Twenty years. One partnership. It shows.
Doyle McDonald turns twenty years old in August 2026. It started, like most good things in Washington, with a chance encounter and a conversation that changed everything.
John was a Senior Vice President at Berman and Company, a DC-based nonprofit management and lobbying firm, when Megan came aboard — on her way to an Air Force Intelligence posting, top-secret clearance pending. John took one look at how she worked and made his case: she was too good at getting things done for government to be the right place for her. He was right. The clearance came through. It didn't matter. Doyle McDonald did.
They worked together at Berman for four years, and then did what people do when they trust each other completely — they built something of their own.
John is a former journalist who found his calling in the middle of some of Washington's most consequential public affairs campaigns. He brings ferocious intelligence, finely tuned intuition, and a passion for investigative research that has surfaced game-changing findings — buried government data, overlooked research, unrecognized allies — that have reframed debates nobody thought could be reframed. (He also spent years behind a bar, which turns out to be its own education in reading a room.)
On weekends he hunts for what others walk past — on riverbanks, ocean floors, and the Thames foreshore. The instinct that pulls a mosasaur jaw or a Revolutionary War relic out of river mud is the same one that found the home renovation angle in an import restriction debate — and got Bob Vila to care about a trade association's policy fight.
What each of them brings.
Megan is the CEO. She brings discipline, abstract thinking, and a relentless focus on results. Her BA is from Yale and her MSc from the London School of Economics, where she studied Conflict Studies — which turns out to be excellent preparation for Washington public affairs. She has been to dozens of countries and cities that reward curiosity — Budapest, Prague, Amman, Marrakech — and approaches every client problem the way a strategist approaches a chessboard: several moves ahead, always.
Outside the office she cooks the way she strategizes — she can construct a flavor combination in her head before a single ingredient hits the pan, then execute it with her own flourishes. She devours fiction of every kind — historical, adventure, the full range — and nonfiction that goes as deep as it gets: her favorite author is the physicist Carlo Rovelli — she liked him enough to name her cat after him — whose exploration of time, reality, and quantum mechanics she finds as useful as any policy brief. The unexpected dividend of a lifetime in books turned out to be people — how they act, what they want, how societies move.
They don't always agree. After twenty years they've learned that's a feature, not a bug. When their instincts diverge they work it through in conversation — or they bring both perspectives to the client and let the tension produce a better answer than either one would have reached alone.
Why it still matters
Before they ever started Doyle McDonald — back at Berman, early in their time together — Megan presented to a room full of hospitality industry CEOs. She was twenty-three years old. Afterward, John pulled her aside and told her he was blown away. Twenty-four years later, nobody in that room would be surprised — but John was right to see it then.
That's Doyle McDonald. Not a firm where people show up and do the work. A partnership where two people have spent twenty years making each other better — and bringing that to every client who walks in the door.
The CTE Science Alliance is not a client engagement. It is Doyle McDonald's own initiative — conceived, built, and operated by the same partnership that has spent two decades reframing debates for some of the most demanding organizations in Washington. When we ask founding partners to invest in this work, we are asking them to back something we already believed in enough to build ourselves.
