By Susan A. Hughes
Harvard Kennedy School welcomed its inaugural cohort of American Service Fellows in July. This group of 50 dedicated public servants represent communities across the United States and bring more than 980 years of collective public service experience.
This cohort reflects the breadth of public leaders in America from combat veterans to teachers to police officers to diplomats and more. American Service Fellow David Gleaton MC/MPA 2027 is among them. Ever since Gleaton graduated from the Air War College, he has had his eye on the future.
As the youngest graduate in the history of the college, Gleaton focused on how science, technology, and education can strengthen America’s future workforce. He co-founded Dreams, Imagination & Gift (DIG) with his college friend Steven Brown to bring science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine (STEMM) education to underserved student populations. He has also spent 20 years in government service, most recently at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau leading its enterprise cloud platform. He even has a beta design for a program to keep authority over AI in the hands of humans.
But his heart—and his purpose—has remained firmly rooted in his past. “I was born and raised in Williston, South Carolina, a small town of 3000,” says Gleaton. “All of my family are from there and live there still.”
Despite a lack of role models in his high school science courses, he enrolled at the University of South Carolina in computer science and information technology. He and Brown, an electrical engineer, realized that they had little opportunity as young learners to imagine a career in technology. They vowed to change that with DIG. “If you don’t see someone who looks like you in that space, you won’t even consider it a possibility,” says Gleaton.
After college, public service was a natural choice. “My dad was in the Army, and I was a military brat growing up, going into the Army Reserves,” says Gleaton. “After my dad retired from the Army, he worked for the Department of Agriculture with combined service over 40 years. Public service is just what we do.”
Gleaton’s first large enterprise systems role was with Veteran Affairs, focused on electronic healthcare systems. In 2014, he was selected to attend the Air War College. “I was one of the few civilians selected as the program is mostly a senior service college for colonels on their way to becoming generals,” says Gleaton.
“It was an amazing experience: 50% of us are domestic, from the national security realm, Department of Defense, the FBI, or Homeland Security, and the other 50% of the cohort are all international students,” he says.
“If you understand how the technology works and you’re able to apply that policy in a way that’s beneficial, I think it’s a game changer.”
In the program, he was able to travel to Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, and meet with members of parliament. He met members of Jordan’s royal family and discussed diplomacy and international relations.
“The experience broadened my way of thinking as a civil servant. I really started to focus on what’s called a systems-theoretic view of information systems,” says Gleaton. He explains that it treats safety and security as a control problem: you model the system, identify where control can break down, and design constraints to prevent failure before it happens. “I tried to apply that theory to the VA so that electronic health records couldn’t fail in a way that harms a veteran’s care,” he says.
But when priorities shifted at the VA, Gleaton went back to his childhood home to start DIG. “Something keeps pulling me back to my community,” he says.
After 12 successful years, there are four DIG centers around the Williston area, and the program offers a scholar enrichment academy, a mentorship program, a summer camp, and even hosts a DIG STEMM festival each summer bringing rural communities together through science.
Gleaton stepped back into civil service joining the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal agency that oversees financial products such as mortgages, credit cards, and loans. A friend who had taken an HKS Executive Education course recommended the Kennedy School to him. After attending virtual information sessions, Gleaton applied for the MC/MPA program.
“HKS made a lot of sense for me because if you go to a pure engineering school, you’ll learn the discipline of AI, machine learning, how the nuts and bolts of it are built, but it’s not necessarily connected to the policy,” Gleaton says. “And the intersection of the two, for me, that’s where you genuinely can help people. If you understand how the technology works and you’re able to apply that policy in a way that’s beneficial, I think it’s a game changer.”
“We need oversight. We need regulations. We need third-party advisors or people who are going to examine our processes, examine our output, and tell us when we are going outside of those guardrails.”
After encouragement from his wife and his son, a senior at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (who urged, “Dad, you have to go!”), Gleaton enrolled at HKS.
“Going back to my Williston roots, I think I can confidently say there’s been no one in my family that’s ever had a year to just think big thoughts,” says Gleaton. “This program is going to give me time to figure out how I can make the world better.”
He is considering how he will put his HKS degree to use. “I’m leaning towards how I can best affect policy and especially the implementation of AI and its use in regulated sectors,” he says. While he hasn’t figured out where that will be, he thinks there’s something to the concept of enabling transparency in the mechanics of AI so that when a bank uses AI to decide who gets a loan, for example, the borrower, the bank, and the examiner should all be able to see how that decision was made.
“We need oversight. We need regulations. We need third-party advisors or people who are going to examine our processes, examine our output, and tell us when we are going outside of those guardrails,” says Gleaton. “That’s a space that’s ripe for a lot of new innovative solutions, new ideas.”
And he has ideas on how to frame policy for this future. “I think the old ways of writing a policy and then passing it over to an engineer to implement it in the system is an old paradigm,” he says. “I’m always going to ask, “Can we do policy as code?”
Looking ahead, Gleaton hopes his story encourages others. “Being a part of Harvard University, being an American Service Fellow, is possible for people of all different backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences,” says Gleaton. And while he looks forward—after graduation, he is considering the regulatory technology space, bringing policy and AI together—he is rooted in his past, in Williston, South Carolina.
“This is where my family came from, and this community keeps me grounded,” says Gleaton. “People ask me how I am going to handle going to school, managing a nonprofit, and exploring something new after HKS. I just say that it’s my community that pulls me along, making sure I’m constantly focused and consistent about bringing others along.”
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Photographs by Lydia Rosenberg
