We Need Smarter People In Washington. Can This Change Get Them There?

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“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

You’ve heard this quote attributed to Einstein. Its actual provenance is up for debate. But whoever said it, they’re onto something: If you try to solve a problem one way, and it does not work, you should try a different solution.

We don't always follow that advice. So what happens when we do?

I want to tell you the story of one organization working to do this in a very high-profile way — by trying to make Washington D.C. smarter. The lesson can apply to us all.

Washington? Smarter?

Maybe you laugh. Washington? Smarter!? Impossible! You don’t need me to tell you that Washington is dysfunctional. But it is also a place where many well-meaning people try to solve very real problems, so let’s look at a specific instance — something that gets a lot of attention, is not the product of emotion-driven culture wars, and could be vastly improved if only more well-informed people were involved.

I am talking about Washington’s approach to technology.

Oftentimes, this is what that looks like:

That’s a video of Senator Richard Blumenthal asking a Facebook executive if the company will “commit to ending finsta.” If you know what finsta is — which is to say, a slang term for a way teenagers use Instagram — you will know that this question is nonsense. It is also representative of a recurring problem in Washington, where regulators appear to have little understanding of the thing they’re threatening to regulate.

This has a demoralizing effect. Many technologists don’t take Washington seriously and would never consider working there — even though Congress would greatly benefit from having more of them around to help drive more intelligent discussions and craft more meaningful policy.

So what’s the solution? Washington has no answer to this. So nothing is fixed.

But what if, instead of hoping in vain that Congress can attract bright minds, we completely rethink the means by which people come to Washington?

That’s what Travis Moore is doing as the founder of Tech Congress. And his thinking can apply to us all: If we want to fix problems, we can't just keep trying to open a closed door. We need to turn around and look for the openings.

First: How did we get here?

The answer doesn’t start with the politicians. It starts with the people working for politicians.

Every elected official has a staff, which helps inform the official and works on their behalf. But most staffers are young and inexperienced, and the sharpest ones don’t stick around long. Why? To start, look at the salaries. (Congress has a salary cap). One in eight staffers don't make a living wage. Junior staffers might make $20,000 a year. A legislative director could make only $80,000! As soon as these people get good at their jobs, someone else with more money — like, say, a lobbying firm or big tech company — will easily hire them away. As a result, elected officials struggle to attract people with deep expertise, and also struggle to retain their best minds.

How do you fix this? One solution could be to pay staffers more. But good luck voting that in when most taxpayers already feel gouged. How else can we attract tech talent to the Hill?

Moore starts by defining the problem like this:

“This isn't a technology problem. It's a representative government problem,” he says. “People that have the lived relevant expertise should have an opportunity to serve.”

And how do you ensure that experienced people have this opportunity, when the jobs available are not attractive?

How about this: You change the jobs.

An experienced engineer is not going to quit Apple for a grueling new career as a low-paid Hill staffer. So what will they be interested in? What if the job is reframed as a prestigious one-year “fellowship”?

This is what Moore’s nonpartisan organization, Tech Congress, is doing. It sets up fellowships for experienced technologists — computer scientists, engineers, and others — to spend a year advising a member of Congress on election security, disinformation, privacy, AI, and other pressing tech topics.

Moore has found that, with this new framework, he can attract exactly the kind of people Washington needs — because he’s also appealing to these people’s needs and sense of mission.

“When you talk to our fellows, they will say point blank, ‘I wanted to work in tech because I wanted to work at problems at scale. And what I found is at a lot of these big companies, I'm just a cog in the wheel,’” Travis says. “In government, you really can work on these problems at scale. Within a year of being in Congress, you can be the senior advisor to a United States Senator or Speaker of the House. And when individuals with tech expertise can make it through the front door in Congress, their skills get put to use very quickly and very efficiently.”

In short, Moore isn’t trying to jam a solution into a problem. He’s replacing the entire framework of the problem. As a result, he’s placed fellows into dozens of offices and committees.

This feels like a pretty simple solution, right? Why didn’t we see it before? Because we’re used to repeating the same ideas over and over and over again until we hate them. We’ve worn ourselves down with limitations.

I’m not saying Tech Congress can solve all our problems, but it is representative of a smarter way forward: Address the disconnect by acknowledging that, yes, some things are broken, and no, that doesn't mean they're not worth saving — and we probably have the best shot of fixing them from an angle we haven’t tried before.

If we can hold those two ideas in our heads at the same time, then we start to look at solutions differently.

And isn’t that what innovation is all about?

Want to learn more? I did a whole podcast episode about why Washington doesn’t understand tech. Thanks to my friend Mary Pilon, who appears on the show, interviewed Moore, and whose reporting informed this newsletter.

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