← KPG Policy Group Principal

Justin Kasieta

The person you hire is the person who does the work.

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Justin Kasieta, Principal of KPG Policy Group
Background

A problem with no constituency, taken to federal action.

Justin founded KPG Policy Group to do for clients what he did for his own issue: take a problem with no natural constituency in Washington and turn it into federal action.

He lost his father at thirteen and entered foster care in Michigan with his four siblings, aging out of the system in 2019. He graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.G.S. and went into corporate and investment banking.

In parallel, he built The Orphan Tax — the campaign against a practice that takes money from children who have already lost a parent, and that almost nobody outside the child welfare system had heard of.

The Orphan Tax

What It Took

When a child in foster care is owed Social Security survivor benefits or veterans benefits — because a parent died, because a parent served — state child welfare agencies have routinely applied to become the payee and used that money to reimburse themselves for the cost of the child's care. Children whose parents have died are made to pay their own foster care bills, usually without ever being told.

There was no trade association for this. No political action committee, no district employment figure, no constituency with a lobbyist. The affected population is children, and by the time they are old enough to object they have aged out and the money is gone.

Justin built the campaign that changed it — not as a client of a Washington firm, but as the advocate who ran the strategy himself. He testified before the Michigan Senate in support of SB 18, which passed the Senate unanimously. He worked with the Children's Advocacy Institute to take the issue federal. The campaign drew coverage in NPR, The Detroit News, CBS, and Michigan Public, which built the outside pressure that a case with no money behind it cannot otherwise generate.

In early 2026, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services directed every state to end the practice. It was the first federal action of its kind.

  • Michigan Senate Testified in support of SB 18. The bill passed the Michigan Senate unanimously.
  • National Coalition Partnered with the Children's Advocacy Institute to take the issue federal.
  • Earned Media Coverage in NPR, The Detroit News, CBS, and Michigan Public built the outside pressure.
  • Early 2026 The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services directed every state to end the practice — the first federal action of its kind.
What Carries Over

The Same Sequence, Run for Clients

A campaign with no budget has to be correct about the mechanics, because it cannot afford to be wrong twice.

I

Find the Decision Point

Not the issue — the instrument. A bill section, an agency's authority, a line in a budget. Advocacy that cannot name the thing it is trying to move generates meetings and nothing else.

II

Build a Record That Holds

Members and staff need a reason that survives scrutiny from the other side. On The Orphan Tax the record was testimony, reporting, and outside organizations willing to attach their names to it.

III

Be There When It Is Written

The outcome is decided in language, on a schedule. Being early is the whole advantage, and it is the part that is easiest to lose while waiting for someone else's report.

Experience

Capitol Hill, and the numbers side of it.

Justin has worked for a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

He also worked in corporate and investment banking, where the job is to read a balance sheet and a projection and say, in front of people who do not want to hear it, whether the numbers support the story. That habit transfers to appropriations work. A program's justification material, an agency's spend plan, and a company's revenue forecast all say more than they intend to, and most of the useful work in this business is reading them closely enough to find where a decision is actually made.

The combination is narrow: someone who has worked for a member of the House Armed Services Committee, who can read the financial case behind a program, and who has personally run a campaign from a standing start to a federal directive.

  • Worked for a member of the House Armed Services Committee
  • Testified, Michigan Senate — SB 18 (passed unanimously)
  • Federal advocacy with the Children's Advocacy Institute
  • Founder, The Orphan Tax
  • Featured in NPR, The Detroit News, CBS, and Michigan Public
  • Corporate investment banking
  • B.G.S., University of Michigan
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Why a Firm of One

The Person You Hire Is the Person Who Does the Work

Most government relations firms are built the same way, for a defensible reason. A senior name with the relationships wins the business. The day-to-day then moves to people earlier in their careers, because the senior person's calendar is the scarcest asset in the building and has to be spread across a book of clients. That is not a criticism of anyone's work. It is arithmetic, and for an organization with a large, continuous portfolio, a team with depth is genuinely the right answer.

It is the wrong answer for a client with one thing that has to happen by a date. There, what you are buying is judgment applied continuously to a single problem — knowing which staffer actually decides, reading the mark the morning it drops, catching that a competitor's language has appeared in a different title of the bill. That judgment does not survive a handoff, because the person who has it is not the person doing the reading.

At KPG there is no handoff, because there is no one to hand off to. The person in the pitch is the person reading the bill text, writing the draft language, running the coalition calls, and sitting in the meeting. When you send an email, it reaches the person who can answer it.

The honest cost of that structure is capacity. KPG takes a small number of clients because that is the real limit of one person's calendar, and taking a client the firm cannot serve properly would defeat the entire point of the structure. If your issue needs a team of eight, we will say so and tell you what to look for instead. If it needs one person who will not put it down, that is the firm.

KPG Policy Group is a new firm and does not claim a client roster. What it offers is a principal whose record is public, whose method is specific, and who will tell you before you retain him whether there is a case.

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Contact

Tell us what you need to happen.

If there is a decision point on the calendar and no one making your argument, that is a fixable problem. Send a short note describing the outcome you need and the deadline you are working against.

justin@kpgpolicy.com