Amy Kramer PPS’18 Found Her Place by Making Room for Others

“Public service that actually solves problems,” Amy Kramer PPS’18 said when asked what she stands for. That answer, more than any title on her résumé, helps explain the shape of her career so far. She has spent it moving through some of the most complex policy environments in government, and she keeps returning to the same instinct: find the barrier, remove it, and make the system work for the people inside it.

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Kramer now serves as a Southeast Asia policy analyst in the Office of the Secretary of War for Policy, where she is the Country Director for Thailand, overseeing one of the United States’ oldest alliances in Asia. Over the past three years, she has also covered Singapore and Indonesia, describing herself as a “pinch hitter” on a small team responsible for providing national security advice to the Secretary of War across eleven Southeast Asian country portfolios. 

A place to belong

At Duke, Kramer found a community that helped her see herself differently.

“Sanford created that smaller place within Duke for me,” she said. “It became the place that I felt most at home on campus.” That sense of belonging gave her confidence early on and modeled what a strong public policy community could be: intellectually demanding and committed to helping its members contribute.

Kramer quickly found that she enjoyed the challenge. She studied public policy and political science and quickly became involved in Duke’s American Grand Strategy program. She talks of how the undergraduate experience showed her that she could do real work, not just talk about it. “The public policy curriculum taught me how to think. It wasn’t just political theory, but grounded in the practical applications to actually get things done… It just fit the way my brain works.” 

A policy built around people

That combination of rigorous analysis and practical problem-solving became central to Kramer’s career. 

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Before moving to the Office of the Secretary of War for Policy, she spent more than three years as a civilian with the U.S. Army, including time as a McCan Strategic Defense Fellow, an Army Emerging Leader Fellow, and, ultimately, a Special Assistant to the Under Secretary of the Army. One of the most consequential projects she led was a year-long overhaul of the Army’s pregnancy, parenthood, postpartum, lactation, and fertility treatment policies. She said the goal was ambitious but simple. “It was all about people,” she said. “If we are serious about investing in the force, we have to make a generational investment in removing the barriers that prevent service members from having to choose between family and service.”

Kramer said the policy was inspired by a white paper written by a community of Army moms on Facebook who refused to stop at frustration.  “Their paper didn’t just highlight problems, but presented carefully researched, actionable solutions.” After the paper reached Army senior leaders, Kramer was asked to determine what the Army should do about it.  Although she had little subject-matter expertise in pregnancy or postpartum policy at the outset, she knew how to build a process capable of evaluating the group’s claims seriously.

“I found the people who had the expertise,” she said. “I brought together personnel policy experts, physicians, and attorneys from across ranks and backgrounds.”  Kramer’s team reached the same conclusion: the problems identified in the white paper were not isolated grievances, but widespread, systemic obstacles affecting retention, advancement, and readiness. Over the next year, Kramer led a comprehensive review of Army regulations to identify and remove those barriers.

The final policy published in 2022 changed 20 Army regulations and affected approximately 185,000 women in uniform and more than 400,000 parents. Now, four years later, the policy is still in place, helping soldiers. “We know people that have stayed in the military as a result,” she said.

Kramer said Sanford gave her the habits and analytical foundation she needed to lead that effort. “Sanford taught me how to write clearly, how to think critically, how to recognize when somebody is trying to pull one over on you, and to really kind of lead a process that was evidence-based and people-focused.”

It also taught her how to translate good policy into a language that senior leaders would actually use. “We had to speak the language the Army understands, which is readiness,” she said. That framing was critical as she worked to convince Army leaders that the policy changes would strengthen the force rather than weaken it. “Data persuades, but narratives compel action,” she said. “We paired the evidence with the experiences of real soldiers so leaders could understand what those policies meant in practice.” 

