Reflections on the 2025 Ed Lorenzen Fiscal Internship

By: Maddie Brown Shirley 

I am honored by the opportunity to continue Ed Lorenzen's legacy as this year’s Ed Lorenzen intern. Ed was a pillar in the federal budgeting community and had a passion for public service. He was known for his incredible ability to conduct deep policy research and communicate to lawmakers about the need for fiscal responsibility – a rare, combined skillset in Washington, DC. As the Lorenzen intern, I learned firsthand how policy research and the legislative process interact. I also learned how grounded, nonpartisan collaboration can bring people of many backgrounds together for a common purpose.

On the policy team, I did a substantial amount of research on government trust funds and gained a deeper sense of the urgency needed to fix Social Security and Medicare’s solvency issues. A large part of my internship was during the historic 43-day government shutdown, which gave me the unexpected opportunity to do research on ways to pay for an extension of the enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies, learn more about Medicare Advantage overpayments and how upcoding contributes to increased costs for the government, and analyze the overlapping budgetary effects of the new 2026 ACA regulatory rule. Overall, working with the CRFB policy team this semester helped improve my understanding of the budget process and the continual fiscal impacts of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

On the legislative team, I prepped CRFB staff members for briefings with members of Congress and their staff, assisted in events like the Social Security and Fiscal Security Leadership Initiative, and authored memos for several hearings about the potential extension of the enhanced ACA subsidies. The hearings' memos and their preparation allowed me to work with the policy and legislative teams in tandem, a unique cross-team collaboration, which showed me how responsive CRFB is to developments in Congress.

In light of Ed Lorenzen's reputation as ‘Captain PAYGO,’ I was able to merge my legislative and policy work to conduct timely analysis of work in Congress. Specifically, I researched the fiscal impacts of the FIX It Act, a recently introduced bipartisan bill that offsets a two-year extension of the ACA enhanced subsidies.  

I am completing this internship with a deep respect for the tightknit community that works on fiscal responsibility and a new passion for fiscal health reform. Going forward, I hope to continue to contribute towards fiscal reform in a bipartisan way. Social Security and Medicare are set to be insolvent by 2032, and there is a lot of work to be done in the coming years to protect people from this reality unfolding. We need more people who are willing to talk about fiscal responsibility at the federal level and its importance to the everyday person.

Maddie Brown Shirley is a Master of Public Policy Student at the George Washington University. She served as the Ed Lorenzen fiscal intern in Fall 2025. For more information about Ed Lorenzen and his contributions to US fiscal policy, see our remembrance here. You can find applications for other internships with CRFB here.