Research Is Not Neutral: How Design Became a Weapon in Public Policy

Jul 8

This piece builds upon the Advancing Research talk I delivered in March 2025, combining reflection, warning, and calls to action. It’s about: (1) administrative burden and design as exclusion; (2) research as a site of power (not just empathy or neutrality); (3) trauma by design, and the systems built around cruelty; and (4) what we can still do, even if this bill passes.

July 8, 2025

Note: This was originally shared on LinkedIn on July 2, 2025.

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Using public research to justify harm instead of prevent it is a betrayal of its intended purpose.

Editor’s Note: This piece was written on June 30 and July 1, 2025, as the “One Big Beautiful Bill” advanced through Congress. This is a fast-moving story, and while elements of the bill are still under debate, its core implications remain deeply concerning, especially for those working at the intersection of design, research, and public policy. This piece also continues ideas I shared in my talk, “Design’s Power to Heal and Harm,” at Rosenfeld Media's Advancing Research conference in March 2025.

There’s a fantasy many in civic tech still cling to – that good-intentioned research is a neutral act. That designers and researchers, armed with human-centered tools and a bias toward empathy, are here to do good. That if we listen just a bit harder, map more journeys, and ask better and more thoughtful questions, justice will somehow magically follow.

But research has never been neutral. It has always been embedded in power: who asks the questions, who gets heard, what gets written down, and whose pain is considered the “insight.”

We’re watching this fantasy unravel in real time with the Trump administration’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” — a corporate-aligned policy agenda masquerading as modernization. Framed as a fix for government inefficiency, the bill advances sweeping proposals: deep cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, rollbacks of clean energy investments, and attempts to limit state-level regulation of artificial intelligence — all while adding $3.3 trillion to the national deficit. This isn’t innovation but rather aestheticized cruelty. And public research is being used to justify it.

No Guardrails, No Accountability

I come to this moment as both a design researcher and a licensed clinical social worker. In my field, there are guardrails created by humans – ethical codes, licensing boards, and real consequences for harm. In design, there are none. No code of ethics. No professional body. No formal acknowledgment of the power we hold when we extract stories, distill pain, or “generate insights” that justify decisions already made.

Too often, research in civic tech is performative and conducted just long enough to check a box or legitimize a roadmap. Participants are interviewed not to share or build power, but to confirm assumptions. And when ethical concerns are raised — about equity, trauma, safety, or harm — they’re not seen as meaningful inputs, but rather as distractions. More often, they’re misunderstood, minimized, or ignored entirely because they don’t align with the logic of speed, sprints, and deliverables.

What results is something I’ve come to call trauma by design: overt and nuanced practices, policies, and systems that don’t just fail people, but are intentionally being designed around slow forms of cruelty and erasure.

We need to reckon with this, and not with shame, but with clarity. Shame keeps people silent and systems unchanged. But accountability invites us all to be honest about what we’ve built, what we're contributing to, what we’ve overlooked, and who’s been harmed in the process.

Not the First Time, But a Sharpened Edge

We’ve seen this before, in the rushed rollout of online SNAP portals, intended to modernize access but structured in ways that quietly reduce participation, particularly among low-income families burdened by documentation and renewal deadlines. In Medicaid systems purportedly modernized for efficiency, states like Arkansas have dropped hundreds of thousands of people from coverage, often for procedural reasons, raising alarms that eligible individuals were purged by technology systems that prioritize throughput over access.

We’ve also seen this in dashboards, where the fixation on metrics often obscures the real stories and struggles behind the numbers. What’s left is a cleaner version of reality that erases lived experience. However, what this bill does is take that erasure and bake it into the system itself. It’s like seasoning policy with poison and calling it reform. This isn’t modernization. It’s designing harm as a feature and calling it “efficiency.”

Public policy scholars Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan call this administrative burden: a system’s intentional use of friction, paperwork, or complexity to suppress participation and block access. What appears to be inefficiency is often a strategic exclusion. As The Atlantic recently noted in its exposé on “sludge,” this kind of bureaucratic harm isn’t always a bug; it’s a feature designed to make people give up. Research becomes weaponized not just in what it finds, but in how it is used or ignored to justify designs of defeat.

Preemption, Power, and the Politics of Platform Protection

The bill initially included an AI preemption clause that would have stripped states of their regulatory authority for up to ten years, an attempt that overwhelmingly failed in the Senate when lawmakers voted 99-1 to remove it.

This wasn’t just policy overreach. It was design authoritarianism masquerading as interoperability. The clause was never about efficiency or innovation; it was always about protecting platforms, not people.

Even Elon Musk – a man with no shortage of audacity – called the bill “utterly insane and destructive.” That should have stopped it cold, but it hasn't.

And still, as of this publication, the Senate presses on, and the House continues deliberations, emboldened by industry lobbying, disinformation, and a design culture that too often mistakes scale for success. Meanwhile, research is left in the backseat, framed as neutral, ethical, and disconnected from these outcomes. It’s not.

