Upon completing his formal education, Moynihan became an
assistant professor at the
Bush School of Government and Public Service at
Texas A&M University from 2003 until 2005. While there, he received the 2004 Paul Volcker Endowment Junior Scholar Research Grant from the
American Political Science Association's Public Administration Section for his article "What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Performance? A Content Analysis of Legislative Discussion of Performance Information." Following this, he accepted a similar position at the
Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It also received the Herbert Simon award from the American Political Science Association, which honors the book with the most significant influence in public administration scholarship in the last three to five years. In the same year, Moynihan launched the Performance Information Project "to bring together contemporary empirical research on how public services use performance data." He was also one of four faculty members chosen to establish a partnership between the Department of Political Science and the Elections Division of the state's
Government Accountability Board. As a result of his academic achievements, Moynihan was one of the youngest members elected to be a Fellow of the United States
National Academy of Public Administration By 2014, Moynihan's work was recognized as among the most influential published by the journal
Public Administration Review. His articles were "The Role of Organizations in Fostering Public Service Motivation" and "Pulling the Levers: Transformational Leadership, Public Service Motivation, and Mission Valence". He was later appointed the La Follette School's Jerry and Mary Cotter Faculty Fellow and received the
David N. Kershaw Award from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. Prior to the
2016 United States presidential election, Moynihan co-authored a paper titled "Election Laws, Mobilization, and Turnout: The Unintended Consequences of Electoral Reform", which focused on the effects of election laws to make voting more convenient and increase turnout. The paper won the State Politics and Policy Best Journal Article Award from the American Political Science Association. His research on federal agencies' use of performance management data was referenced in President
Barack Obama's proposed U.S. budget for 2016 and 2017. After presenting his research on public sector performance to policymakers at the
U.S. Office of Management and Budget, the
World Bank and the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), he received the Leon D. Epstein Distinguished Faculty Research Award from the
University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Letters and Science. Moynihan left UW–Madison in 2018 with his wife
Pamela Herd to join the faculty of Georgetown University as the inaugural McCourt Chair at the McCourt School of Public Policy. From 2018 until 2020, Moynihan was a Visiting Professor at the
Blavatnik School of Government and an academic visitor at
Nuffield College, Oxford. In Fall 2023, Moynihan was elected President of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, serving until Fall 2024. In August 2024, Moynihan and Herd joined the University of Michigan Ford School of Public Policy. In January 2025, Moynihan was appointed the J. Ira and Nicki Harris Family Professor of Public Policy. ==References==