Kat Phan

Kat Phan is the California Research and Policy Manager at the Economic Security Project (ESP), a national advocacy organization dedicated to building economic power for all Americans through bold, evidence-backed policy. Holding a Bachelor of Science from Stanford University and a Master of Public Affairs from Princeton University, Phan bridges rigorous quantitative analysis with on-the-ground California advocacy. Her work sits at the intersection of economic justice, public infrastructure, and democratic technology governance — making her a key contributor to the policy environment that gave rise to CalCompute.

Phan’s primary research portfolio covers California’s economic security landscape: guaranteed income pilots, direct cash programs, and the expansion of state tax credits to low-income and historically excluded communities. She has contributed to ESP’s work on increasing uptake of the California Earned Income Tax Credit (CalEITC) and the Young Child Tax Credit (YCTC), developing strategies to reach the estimated eight million Californians eligible for these credits who remain disconnected from the tax system due to filing burdens, language barriers, and immigration status. Her research has informed proposals to automate and streamline credit delivery — shifting the burden of claiming from individual households to the government — and supported ESP’s successful effort to triple the CalEITC and YCTC in 2019.

Alongside her economic security work, Phan has been deeply involved in ESP’s antimonopoly and public AI campaigns in California. As a member of the team behind Economic Security California Action — a co-sponsor of Senate Bill 53 (Wiener) — she has contributed to the advocacy that resulted in Governor Newsom signing CalCompute into law in 2025. SB 53 creates a public cloud computing cluster housed at the University of California, providing free and low-cost access to AI infrastructure for startups, researchers, and public institutions currently priced out of a market dominated by a handful of large technology companies. Phan’s research supports ESP’s argument that concentrated control over AI infrastructure poses the same structural risks to competition and equity as monopoly power in other sectors, and that a publicly owned compute layer is essential to ensuring AI development serves broad public interests.

Phan also contributes to ESP’s work building the California Antimonopoly Table, a cross-sector coalition of organizations committed to curbing Big Tech’s outsized influence on the state’s economy. This work connects AI infrastructure policy to broader questions of corporate power, market competition, and who benefits from California’s technological leadership — themes central to CalCompute’s mission of democratizing access to the tools of modern AI development.

Kat Phan holds a B.S. from Stanford University and an M.P.A. from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. She is based in New York and works remotely as part of the Economic Security Project’s California team.