Each summer, a small cohort of Harvard Kennedy School students participate in the Michael S. Dukakis Governors’ Summer Fellowship Program, serving in U.S. governors’ executive offices for 10 weeks between their first and second years of graduate study.
Jacob Essig MPP 2027 spent the summer in Wilmington, Delaware, working alongside Governor Matt Meyer (D-DE) to help with state housing and community development policy and work closely with constituents. We asked him about what he learned during his fellowship experience. Here’s what he shared.
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You went into the fellowship already with city- and federal-level work experience. What surprised you most about how policymaking and regulatory reform actually happen at the state level compared to your past roles?
Coming from the federal government, after three years at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), I expected state-level policymaking would feel like a scaled-down version of what I’d done before. I was surprised when I saw just how different it was.
At CFPB, I’d worked in an agency with more than 1,000 employees. In Delaware, I joined a roughly 30-person governor’s office with a policy team of just a few people (plus me for the summer), responsible for designing and implementing the governor’s agenda on housing, small business, infrastructure, permitting, energy, cultural affairs, agriculture—the list goes on. The breadth of the portfolio and the speed of the work surprised me.
What surprised me even more was the level of direct constituent engagement. People in Governor Meyer’s office are constantly on the phone with “Delawareans,” answering every email, and meeting daily with advocates, local leaders, small business owners, and community members. At the federal level, policy work can feel insulated from the people it affects, and in my case I was several steps removed from implementation. In Delaware, that distance essentially disappears.
Part of that is intentional—it is a reflection of the values of Governor Meyer’s team. But part of it is just Delaware. Every person I met said the same thing: “Everyone knows everyone here.” Delaware isn’t just a small state; it feels like a deeply interconnected community. That closeness between policymakers and the people they serve was both surprising and really promising to see as an aspiring local and state-level policymaker.
Walk us through a specific regulation or process you’ve examined in Delaware—what it looks like, what challenges it creates on the ground, and how your work is helping to shape potential reforms?
One of the projects I’m most proud of from this summer came out of Executive Order 21 (EO 21), Governor Meyer’s initiative to reduce unnecessary regulatory burdens on small businesses. I focused on food trucks and cottage food vendors—small, often owner-operated businesses disproportionately run by immigrants and people of color. My research focused on understanding the burdens Delaware’s food truck and cottage food regulations—among the most stringent in the country—place on these small business owners and how to streamline them without compromising food safety.
I started by mapping every state-level regulation these businesses face: licensing requirements, health inspections, facility requirements, labeling rules, operational restrictions, etc. Then I looked to other states—there’s a reason so many people call states “laboratories of democracy.” I asked: What do other states actually require? Where has streamlining worked? Which rules are genuinely tied to public health outcomes, and which might be redundant or outdated?
My research suggested that a meaningful number of Delaware’s requirements go well beyond what peer states and modern evidence deem necessary, adding cost and complexity without a clear public benefit. I pulled this into a research memo outlining specific reform options, grounded in evidence from other states and from public health and regulatory research. That memo is now being used to inform potential reforms under EO 21.
Seeing your research feed into a real policy process is a big part of what makes this kind of work so rewarding.
“This fellowship confirmed and deepened something I already suspected after my experience as a Transition Term Fellow in Jersey City, New Jersey: state and local government is where I want to build my career.”
Delaware is often seen as a “corporate capital” and a state with diverse local housing needs. How have those unique features of Delaware’s economy and political landscape shaped the way you think about housing policy and economic development?
Delaware’s political economy is unique—largely because of its small size, tight-knit politics, and the significant role of corporate franchise taxes in the economy and state budget.
It is absolutely a corporate capital: there are more than twice as many companies registered in Delaware as there are people, and over 65 percent of Fortune 500 companies are incorporated there. Corporate franchise taxes—the fees that companies pay to incorporate Delaware—generate roughly 25 to 30 percent of the state’s general fund revenue, so Delaware’s business-friendly reputation has real fiscal and political consequences.
At the same time, the people who actually live in Delaware are incredibly diverse: corporate lawyers and financial professionals, medical, chemical, and life sciences workers in Wilmington, farmers in Kent and Sussex Counties, tourism workers along the coast, and a growing number of retirees drawn by lower costs of living, low taxes, and beautiful beaches.
