In the last few years, I’ve had an up-close view of Congress and the National Science Foundation thanks to consecutive AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowships. In this talk, I will explain the whole federal government (time permitting). If an hour isn’t long enough, you can be confident that you’ll learn something about the relationship between Congress and the Executive Branch and why mathematicians have a role to play in maintaining the functionality (and functoriality?) of that relationship.

From October 2022 to August 2023, I worked with the majority staff of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee of the United States Senate. In that role, I developed a policy portfolio that started with federal information systems and expanded to include artificial intelligence (and algorithms in general) and, accidentally, federal financial assistance coordination and oversight. From September 2023 to February 2025, I worked with the National Science Foundation Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, Division of Information and Intelligent Systems, Robust Intelligence Cluster. My policy portfolio at NSF also included artificial intelligence, but from a very different perspective!