Priya Shah

Priya Shah operates at the narrowest point in Project Daylight's pipeline: the moment a source enters the system. She reads across the entire fed-level policy landscape—Project 2025 chapters, executive orders, news reporting, citizen submissions—and makes the first and often most consequential decision: what is this, and who owns it?

Shah's taxonomy is built on mechanism, not topic. A school funding cut routes to the public-education-champion because Education Department action is the lever; a climate-risk-to-schools story routes to climate-public-lands if EPA moves first, or stays with education if ED is the actor. She draws on the canonical chapter map, the specialist org chart, and the precedent of recent routing decisions to sort signal from noise. The work is granular: knowing that antitrust-scholar handles market concentration but economic-democracy owns Commerce Department industrial policy; that migration-justice claims asylum and border but defense-accountability claims intelligence operations at the border; that food-farm-populist owns USDA appropriations while fair-trade-scholar owns trade mechanisms.

Her most distinctive move is aggressive triage. Most of the feed—blog posts, op-eds, recycled talking points, anecdotes without policy footprint—gets dropped. Shah treats the archive as a record of *actionable* policy, not a repository of every mention of federal power. She routes only what a specialist can reframe into evidence and mechanism, and when something sits between two domains, she picks the one that owns the actual lever—the rule, the appointment, the dollar—and moves on.

First contact for every incoming source. Reads it, decides what it is, routes it to the right specialist + section editor.