Why More EAs Should Work in Government

By policy_wonk @ 2025-09-09T13:54 (+18)

When people think about high-impact careers, government roles are often undervalued. The EA community has historically prioritized causes like global health, existential risk, and farmed animal welfare, areas where the problems are vast, neglected, and tractable. For each of these causes, there’s a crucial lever for change that we are underutilizing: working in government institutions. 

To be clear, government work isn’t absent from EA’s radar. In fact, careers in AI governance, biosecurity policy, and nuclear safety, which are three of the top priorities on the 80,000 hours high-impact careers list, explicitly recommend government service. 

So what’s missing?

While government work is discussed in some cause areas, working inside of government itself is not consistently treated as a core, cross-cutting priority. It’s often framed narrowly or adjacently to think tanks, diplomacy, or consulting on existential risk. But the truth is, the vast machinery of government touches almost every EA-relevant issue, from farmed animal welfare and global health to housing. These domains shape billions of lives and trillions in spending, and yet very few EAs are contributing high-impact work in the agencies and departments where much of that power is wielded. 

That makes working in government a neglected and underexplored path, for every one EA working at a federal agency or state department, there are a dozen working in academia, nonprofit, or think tanks. If we want to influence systemic levers like law, regulation, and public funding for wide-spread and lasting change, we need far more EA-aligned professionals working within public institutions. 

To illustrate what this could look like, a new nonprofit, Food Policy Pathways (FPP), launched earlier this year to help values-aligned professionals pursue government roles across the U.S. that shape our food system. Their theory is simple: if we want a more humane and resilient food future, we need the right people in government designing the policies that govern it, and which can impact billions of animal and human lives. FPP provides mentorship and free career coaching to help make that pipeline possible. 

These efforts point to thinking of government policy in a broader way: government can be a major source of long-term funding and infrastructure for impactful work. While private philanthropy in farmed animal protection totals around $220 million annually, government funding towards these same goals, through grants, salaries, and institutional budgets, have the potential to dwarf that amount. By comparison, the budgets of public institutions like the USDA and NIH stretch into the billions each year, vastly outpacing what private grants can provide. While it’s true that not all of this capital can be redirected toward high-impact causes, the public sector remains an underleveraged resource for values-aligned work. 

Of course, not all government roles are equally impactful. Entry-level staffer jobs, obscure agency positions, or narrow administrative roles may not offer immediate influence. But this isn’t unique to government, it’s true of any field. What matters is cultivating an ecosystem of EAs who are willing to do the slow, strategic work of building trust, learning institutional levers, and climbing the ladder toward durable influence. In turn, they can then go on to teach, guide, and uplift others following this path.

If 100 Effective Altruists were choosing their careers today, how many should enter government? At least 20? Probably more. The point is not to prescribe a number, but to reframe government work as essential infrastructure for EA goals, not just a side route. 

So what do we need? We need existing organizations to support talent entering public institutions by adding available public service opportunities to job boards, and including the role of government as a lever for change at summits or conferences. We need greater funding to build these pipelines and sustain people in impactful roles, especially those that may not pay much but have the power to shape meaningful, long-term policy change. Just as crucially, we need more individuals willing to do the careful work inside the system, learning how institutions function and identifying points of influence over time. And we need broader recognition across the EA community that lasting progress often comes through public infrastructure, not just private innovation.

If this community is serious about scale, neglectedness, and tractability, we can’t afford to overlook government as a career path. It’s time to treat public institutions as core terrain for impact. 

David_Moss @ 2025-09-09T19:04 (+5)

For reference, about 10% of EAs in the last EA Survey reported their career plan as working in government or policy. That's not very far behind the top categories, and it doesn't account for the 14% of respondents still deciding.