Ashley Balcerzak joined the federal politics team in 2017, her second stint at the Center for Public Integrity after covering state and local politics as an American University Fellow in 2015-2016. She previously wrote about federal money in politics and conflicts of interests for OpenSecrets Blog. Her favorite stories covered foreign lobbying, opaque LLC contributions and how special interests spend their money. She also worked with The Washington Post investigative team on its police shootings database, a project that won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting. She earned her undergraduate degree in journalism at Northwestern University and her master’s at American University. Ashley’s work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Slate, TIME, The Daily Beast and HuffPost.
