Dear friend of Lincoln:
I’d like to share with you some of our team’s recent work on a range of issues, from national security, to tech regulation, to modernizing governance. I also want to introduce you to our growing team.
Lincoln’s Voice
Our Executive Director, Zach Graves, announced that Lincoln is adopting an “open voice policy” to allow our policy experts and fellows to “have their own views, endorse positions, and openly disagree with other team members so long as it’s within the scope of Lincoln’s work, values, and mission.”
New Fellows
Geoffrey Cain and Deepesh Chaudhari have joined our team in partnership with the Plaintext Group through the Fellowship on Advancing Critical and Emerging Technologies.
Geoff is a technologist, foreign correspondent, and author of two books: The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future, and Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech. Before joining Lincoln, Geoff was a TechCongress fellow with the House Foreign Relations Committee. His work has appeared in The Economist, Time, and the Wall Street Journal.
Deepesh is an experienced technologist, startup founder, and community builder. Before Lincoln, he worked for ProtonMail on a team fighting platform abuse and disinformation. In India, he co-founded a civic-tech company to bridge the communication gap between residents and their local governments.
We also welcomed Evan Swarztrauber as a senior advisor for tech and telecom policy. Evan is a director at Clout Public Affairs, and he previously served at the Federal Communications Commission as a policy advisor to Chairman Ajit Pai and FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr.
Research
Our policy research team was busy in Q1 working on projects aimed to make the future happen sooner, strengthen national security, and improve American governance.
We continued to research ways the federal government can leverage technology to manage national security risks. In my report with Lars Schönander, “Using Technology and Data Analysis to Improve Oversight of Foreign Influence in American Postsecondary Education” we identified problems with how the Department of Education tracked and published data about foreign contribution disclosures for colleges and universities. With Congress currently considering legislation to reform these disclosure rules, we offered recommendations for ways the Department of Education can improve transparency.
In March, I published a paper, “The Case for Reforming and Strengthening K-12 Education R&D,” which considers how policymakers can make the future happen sooner in the education sector. For years, Lincoln has been analyzing ways to spur technological innovation through research and development. This report examined the disappointing history of federal education R&D activities and provided recommendations for government oversight and reforms to improve learning opportunities for American children.
Nathan Uldrichs published an essay on“Why the Right Needs to Study Management Policy in American Governance,” in The American Mind. His research extends Lincoln’s past work on improving governance, which has traditionally focused on Congress and its support agencies, to the executive branch. Nathan argues that without a governing management agenda, “conservatives risk being like the dog that catches the car, lacking the specific knowledge to command the federal bureaucracy and implement their governing agenda.”
We also continued our work focusing on modernizing Congress and improving government oversight. Lars upgraded a website he created to organize and publish videos from all Senate committee proceedings in one place.
At the end of March, we were very pleased to see a new proposal in Congress to leverage the Government Accountability Office’s nonpartisan oversight, an issue that Zach and I have been writing about since 2019. The proposal could save taxpayers tens (if not hundreds) of billions of dollars, as I’ve explained in The Hill.
Commentary
Our policy team has continued to publish timely commentary on Big Tech, national security threats, geopolitical competition, and efforts to strengthen American governance.
Luke Hogg has been busy analyzing the latest tech policy developments on Capitol Hill, writing about lawmakers’ plans for regulating stablecoins, Congress’s attempts to reshape antitrust law with a focus on Big Tech, the latest bill to regulate data privacy, and the Federal Aviation Administration and Federal Communications Commission’s debates over the ongoing 5G rollout.
With Congress working on finalizing its China competition legislation, Lars analyzed how the People’s Republic of China is exploiting the lack of transparency regarding foreign contributions to colleges and universities for the Washington Examiner. Geoff analyzed the House-passed America COMPETES Act and warned that American industrial policy is spread too thin.
I wrote about an encouraging initiative in Florida to improve the state’s cyber-risk management in the Examiner, continuing our work to improve state and local cybersecurity capacity.
In January, I wrote about the ongoing work of the House Modernization Committee and why Congress should expand the Rule of Seven statute to encourage more bipartisan fact-finding oversight.
The Realignment Podcast
Marshall Kosloff and Saagar Enjeti have continued to host fascinating conversations on their podcast The Realignment, which is sponsored by Lincoln. Each episode considers a different aspect of the “shifting views on national security, economics, technology, and the role of government in our lives” that are driving today’s political changes. Many of their conversations in Q1 focused on the war in Ukraine, featuring prominent national security experts such as Amy Zegart, William Drozdiak, Ian Morris and Sean McFate. Marshall also interviewed Jennifer Sciubba, author of 8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World, and Christian Brose, author ofThe Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare.
Events
In March, Senior Fellow Antonio García Martínez hosted a Callin conversation with PayPal Founders Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Luke Nosek, and author Jimmy Soni on The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley. That month, we also co-hosted an event with the Manhattan Institute on Web3 and the Future of Big Tech.
Thank you for following our work. We appreciate your continued interest in Lincoln Network and our mission and welcome any questions or feedback.
Dan Lips
Head of Policy
Lincoln Network
