Meryl Kornfield
Meryl Kornfield is a staff writer on the politics desk at The Washington Post, focused on how the federal government operates and on the people affected when its systems are pushed to their limits. Her reporting is defined by close, document-driven coverage of watchdogs, cost-cutting campaigns and personnel decisions, often inside the Trump-era bureaucracy. She returns repeatedly to stories where oversight, internal policy and political power collide, following them from quiet rules and memos to public consequences for agencies, workers and vulnerable groups. Alongside that accountability work, she has experience on the campaign trail and in general assignment and investigative projects, which gives her a habit of tying Washington decisions to lives beyond government headquarters.
Watchdogs, inspectors general and the Trump-era bureaucracy
Kornfield has built a substantial body of work around government watchdogs and the fight over their independence under Trump.
She has chronicled the nomination of a Trump-aligned figure to lead the Interior Department’s inspector general office, unpacking how that choice could reshape oversight of high-profile projects such as the Reflecting Pool renovation. In related coverage, she has documented broader efforts to blur the fire wall between inspectors general and the agencies they scrutinize, showing how partisan pressures and personnel decisions are changing traditionally independent roles. Her stories in this area often rely on internal email chains, interviews with oversight officials and accounts from congressional staffers, illustrating the mechanics of investigations rather than just their outcomes.
She also follows watchdogs beyond individual appointments, including the Government Accountability Office’s probes into sensitive data access by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the resistance those probes have met inside agencies. In this work, she traces how agencies have withheld records, how that shapes what GAO can publicly conclude about DOGE’s reach, and what that means for transparency around major policy initiatives.
Taken together, her oversight coverage situates individual headlines within a larger fight over who polices the federal government and how much independence those watchdogs can retain under sustained political pressure.
DOGE, federal workers and the machinery of cuts
A second major strand of Kornfield’s politics coverage follows DOGE and other Trump-era cost-cutting efforts across the federal workforce. She has reported on DOGE’s sweeping claims of savings, highlighting findings by GAO that billions of dollars in its public tally could not be verified and that some touted cuts did not occur as advertised. She has examined persistent gaps in basic information about who worked for DOGE and whether those officials understood ethics rules, underscoring the opacity of a high-impact initiative meant to overhaul government operations.
Her longer enterprise work tracks DOGE beyond its formal end date, showing how its decisions and unfinished projects continue to surface in agencies and programs throughout the government.
Kornfield’s DOGE reporting is closely tied to stories about federal workers and the systems that protect or expose them. She has covered Trump’s efforts to strip job protections from thousands of senior federal employees, explaining how reclassifications made it easier to dismiss staff across agencies. She has detailed an unwritten policy that instructed judges to pause federal workers’ class discrimination claims, showing how internal directives can sideline civil-rights-era protections without public debate. Other work in this thread includes accounts of federal employees too fearful to attend their own award ceremony after sweeping job cuts, and the case of a senior FEMA official found to have been unlawfully pushed out amid DOGE-linked restructuring. Across these stories, she consistently writes through the lens of process and impact, connecting legal filings, watchdog reports and agency decisions to the daily insecurity faced by government workers.
Immigration, social programs and elite pathways to power
Kornfield frequently covers how Trump-era changes to immigration and social programs intersect with status, money and vulnerability. She has reported on Trump’s “gold card” visa program, focusing on how attorneys for wealthy clients assess the risks and benefits of a fast-track immigration offer marketed to the global elite. Follow-up coverage has quantified its limited uptake, using government filings to show how few applicants have paid the fee despite the program’s public promotion.
In parallel, she has covered Trump’s new $1.8 billion fund and how his allies are positioning themselves to apply, extending her scrutiny of elite access from visas to financial vehicles branded around political power.
Her coverage also follows more coercive uses of government systems. In one investigation, she detailed a Trump-era plan within the Social Security Administration to falsely mark millions of living people as dead, using a death-record database as leverage in immigration enforcement. She has examined projected shortfalls in Social Security funding and the role of tax policy and demographic trends in accelerating those gaps. Kornfield has written on cuts to gender-affirming health coverage for transgender federal workers and on an internal policy that effectively paused discrimination claims, showing how civil servants’ access to care and legal recourse can shift under relatively obscure administrative decisions. Across this work, she balances big-number policy stories with individual cases, such as the FEMA official fighting to clear her name after being publicly blamed for immigrant housing payments.
