He left Capitol Hill to build the firm that does the math Capitol Hill skips. Tax, health care, fiscal policy - the unglamorous machinery that decides who pays what.
Most mornings, the question on Alex Brill's desk is some version of the same one: if you move this lever in the tax code, who pays, who benefits, and by how much. He answers it for a living, and he has answered it from nearly every chair in Washington that gets to ask - the White House, a congressional committee, a fiscal commission, a think tank, and now his own firm.
Brill is the founder and CEO of Matrix Global Advisors, a boutique economic consulting shop in Washington that specializes in health care, tax, and fiscal policy. He is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies how tax policy moves the economy and what tax, budget, health care, retirement, and trade decisions actually do once they leave the press release and hit the ledger.
The throughline is not ideology, though he is comfortably a free-market economist. It is arithmetic. He has built a career on the unfashionable belief that policy should be measured before it is sold, and that the difference between a good idea and a costly one usually hides in a footnote.
What makes him worth reading is the company he keeps with inconvenient numbers. When the easy story and the data disagree, Brill tends to side with the data, even when that puts him crosswise with people who otherwise share his politics. He edited a book making the conservative case for a carbon tax. Plenty of conservatives did not thank him for it.
Before the firm and the fellowship, Brill spent five years as policy director and chief economist of the House Committee on Ways and Means, from 2002 to 2007. That committee writes the tax code. He directed its policy development and helped run negotiations on tax, health, pension, and trade matters, which is to say he was in the room when abstractions became statute.
Before the Hill, he served on the staff of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the small shop of economists whose job is to tell a president what the numbers say rather than what the politics want. Serving both the executive and the legislative branch is a Washington rarity. Brill did both, which is part of why he can translate between them.
He later worked as a tax policy advisor to the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, better known as Simpson-Bowles - the bipartisan deficit effort that everyone cites and no one passed. He also served on the 2008 Republican Platform Committee. The pattern is consistent: when a serious body needs someone who can model the tradeoffs, his name comes up.
In 2007 he made the move that defines him now. He founded Matrix Global Advisors and started doing the analysis on his own terms - rigorous, independent, and aimed at clients who need the real number rather than the comfortable one.
Written with Alan D. Viard. The case that the true cost of taxation includes the behavior it distorts and the wealth it never lets form - the burden that does not appear on any 1040.
A volume asking the political right to take a carbon tax seriously, on growth terms. It earned him a sharp in-house rejoinder titled "Carbon Taxes: Et Tu, Alex Brill?"
A free-market economist editing the conservative case for a carbon tax is the kind of move that loses you friends on a Tuesday and earns you readers for a decade. Brill made it anyway.
Matrix Global Advisors is small on purpose. It works the intersection of three subjects that most people treat separately: health care, tax, and fiscal policy. Brill's bet is that the interesting problems live exactly where those three overlap - drug pricing that bends federal budgets, tax incentives that reshape clean energy, retirement programs whose math runs decades into the future.
At AEI he keeps the academic muscle warm, publishing on who pays income tax, how to design technology-neutral clean energy incentives, and where Social Security and the manufacturing sector are headed. He has testified before Congress many times - on tax policy, labor markets, unemployment insurance, Social Security reform, fiscal stimulus, and biologic drug competition - which means his analysis routinely ends up quoted back at the people who commissioned it.
His master's is in mathematical finance, not a typical credential for a Washington policy hand, and it shows. He treats the tax code less like a moral document and more like a machine with moving parts, some of them missing a screw. Find the screw, and you have a policy memo.
Ask what Brill is for, and the answer is not a party - it is a method. He wants tax, health care, and fiscal policy decided by evidence, with growth and incentives kept at the center of the conversation instead of buried under slogans. The work is patient. Most of it does not trend. But the next time a markup turns on a number, there is a decent chance the number traces back to someone like him.
He catches up to the rest of us mid-stride, already three drafts into the memo nobody else wanted to write. That is the job. He seems to like it.