Austin is the Deputy Director of the Thurman Arnold Project at Yale University, an initiative that brings together faculty, students, and scholars from Yale Law School, the Yale School of Management, and other institutions to collaborate on research related to competition policy and antitrust enforcement. He is also a Fellow at The Harkin Institute at Drake University and a Senior Fellow at Data for Progress .

Austin is currently working on a book that argues for restoring the balance of power in the American food system in favor of farmers, workers, small businesses, and communities. The book is inspired by an article he originally published in The American Conservative that was later republished in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, Civil Eats, and The Progressive Populist.

Austin is a 7th generation Iowan from Cedar Rapids. His mother Kathy managed a beauty salon before opening her own bakery. His father Scott delivered and merchandised beer for a local, family-owned beer distributor. Austin’s passion for agriculture comes from spending weekends working with his Grandpa Frerick.

Austin has held a job since the age of 12, when he started working at the Cedar Rapids Gazette as a paperboy. He attended Grinnell College on merit scholarships and Pell Grants. While in college, Austin wrote two theses on corporate power in Iowa’s slaughterhouse communities. After being the first in his family to graduate from college, Austin attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison for graduate school on a full academic scholarship.

Once he completed his education, Austin took a job at the Congressional Research Service in the Library of Congress, where he provided non-partisan policy analysis to members of Congress and their staff, with a focus on income support programs. He then worked as an Economist at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of Tax Analysis. While working next door to the White House, Austin published research on executive compensation, pharmaceutical corporate charity abuses, and the growth of concentration in the American economy.

Following the 2016 election, Austin decided to move back to Iowa to run for Congress in Iowa’s Third Congressional District. He ran the first modern day American trust-busting campaign, focusing on how agribusiness corporations harm farmers, workers, small businesses, and communities. In particular, he criticized the then pending merger between agribusiness giants Monsanto and Bayer. He took his economic message to national publications like The Washington Monthly, SlowFoodsUSA, The Nation, and numerous small-town Iowa papers like the Creston News Advertiser, Guthrie Times, & Earlham Advocate.

Austin has continued to highlight the growing economic concentration in the American economy. He worked as the Director of Special Projects at the Open Markets Institute, where he authored a report on “America's Concentration Crisis,” which was discussed extensively by David Leonhardt in a New York Times column -and cited by Vox and The Intercept and tweeted out by Sen. Sanders and David Axelrod. He also created & organized the "Heartland Forum" in Storm Lake, Iowa, the first candidate forum during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary process, which focused on the impacts of economic concentration in rural America. It was attended by Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Secretary Julian Castro, and other candidates.