in hard-to-assess fields like policy: 1) a way of understanding and iterating on what you’re trying to achieve, even with limited feedback loops, and 2) a way to feel some part of your impact, even when many steps removed from it.

Our first Launchpad guest, Todd Moss, has excellent advice on understanding what you’re trying to achieve: in short, invest a lot of upfront time into thinking through your theory of change (or as Todd calls it, your impact value chain). What is your ultimate goal, what is the near-term result that needs to be achieved, and what could you do to best achieve that? You can iterate on the answers to these questions by pressure-testing your plan with experts in your policy area and considering the kinds of data you could collect to test whether your approach is working.

On feeling your impact: I think this looks like cherishing the wins you do learn about, and extrapolating to the many under the iceberg that you will never see. If you contributed to getting a policy passed and you hear about the difference it made in someone’s life, write a little quote from that and put it up as a sticky note somewhere you’ll see it. At Horizon we share wins in our team Slack, which is a great source of motivation.2

5. Increase your surface area for luck.

If you’re neutral on going to that event or getting that coffee, consider that the upside of going could be a conversation that leads to your next job or project, whereas the upside of binging Grey’s Anatomy is that you’ll be closer to the end of Grey’s Anatomy. (“Neutral” is the key word here: you do not have to close down every happy hour in Dupont.)

I’ve experienced this on a personal level—I likely wouldn’t have started a role in the Texas Senate without a few serendipitous encounters with a veteran lobbyist in the Texas House—but it’s been even more compelling to witness the way this dynamic plays out at just about every one of Horizon’s events. In the aftermath of a typical workshop, we get an influx of messages like, “because of this conversation, I’m now collaborating with X person on this project,” or “this mentor is now floating my names to offices I’m excited about”. Getting a few dozen ambitious, smart people in a room together has led to some of our biggest wins.

6. Work on something important with people you want to spend time with.

Of course, it’s hard to determine the second part ex ante—but seeking out people who care about helping others and share your sense of what matters is a pretty good bet. On that note, we’re hiring!

Thank you to the many people across policy who have contributed to Emerging Tech Policy guides, whether by lending your expertise, helping spread the word, or giving us ideas for what to write next.