Efficiency over Ethics Is a Betrayal

We have to stop pretending that design research is disconnected from policy. The 100,000+ clean energy jobs that may vanish with this bill? They’re not casualties of some abstract legislative process – they’re the result of real-world decisions that were once informed by research, then often abandoned in favor of scale and speed.

When we center efficiency over ethics, optimization over humanity, and outputs over outcomes, we betray the very public we claim to serve. That betrayal is cumulative. Over time, it erodes not just trust in systems, but the belief that people’s time (and lives) matter at all.

In a world where most interactions are now mediated through digital systems, even small design decisions — such as drop-down menus, login barriers, and document requirements — can become acts of exclusion. I’ve spoken with public interest researchers across the country – some working in federal agencies, others in consultancies, nonprofits, or academia – who have raised red flags only to be sidelined, doxxed, or quietly let go, not for doing the wrong thing, but for refusing to comply.

Many readers may not realize that early versions of the bill included federal retirement reforms and increased pension contributions for civil servants, while exempting lawmakers and their staff. However, most workforce-related provisions have since been stripped from the Senate’s version before it passed.

The final version still includes provisions that are harmful to new federal hires: it would force them to choose between renouncing civil service protections entirely or paying significantly higher retirement contributions, effectively penalizing upward mobility and union participation.

That remains a particularly cruel flourish in a bill framed as modernization, one that in its early drafts at least seemed designed to charge civil servants for doing the work of the public, while protecting lawmakers from the costs of their own policy decisions.

Toward an Ethic of Care and Accountability

Well, this is all depressing. So, what now?

We must build research practices that are trauma-informed, transparent, and accountable. That means rejecting urgency culture, embedding care into our methods, and refusing to reduce people to data points. That also means recognizing when systems are not broken, but working precisely as intended to keep people out, to grind down resistance, and to preserve power under the guise of modernization.

One practical framework is the Two Loops Model, developed by the Berkana Institute. It maps how old systems die while new ones emerge. The current loop – defined by speed, harm, and institutional power – is breaking down.

But the next loop is already forming. Quietly, steadily, people are building new patterns rooted in care, reciprocity, and collective refusal. These aren't just ideas. These are practices that occur in small teams, peer networks, and community-rooted spaces.

There is no single blueprint, but the momentum of a public interest pluriverse. These emerging systems need champions. They require researchers willing to be clear about the harm they see, designers willing to say no to platforms that commodify suffering, and leaders willing to slow down in a world obsessed with speed. They need institutional courage.

This Is a Choice Point

We cannot research our way out of this moment. But we can make different choices about how we use our power because research doesn’t just observe the world; it reshapes it.

The question is: will we shape it for power, or the public?

This isn’t about blaming individuals. It is about confronting the culture, incentives, and systems that have made this kind of harm so easy to obscure and deny. If we’re serious about designing for the public, we have to be just as serious about the public impact of our decisions, even when they’re dressed up as innovation.

If This Passes: What Can Designers (and Technologists) Actually Do?

The truth is, this bill could pass. And its impacts will be catastrophic for low-income families, disabled communities, public servants, and anyone relying on what remains of our public infrastructure. So what can designers do in the face of this vast policy violence?

We can’t fix what’s coming. But we can stop pretending we’re neutral in how it lands. And that means making different choices — not just about what we design, but also how we present ourselves, what we name, and with whom we stand.

Here’s where I believe we can begin:

Refuse to legitimize harm. Design often gets used to beautify decisions that were made long before we arrived. When that happens, our job isn’t to smooth the rollout; it’s to tell the truth. Call out what’s policy, not design. Refuse to frame harm as a “user pain point.” Say what you see.
Build counter-narratives. While bad actors frame this moment as innovation, designers can publish, document, and archive what’s actually happening. Write about what didn’t feel right. Capture the tension. Support researchers who are holding the receipts and retaining the ethical memory of this moment.
Design for resilience, not reform. Don’t pour your time into fixing systems that were never designed to serve. Focus instead on survival tools, such as plain language resources, eligibility guides, community-led directories, and trauma-informed digital services. Small, slow, and local will matter more than scale.
Find the truth and speak it within your institutions. If you’re working in government or for a contractor, and you see harm unfolding, say so. Document decisions. Align with others who are pursuing the same goals. Even if you can’t stop the rollout, naming the misalignment matters. And remember: you’re not alone.
Organize, don’t individualize. Form or find peer groups within your workplace or outside of it. Ethics and accountability work better in community. Share refusal language. Build mutual support. We need each other more than ever.
And above all, lead with care. This moment will ask more of us emotionally, spiritually, and professionally. But care is not a soft skill. It is a strategy and a discipline. Support your teams. Slow down where you can. Choose repair over urgency, and the truth over optics.

While we can’t research our way out of this, we can resist becoming tools of harm. The second loop is already here. And many of us are already building it without permission and a budget line, but with clarity and conviction.

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If this resonates with you, especially if you’re working within a system and quietly trying to change it, I’d love to connect. There’s another way forward, and we don’t have to build it alone.