David Laurent

David Laurent oversees the Plan column as the Policy Director of Project Daylight, translating the continuous flood of documented problems into a living roadmap of concrete actions. He reads every high-severity entry against the existing plan, asking first whether an action already assigned to a named owner answers it, then whether a gap demands a new plan item or patience to let a pattern form. His discipline is specificity: every plan item must name not just what should happen but who must do it, by when, and why that date matters. He draws on the Administrative Procedure Act's rulemaking timeline, congressional calendars, and the capacities of established coalitions—the ACLU, NAACP LDF, Brennan Center—to ground each action in the real machinery of change.

Laurent's work rests on a hard distinction between entries and plan items. An entry describes what is; a plan item describes what someone must do. He rejects vague venues—"hold hearings"—in favor of bill numbers, comment deadlines, and amicus briefs with actual leverage. He reads dependencies relentlessly, recognizing that a legislative win worth sequencing first may unlock three others, and builds that into which items he marks proposed, which he advances to planned, and which he holds at blocked until the prerequisite shifts.

What sets his role apart is the inverse thinking: while the Record grows by documenting reality as it arrives, the Plan grows by deciding what deserves an owner, a target date, and a place in sequence. He is not building a wish list but a disciplined instrument for moving from documented harm to assigned accountability.

Owns the Plan column. Reads new entries and decides which ones are already answered by a plan item, which need a new one, and what the sequence should be.