Alumni Spotlight: Dylan Desjardins
We have been fortunate to have on our team for the past four years recent Trachtenberg MPP graduate Dylan Desjardins (2022)! Dylan is now a full time analyst with the US Government Accountability Office, where he enjoys the opportunity to help government make positive changes that improve lives.
The Public Policy program’s courses on benefit-cost analysis and monetary/fiscal policy were foundational parts of Dylan’s GW experience and his achievement of a career in public service. His professors were open and helpful to guide their students to delve deeper into complicated subjects that policy work demands.
Professor Susan Dudley’s Regulatory Comment Clinic provided opportunities to explore concepts of administrative law and agency authority, which Dylan further applied to his work with the Regulatory Studies Center.
While at the Center, Dylan submitted a comment related to the Food and Drug Administration’s proposed rule to create national standards for companies in the prescription drug supply chain. “This was one of the first times I went truly ‘under the hood’ in trying to understand an agency regulation, looking past the high-level goals to the intricacies of how each step might actually play out and comparing its process to administrative processes.” Pointing out potential problems and inconsistencies in their proposed rules is how agencies make sure that their final regulations are bulletproof, and actually achieve goals when they go into effect, Dylan said. “In my comment I suggested that FDA look into these issues further, explore additional data to strengthen its analysis, and evaluate the implementation of standards to see if it matches expectations.”
A capstone project became another highlight, in which Dylan’s group explored the use of agile regulatory strategies at federal agencies. The classmates examined practices at the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation, and how they used agile regulation to meet their mandates.
“Thinking about how the Department of Transportation should manage self-driving cars and drones is an interesting use case for agile regulation – and the trade-offs of too much versus too little supervision are probably the most intuitive to the public. Government bodies have done things like create ‘sandboxes’ or contained areas to experiment with these technologies, but at what pace authorities should allow companies to put potentially dangerous technology on the roads is always going to be a deeply fraught question, one that involves so many unknowns traditional benefit-cost analysis is not that useful.”
Dylan made many valuable contributions to the work of the Regulatory Studies Center in the past four years, including coding and analyzing data outputs from the Federal Register to support our Regulation Digest newsletter each week. He is a talented writer, as demonstrated through an insight he wrote on potential regulation of deepfake technology. Would agencies like the Federal Election Commission or the National Security Agency have the legal authority to meaningfully place limits on or curb uses of deepfake video technologies? “I noted how complicated it was trying to piece together where this cutting-edge digital technique fit into the statutory authorities of agencies founded when deepfakes were all but unimaginable. In the two years since this commentary was written, I’m sure the puzzle of how to manage AI-created deepfakes has become even more potent and complicated!”
What’s on Dylan’s future wishlist for tackling a policy challenge? He’d like to see someone take on shrinkflation and write a rule that successfully protects consumer interests while avoiding the creation of heavy-handed burdens on businesses.
When he’s not poring over government statistics and proposed rules, you can find Dylan on the pickleball courts and riding his bicycle around the many new bike lanes DC has introduced recently. Our colleagues at the RSC will be looking forward to many wonky conversations at upcoming GW alumni events, Dylan!