For thirty years, I was one of the people who ran the American federal government — across five Cabinet agencies, from GS-3 to GS-15, co-authoring strategic plans and directing billion-dollar budgets at some of the country's most consequential institutions.

At 48, a rare neuromuscular disease ended that career. At 50, I started a new one.

I write to translate what the government actually does — not what politicians say about it — for citizens who deserve to understand what they have, and what they stand to lose. My op-eds in The Hill, my essays in AGNI and the Yale Review, and my book An Informed Citizenry: How the Modern Federal Government Operates all begin from the same place: the belief that an informed citizenry is the only reliable check on power, and that most Americans have never been given the information they need to be one.

Politics gets the airtime. Government does the work. I'm here to explain the work.