Sarah Gilliland is a Senior Policy Analyst in the New Practice Lab at New America. A librarian by training, she spent thirteen years as a career civil servant conducting nonpartisan policy and legislative research at the Congressional Research Service, the U.S. Senate, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and the Executive Office of the President. At GAO, she worked closely with auditing teams reporting to Congress on a wide range of programs and issues related to education, labor, retirement, taxation, veterans affairs, housing, community investment, and health care. As part of that work, she designed and executed hundreds of complex literature searches to support objective issue analysis on topics including tax code implementation, drug misuse, religious hate crimes, financial exploitation of seniors, organ allocation policy, and military spouse employment. As part of the Applied Research Methods team at GAO, she collaborated with colleagues to incorporate rigorous methods into equity research, and led the library’s national COVID-19 response and support research in the first year of the pandemic. In between government stints, she was a law librarian at a private firm with significant corporate, trade, tax, and regulatory practice areas. She has a Master’s in Library and Information Science and Bachelor’s degree in English, both from the University of South Carolina.
Sarah lives in Washington DC with her family and enjoys music and the great outdoors.