Kramer was only 25 when she began leading the initiative, often briefing officials who had served in the Army longer than she had been alive.  “I had to very deliberately obfuscate my age, or no one would take me seriously,” she said. The experience reinforced another lesson: formal seniority is not a prerequisite for meaningful impact. “Experience is valuable, but you do not need decades of it to think critically, ask hard questions, develop expertise, or motivate a team,” she said. 

For Kramer, this is the best version of public policy. “Change can start from the grassroots,” she said. “Remember, this all started on Facebook by a bunch of young moms who, instead of complaining, offered a solution.”

The thesis that kept coming back

Kramer’s Sanford experience also had a direct line to her career path.

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While at Duke, she encountered an idea that changed her life: that one of the most reliable indicators of a nation’s security is not its geography, natural resources, religion, or political system, but how its women are treated. “It gave me a way to understand gender not as a separate social issue, but as central to security and institutional strength,” she said.

That question shaped her Sanford honors thesis examining the impact of female leaders in Army ROTC programs. The research took Kramer to Fort Knox, where she worked with the Cadet Command research team, helped develop a national survey for senior cadets, and later briefed the commanding general on the findings. “My thesis quite possibly got me my first job in the Pentagon years later,” she said.

The project also helped shape how she thinks about belonging in institutions. She conveyed how the work showed her that systems often fail to contemplate people who fall outside the norm. “Most of the policies we changed did not deliberately exclude or discriminate,” she said of her later Army policy work. “They simply did not contemplate certain populations, such as pregnant Soldiers.” She stressed the importance of thinking holistically and leveraging diverse teams capable of identifying unintended consequences before they become embedded in policy. 

Sanford, the Robertson program, and a bigger view

Kramer is quick to credit Duke for giving her both opportunity and perspective.

“The whole trajectory of my life has changed because of the financial and community support of the Robertson program in particular,” she said. She credits the program with making possible the research, travel, internships, and early professional connections that shaped her path. “They are the one part of Duke I never say no to,” she said.

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She also points to the American Grand Strategy program and faculty mentors including Peter Feaver and Kyle Beardsley. “I basically minored in Peter Feaver,” she joked, then added that Beardsley, her thesis advisor, spent hours helping her turn the project into something substantive enough to brief at West Point.

That broader Duke experience mattered in another way too. Kramer served on Duke’s Board of Trustees from 2018 to 2020. “Serving on the Board was an honor and also instilled the confidence to speak up despite being the youngest person in the room.” 

She said the role also changed how she understood leadership within large institutions. It showed her that decisions often involve considerations invisible from any single vantage point. Kramer carried that perspective into government. “It has resulted in me giving people in my chain of command a little more grace,” she said. “I’m humbled by how much I don’t know that I don’t know.”

Taking action

Kramer does not romanticize policy work. She knows it moves slowly. She knows it can look abstract from the outside. But she also knows what it can do when it works.

“I think public policy matters because the world is so complex,” she said. “Good public policy allows us to navigate that complexity.” She added that policy matters because trust in institutions has become a defining challenge, and because people deserve systems that do more than acknowledge their problems. They deserve solutions.

She sees that same logic in her current job. Working in Thailand, she said, is intellectually rewarding because it sits at the center of alliance management, diplomacy, economics, and security. “I get to empower an ally to protect themselves,” she said. “And I eat a lot of Thai food… I quite possibly have the best job in the entire Department.” 

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She also knows the work depends on recognizing one’s place within a much larger effort. “So many issues cut across the entire government, the whole interagency,” she said. “You have to understand how your piece contributes to the larger objective and also know when and whom to ask for help.”

Asked what she stands for, Kramer came back to the same answer, only sharper. “I stand for taking action,” she said. “I like being the person who sees the issue and the opportunity to address it with the energy and enthusiasm required.”

That may be the clearest way to understand her story. Sanford helped her learn how to think, write, and lead. Robertson gave her the freedom to ask ambitious questions and follow them across the world. Duke and the American Grand Strategy Program helped her find her place. And in every role since, Kramer has tried to do the same thing for someone else.