The Policy Continuity Framework
Keep your government affairs operation intact while you hire.
The average time-to-hire for a senior government relations leader is 93 days. Your policy priorities do not pause for that timeline.
Forward Strategies offers three structured engagements — built on the architecture Mattie Duppler used to stand up Amazon's public affairs function — that allow General Counsels and executive leaders to maintain coalitions, manage congressional relationships, and meet regulatory deadlines during the interval between departure and permanent hire.
What a government relations vacancy actually costs
Most companies treat the space between a GR leader's departure and their replacement's start date as a logistics problem. It is a risk management problem.
In the 90+ days after a senior GR departure, companies routinely face five concrete exposures:
Coalitions move without them and they lose founding-member positioning
Comment periods close without input on rules they will live with for a decade
Congressional staff rotate and relationships reset to zero
Lobbying disclosure and ethics deadlines pass unchecked
Competitors accelerate policy positioning while the seat is empty
None of these require a permanent hire to manage. All of them require a system.
How it works:The Policy Continuity Framework
The anchor of all three engagements is the same: The Policy Continuity Framework, a structured 90-day system organized into three phases.
The first 30 days arrest the decline. A priority assessment protocol, a stakeholder inventory methodology, and a crisis monitoring structure allow a General Counsel or interim executive to identify and contain the most time-sensitive risks without requiring GR expertise.
Days 1–30: Contain Crisis
The second 30 days build operational consistency. Coalition engagement protocols, Hill meeting frameworks, and policy positioning templates allow the operation to run on structured processes rather than institutional memory.
Days 31–60: Create Consistency
The final 30 days prepare the incoming permanent hire to inherit forward motion rather than a cold start. Knowledge transfer protocols, internal advocacy tools for the permanent hire's mandate, and KPI construction for their first six months.
Days 61-90: Prepare for Momentum
The Framework is available at three engagements levels
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The Policy Continuity Framework
The complete Framework, template library, and monthly group onboarding webinar. For legal and executive teams covering the gap internally who want structure, not supervision.
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The Framework + Advisory
Everything in the Framework, plus direct 1:1 advisory access with Mattie across the 90-day window: two private strategy sessions, email support with template reviews, and a monthly policy briefing
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The Integration Engagement
A 90-day embedded engagement in which Mattie integrates with your leadership team to run the continuity operation alongside you. Weekly working sessions, direct drafting and outreach, meeting representation, and board-ready reporting. Capped at three engagements per quarter.
About The Framework’s Author:
Mattie Duppler is the founder of Forward Strategies. Before building her consulting practice, she stood up Amazon's large-scale public affairs function and led some of the highest-profile policy fights of the past decade. Her Capitol Hill background includes senior work with the House Republican Conference; she holds an MBA from Georgetown and hosts the policy podcast The Tradeoff. She is a regular commentator on federal policy across national media.
The Policy Continuity Framework is the distilled system she used to build a new function from zero — now adapted for the narrower challenge of maintaining an existing function during executive transition.
Your Questions, Answered-
Policy Continuity is the discipline of maintaining government affairs operations during the period between a senior GR leader's departure and their permanent replacement's start date. Forward Strategies offers three structured engagements — a self-study framework, framework plus advisory, and an embedded integration engagement — all built on the same 90-day architecture.
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These engagements are built for General Counsels, Chief Compliance Officers, and senior executive leaders at established companies who have inherited responsibility for government affairs during an executive search. They are not designed for startups building a function from scratch or for ongoing lobbying representation.
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An interim lobbyist performs representation. The Policy Continuity Framework builds the continuity infrastructure — priorities, protocols, stakeholder maps, coalition commitments — that allows whoever is covering the seat to operate coherently. Some clients do both. The framework makes any interim representation more effective.
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The framework is most useful when initiated within the first two weeks of a departure. It remains valuable at any point in the 90-day window, but the Days 1–30 priority assessment is hardest to execute retroactively.
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The Policy Continuity Framework suits teams with available internal bandwidth and no acute external pressure. The Framework + Advisory suits regulated-industry companies with active policy exposure. The Integration Engagement suits companies facing imminent crises, complex regulatory environments, or unexpected departures where no internal successor exists.
If you are looking for an in-depth audit and comprehensive architecture, please fill out the form for the Integration Engagement and we will get back to you in one business day.