From a housing perspective, this mix creates real growing pains. Despite being a “corporate capital,” Delaware faces a serious housing crisis. The state has a cumulative deficit of roughly 40,000 to 50,000 homes, nearly half of renters report being cost-burdened, and abouty 37 percent of adults ages 18 to 34 still live with their parents. And unlike many states, a lot of Delaware’s localities don’t have full-time planning staff and aren’t equipped to lead land-use planning on their own, which pushes the state to play a more active role in guiding responsible growth.
Learning about Delaware’s housing supply struggles—and the significant efforts at the state level to address them—has deepened my appreciation for how complex housing policy is in practice. Governor Meyer is committed to smart growth and encouraging dense, responsible development rather than sprawl, but he’s also clear that blocking developers from building new homes isn’t the answer when you have a housing deficit this large. Watching the state balance the need to promote new development, protect natural resources, and respect the concerns of communities absorbing significant new growth by engaging local stakeholders has made me much more thoughtful about how housing policy has to work politically as well as technically.
What’s been the most memorable moment of your fellowship so far, in the office or around Delaware?
The last day of the legislative session in June. My coworker generously drove me about an hour down to Dover, the capital city and home of Delaware’s historic Legislative Hall. What I experienced that day was unlike anything I’d seen before. Lawmakers from across the state were advocating for their legislation, debating, and voting well into the night. Just as I had been warned on the first day of my fellowship, the session didn’t end until sunrise the next morning.
What struck me most, though, wasn’t just the energy on the floor. Across the street in the Governor’s Dover office, the staff were working hard well into 2, 3, 4 o’clock in the morning—tracking votes, following legislative developments, and continuing to advocate for the Governor’s priorities until the very last vote. Most of my coworkers stayed far longer than they had to because they genuinely cared.
That kind of dedication—the commitment to seeing it through on behalf of the people of Delaware—is something I won’t forget. It gave me a lasting sense of what it looks like to have deep pride in and care for the work you do for the community.
What’s a piece of advice or insight from Governor Meyer’s team that you expect to carry into the rest of your career?
The through-line I heard from almost everyone on Governor Meyer’s team was some version of: know who you’re serving, and never let them become abstract.
As I mentioned earlier, the office is in constant contact with the Delawareans they serve, and that engagement fundamentally shapes the team’s policy work. In my own work with the policy team, the concerns and priorities that surfaced in emails and conversations often found their way back into the work, directly or indirectly.
Coming from the federal government, where the distance between policymakers and constituents can often be larger than I’d like, that insight stuck with me. Sitting in conversations with agency staff, local nonprofit leaders, small business owners, and many others, I saw firsthand that the best policy is grounded in the real experiences of the people it is meant to serve—and of the people who have to implement it every day. That is something I will carry with me going forward.
How will this fellowship shape what you focus on back at HKS this fall, whether that’s coursework, research, or how you’re thinking about your career after graduation?
This fellowship confirmed and deepened something I already suspected after my experience as a Transition Term Fellow in Jersey City, New Jersey: state and local government is where I want to build my career. In both Jersey City and Delaware, I saw a directness to the work that you don’t always see at the federal level. In Delaware, I could really see the connection between what our team was doing and the lives of the people and communities we served, which I found incredibly motivating and meaningful.
This has shaped how I’m approaching my time at HKS. I’m planning to take SES 5490: Affordable Housing and Community Economic Development and MLD-125: What Works in Public Sector Management, both directly inspired by my positive experience working on community development issues in Delaware this summer. I am also focusing my Policy Analysis Exercise on zoning and housing regulatory reform, which grew out of how much I enjoyed diving into Delaware’s regulatory landscape.
Career-wise, this summer cemented my passion for local and state-level policy. I loved working in an executive office—at the state level in Delaware and at the city level during Transition Term—where the policy is tangible, the stakes are visible, and you can be in real dialogue with the community you’re trying to serve every day. That’s the kind of work I am now sure I want to do.
Banner image courtesy of Adobe Stock / Vasanth. Headshot and inline images courtesy of Jacob Essig.
