About Craig Bolin
Army Infantry, political science, and a second career thinking about how technology should be governed.
Background
I grew up curious about how systems work and how people end up inside them. Joining the U.S. Army Infantry at 19 was part of that. You see how a large institution actually operates from the inside, what breaks, what holds it together, and who carries the weight when plans meet reality.
Over eight years in the infantry and Pennsylvania Army National Guard, I served as a team leader, deployed to Iraq, and earned the Combat Infantryman Badge along with multiple Army Commendation and Achievement Medals. I left the service as a Sergeant (E-5) with a clearer picture of what good policy looks like on the ground, and what bad policy costs the people implementing it.
From Operator to Policy
After the Army I worked in small-business operations and instructional training, including a stint at ASM Research developing training for Army medical personnel. In 2024 I completed a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, summa cum laude, from Florida Atlantic University. Phi Kappa Phi, top of the class. That is when I started taking policy seriously as a career rather than an interest.
I am now a Master of Public Policy candidate at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, expected to graduate in December 2026. This semester I am taking a national security course with former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, writing legislative policy on veteran healthcare accountability (the MISSION Act and Third-Party Administrators), and digging into the AI-governance literature in earnest.
What I Care About
The thing that pulls me forward is a pretty specific gap: we have AI systems and emerging technologies that can do things we do not yet have the policy infrastructure to govern. Not just regulatory enforcement. The deeper question is what oversight looks like for systems that evolve faster than the committees meant to oversee them. The veteran-healthcare work is a smaller version of the same problem, where large contracted systems operate with weak accountability loops.
I bring two things most tech-policy researchers do not. First, an operator’s reflex, always asking how a rule would actually run, not just how it reads. Second, a willingness to keep learning uncomfortable things in public, which is how I ended up teaching myself enough software and systems to run my own research agents.
Outside the Work
I sim-race on iRacing, have a lot of opinions about instrument clusters, and keep an art and tattoo portfolio on this site because those years still matter to who I am. You can see some of that work on the art page.