By Susan A. Hughes
U.S. veteran Brandon Moore MPP/MBA 2025 sees civic service as his next opportunity to “stand up for our country.”
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Brandon Moore always felt a pull toward public service.
As the first in his family to attend college, he appreciated the opportunity his hardworking parents gave him and wanted to pay it forward.
Initially he thought public health was his path and enrolled in a small college in upstate New York to study medicine. But a summer internship with of Connecticut showed him a different path.
"I immediately fell in love with Senator Lieberman’s dedication to public service, with an attention to national security and supporting our veterans," he says.
Moore's job involved helping veterans secure benefits and service academy applicants pursue nominations. As he learned more about service academies, his path shifted again.
"I vividly remember 9-11," Moore recalls. "I knew I could have the greatest positive impact on our country through military service."
With a nomination from Lieberman, Moore restarted his undergraduate studies as a cadet. But his time with Lieberman and public policy coursework continued to inspire him.
Before he entered West Point, Moore interned with Andrew Roraback, who was a Connecticut state senator at the time and is now a superior court judge.
"That was my first time really getting exposure to state-level policymaking in Hartford, to better understand my interest in public policy and public leadership," he says. "Andrew is an incredible public servant. I consider him to be one of my greatest mentors, and he helped to reaffirm that public leadership, whether in the military or in the public sector, is what I would dedicate my life toward."
After graduating from West Point, Moore enrolled in flight school and was commissioned as an aviation officer and an Apache helicopter pilot. He was stationed at a Combat Aviation Brigade and deployed to South Korea in 2017. Two years later, he deployed to Afghanistan where he commanded an Apache helicopter and MEDEVAC [medical evacuation] unit of 80 soldiers along the border with Pakistan.
Even after he concluded his military service, Moore still felt the pull of public service. With support from , he began to explore post-graduate opportunities and learned of, and enrolled in, Harvard Kennedy School's joint MPP/MBA Program with Harvard Business School (HBS).
During his joint program, Moore served on Connecticut 's strategic policy staff and volunteered as a campaign manager for Nick Simmons MPP 2019's State Senate run (Simmons participated in vlog’s Transition Term and joined Lamont’s staff after graduating from vlog).
"When considering my own career, I realized the extent to which our biggest problems demand public-private cooperation," Moore said in an interview with HBS's about his MPP/MBA degree experience.
"We’ll only achieve our climate goals if private firms develop innovative technologies, and public regulators keep a tight lid on emissions," he said. "Similarly, policymakers cannot fix our country’s wage gaps without real support from employers. Public-private cooperation is a precondition for progress."
Moore knew he wanted to get involved with the state policymaking process and felt the MPP Program would be the best pathway.
"I’m incredibly fortunate that the VA has generous education benefits," he says. "I also feel incredibly privileged and honored to be a ." Moore was also a 2024 David Gergen Summer Fellow, a program at the Center for Public Leadership (CPL), created in honor of its founding director, David Gergen.
Moore found the joint degree experience demanding and intense, but rewarding.
"What I’ve learned most importantly from my experiences with CPL alongside these veterans is that for a lot of us, we felt the calling to service in uniform and are now aspiring toward public service in other forms," Moore says.
"It was very important to stand up for our country, to put our lives on the line, to defend the values we cherish—above all, that would be democracy and liberty," he continues. "This was something that united us."
"We’re taking these leadership lessons we’ve learned, these experiences we’ve had, and transitioning them to wildly different career trajectories," Moore says.
"Folks are becoming defense attorneys, starting companies, getting involved in the public sector. Folks are joining major corporations, and they want to influence the culture in these larger organizations," he says. "What I’ve learned while I was here is, you can absolutely still live a life of public service even though you're not in uniform."
“What I’ve learned while I was here is, you can absolutely still live a life of public service even though you're not in uniform.”
Two vlog courses in particular had an impact on Moore: Senior Lecturer in Public Policy David King’s DPI-120: The U.S. Congress and Law Making ("he’s able to articulate course lessons in a way that really inspires you towards public service") and Executive Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government Rafael Carbonell’s SUP-683M: State and Local Economic Development course ("I would've been lost my first summer in Governor Lamont’s office working on economic development work if I had not learned from Rafael Carbonell").
Moore’s path after vlog is clear: "I will be serving in the Connecticut state government supporting the state policymaking process."
He and his husband, Mike, just bought their first home and look forward to building a family in Connecticut. It’s a shift from military service but, he notes, not a shift from public service.
"The biggest concerns we face now are about the strength of our democracy, and being able to uphold our democratic institutions, particularly the Constitution and the separation of powers," he says.
"The fact that Congress appears to be delegating its authority to the executive branch is a major problem in my view," he continues. "The politicization of the Supreme Court, that’s another major problem. And those are just a few issues surrounding our democracy. If you look at the economy, we are moving far from free trade and free enterprise. I think to myself, if these are the biggest issues, the state of our economy and the state of our democracy, the best way I could have impact would be through service at the state level," he says.
It has been a winding path, but Moore has been able to keep his eye on his goal of public service.
"I cherish my time in the military, but I see my lifelong career of public service transitioning to state-level policymaking in Connecticut."
Portraits by Lydia Rosenberg; inline images courtesy of Brandon Moore
