Fiscal policy · machine-readable law · data engineering

Thurston Powers

I build systems that make law and government data useful.

I began in fiscal-policy research, where working with XBRL introduced me to machine-readable law and led me into software engineering and database architecture. I still work across both sides of that divide: part software engineer, part policy analyst.

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Now

Exploring what comes next

I’m most useful where policy knowledge meets messy public data: designing legal corpora, building resilient ingestion systems, improving search and retrieval, and turning ambitious research ideas into dependable software.

Experience

Chief Data Engineer

Vulcan Technologies · YC-backed startup

Dec 2025 – Aug 2026
  • Built the company’s legal database across federal, state, and municipal government sources.
  • Developed collection and normalization systems for regulations, registers, statutes, acts, executive orders, constitutions, court rules, bills, guidance, budgets, municipal codes, meetings, and zoning data.
  • Expanded coverage to nearly every state, Washington, DC, the federal government, and at least one source from roughly 19,000 municipalities.
  • Created AI-assisted crawlers that autonomously identify guidance documents and agency datasets.

Senior AI Software Engineer · AI Software Engineer

Institute for Humane Studies

Sep 2024 – Dec 2025
  • Led engineering for AI-assisted legal search, legislative data pipelines, and public-policy research tools.
  • Built and operated ETL pipelines for state and federal legislation, laws, regulations, proposed rules, and related sources.
  • Designed relational, document, graph, and vector data systems plus APIs for legal research products.
  • Built ScholarsEdge, a search platform for statutes, regulations, bills, and scholarly research.
  • Built Excalibur, an Electron application combining a VS Code-like workspace, a writing environment, and constrained agents for repeatable policy research.

AI Engineer · Data Engineer · Data Analyst

Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Nov 2018 – Sep 2024
  • Progressed from policy analytics into data engineering and then AI engineering.
  • Served as database administrator for State RegData, managed its public API, and supported the collection pipelines that turned state regulations and statutes into longitudinal data.
  • Extended State RegData with topic clustering and durable document references that allowed the same regulatory documents to be tracked consistently over time.
  • Finished my time as a data engineer by building Nukebot, a retrieval-augmented research assistant for nuclear-energy law and regulation.
  • As an AI engineer, built a legislation bot that matched bills to researchers and a concept graph designed for long, heterogeneous legal documents.
  • Led engineers building applied-AI tools and managed supporting AWS infrastructure.

Research Manager · Legislative Analyst

American Legislative Exchange Council

Jun 2017 – Nov 2018
  • Authored and managed major fiscal-policy publications, including Unaccountable and Unaffordable, Other Post-Employment Benefit Liabilities, and State Bonded Obligations.
  • Authored op-eds, policy briefs, and other public-facing analysis on state tax and fiscal issues.
  • Helped organize and run Tax and Fiscal Policy Task Force meetings.
  • Presented research at ALEC conferences and traveled to state capitals to testify, brief policymakers, and conduct legislative outreach.
  • Supported legislators and other stakeholders working on tax and fiscal-policy issues, particularly in the Northeast.

Policy Analyst

Yankee Institute for Public Policy

Jun 2015 – Jan 2017
  • Researched and authored Where Has All the Money Gone?, using historical budget records from the Connecticut State Library to reconstruct the state’s fiscal history after the adoption of its income tax.
  • Contributed to Taxes at Home, a town-by-town comparison of municipal spending, including deeper analysis of several of the state’s highest-spending municipalities.
  • Produced government-finance research, statistical analyses, visualizations, policy briefs, and public commentary.

Education & credentials

Master’s Degree in Public Policy

NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service

Public policy, economics, finance, econometrics, large-scale data analysis, and data visualization.