Professional Affiliation

Staff Writer, The Washington Post

Expert Bio

Amy Goldstein is a staff writer for the Washington Post, where she writes nationally about social policy issues. Her pieces focus on health care reform, Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, welfare, housing, and the strains placed on the social safety net by the recent recession.  During more than two decades at the Post, she has covered the White House and other notable news events of recent times, from the Monica Lewinsky scandal to the Columbine shootings to the past four Supreme Court nominations.

Amy was part of a team of Washington Post reporters awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for the newspaper’s coverage of 9/11 and the government’s response to the attacks. She was also a 2009 Pulitzer Prize finalist for national reporting for an investigative series she co-wrote on the medical treatment of immigrants detained by the federal government. Amy is a visiting research professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. She holds an AB in American Civilization from Brown University and was a 2005 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. She is returning to DC from a year as a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Wilson Center Project

"Tumbling Downhill: How Long-Term Unemployment is Transforming Lives and Reshaping our National Identity."

Project Summary

The central question of Amy's work is: When jobs go away, what happens then? She is using an approach that marries narrative journalism with original quantitative research, illuminating the day-to-day consequences of vanished jobs on people and the place where they live. How has the recent economic crisis affected job retraining, access to health care, mental health, family relationships, growing up and coming of age, economic development, political alignment, and more?

Previous Terms

July 2012 - August 2012