Campaign trail, archives and long-form political storytelling
Before joining the politics desk in her current role, Kornfield moved from general assignment reporting into a national politics position focused on the 2024 presidential campaign, documenting the race as a campaign trail reporter. That experience is reflected in her real-time coverage of candidate moments, such as town halls where contenders confront questions about history and civil rights, which she has captured and contextualized in live reporting. Her earlier general assignment work at the same masthead included stories on people deciding to get vaccinated after initial hesitation, demonstrators swept up in mass arrests after George Floyd’s death, and grocery workers on the front lines of the pandemic, as well as contributions to investigations into the opioid crisis, the Afghanistan Papers and student health centers.
On the politics desk, she also contributes to more narrative and archival projects. In a recent interactive feature, she worked with newly recovered World War II prisoner-of-war records at the National Archives, using historical documents to tell contemporary stories about recognition and record-keeping. That piece underscores her comfort with complex records and data-heavy formats, complementing her more immediate Trump-era coverage of inspectors general, DOGE and Social Security. Across beats, she writes in a straightforward, evidence-focused style, relying on documents, legal proceedings and official reports to ground stories about political conflict and government change.
4 more politics journalists.
A.D. Quig
A.D. Quig follows money and power through Chicago and Cook County government, showing how political decisions, taxes and public spending affect residents and businesses. At the Chicago Tribune, she covers city and county politics, municipal finance, tax policy, budgets and the structures shaping mayoral and council authority. She joined the Tribune in 2022 after covering politics for Crain’s Chicago Business and The Daily Line. Her work examines council power, ethics rules, police leadership, tax incentives, public agencies and pandemic aid. She has reported on data center tax breaks, property tax errors, federal relief spending and the fiscal effects of major development proposals. Quig combines insider government reporting with public accountability journalism. She uses public records, data and budget documents, follows committees and staff negotiations, and explains complex decisions in plain language with precise numbers and a direct link to everyday consequences.
Adam Daly
Adam Daly covers politics for amNewYork with a focus on the inner workings of city and state government and the low-profile forums where power is exercised and negotiated. He reports on commissions and panels that shape how New York is governed, treating charter reform and government efficiency as central political terrain. His coverage of moves to replace an Adams-era charter commission with a new government efficiency panel foregrounds mandate, authority, and what “efficiency” means in practice for agencies and services. He tracks who gains and loses influence when one commission supplants another and which constituencies are being answered to. Daly explains dense procedural questions in clear, reader-facing terms, using specific institutional details and occasional wordplay to connect jargon-heavy reforms to public spending, service delivery, and mayoral power.
Adam Pack
Adam Pack covers Capitol Hill through power struggles, investigations and ideological fights, focusing on how Congress intersects with Donald Trump’s agenda. He is a politics writer on Fox News Digital’s Capitol Hill team, covering Congress, federal elections, legislative battles, election rules, war powers, primaries and intraparty fights. He previously wrote for the Daily Caller News Foundation. His reporting examines deadlines, vote counts, bill language, campaign spending, court rulings, oversight reports, culture clashes and emerging issues such as AI-backed political groups. He has covered FISA reauthorization, defense spending, the SAVE America Act, housing policy, redistricting, candidate absences, primary spending and disputes over sex, gender, religion and race-based caucuses. He reports primarily through news features and investigative-style pieces built around documents, committee reports, court records, unearthed video and specific legislative details. He often co-writes complex Capitol Hill stories and publishes “FIRST ON FOX” exclusives.
Adam Sullivan
Adam Sullivan is a veteran politics reporter for WCAX who connects elections and party disputes to everyday life. He covers statewide races, party primaries, federal representation, political rhetoric, extremism, and accountability across the Upper Valley and neighboring states. His reporting includes Becca Balint’s victory over Molly Gray in the Democratic U.S. House primary to replace Congressman Peter Welch. He also reports when political controversies affect public safety, political culture, towns, and institutions, including a New Hampshire Libertarian Party post endorsing violence against elected Democrats. Sullivan follows cultural stories with civic consequences, such as Noah Kahan’s appeal to fans to stop stealing a Strafford road sign linked to his music. He writes straight news centered on concrete events, official reactions, political context, community impact, and what comes next.