The Top Line

Matt Lira, who held a wide variety of technology-related posts in Congress, recently spoke about how to modernize Congress – especially congressional technology – in a wide-ranging interview in Statecraft. Matt was around during the heady days when Reps. Darrell Issa, Steny Hoyer, Eric Cantor, Mike Honda, Nancy Pelosi, and others were pushing forward innovation on Congressional technology.

Anyone remember the 2007 Open House Project report, the 8 principles of open government data, or the recommendations to the bulk data task force? There’s a long, largely untold story of the collaborative effort among congressional political staff, non-political staff, and civil society coalescing around the start of the Obama administration that brought tremendous energy to modernizing legislative branch technology. One focus was improving transparency, but another was to save staff from the drudgery of aspects of their work so they could serve a higher, democracy-supporting function. Let me quote Matt on this point:

The Top Line

From our shameless self-promotion division, Roll Call was kind enough to profile me this past Tuesday.

Do you support democracy? I mean, do you work at a foundation or are a high-net worth individual and want to see our political system work better? If so, the folks at Democracy Fund Voice have published a blogpost and white paper that outlines their successes and lessons learned in supporting congressional capacity and congressional reform work. I had the pleasure of working with Democracy Fund Voice and Democracy Fund for many years and their support  and insight was essential to my success.

Congress is out and it’s my suspicion that news from Congress may slow down. While the press chases the campaign, in the background are important efforts to resolve the differences in the Appropriations and NDAA bills for passage in December, hammering out a Continuing Resolution to keep the government open, jockeying for positions on committees as members retire – and the work to update the rules for the House, the Senate, and the parties inside them. The rules in particular have long been an interest of mine – process guides the results – and the August recess is the unofficial kick-off for a lot of this work. Stay tuned.

Know a technologist who should work in Congress? The TechCongress fellowship has applications open through August 7th for their January cohort. Mid-career fellows receive a $93,000/year stipend and early-career fellows receive a $70,000 annual-equivalent stipend.

This week is Sunshine Week, the annual celebration timed to James Madison’s birthday “that shines a light on the importance of public records and open government.” Sunshine Week began in Florida in the early 2000s in response to efforts by members of the state legislature to create a plethora of new exemptions to the state’s public records law. It has spread nationally, with some federal agencies hosting Sunshine Week events and the House’s Oversight Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee (and sometimes Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee) holding oversight hearings, marking-up legislation, and sending letters. Here’s a list of this week’s events.

Why should we care about government transparency?

It’s not easy to recognize when our political system is transitioning from one era to another, but there are many signs that we are in the middle of that process.

This past week, Senator Mitch McConnell announced he will step down as Republican leader at the end of this Congress and retire from the Senate when his term ends. His nemesis, Democratic leader Harry Reid, retired from the Senate in 2017. In the House of Representatives, all of the “Young Guns” — Reps. McCarthy, Boehner, and Cantor, as well as Rep. McHenry — have left the Capitol, or are about to do so. Their longtime political opponents, Reps. Pelosi, Hoyer, and Clyburn, have recently stepped down from their leadership posts, although several are still influential in the House.

In January, the R Street Institute, Demand Progress Education Fund, and POPVOX Foundation hosted a cybersecurity training for House staff. While the House and Senate provide resources and training to protect official accounts, at this time, there’s no equivalent support for staffers’ non-official accounts.

This past Tuesday, I sat in on an excellent hearing on the use of Artificial Intelligence in the Legislative Branch, hosted by the House Administration Committee. I’m not going to recap it here — Aubrey already did that — but I did want to share a good idea that I ripped off from the Obama administration.

It’s a really simple idea: in order to build on top of data, you have to know what you have. To wit: way back in the midst of time, 2013 to be precise, President Obama required agencies to conduct and create “enterprise data inventories” — a comprehensive list of all the data an agency holds.

In my work I have the luxury — sometimes the necessity — of digging into Congress’s past. How did things work before? What were people thinking? Is any of this relevant today?

So when reading through comments on the introduction of Congress reform legislation from the Congressional Record in the 1960s, I ran across a mention of a “Management Study of the U.S. Congress” by Arthur D. Little, Inc. in 1965. Naturally, I wanted to read it.

On Thursday, the House of Representatives did something unusual: it passed a small, bipartisan bill with a substantive and positive impact on policy. The PRESS Act, co-sponsored by Rep. Kevin Kiley [R, CA], Jamie Raskin [D, MD], and eighteen others, is a reporter shield law. The District of Columbia and every state except Wyoming provide a statutory protection or court-recognized shield for journalists.

This bill, like the ones in the states, prohibits prosecutors from forcing journalists and their IT providers to disclose information about their sources except when doing so would prevent terrorism or imminent violence. Basically, think of it as a clergy or attorney-client privilege, but for reporters talking to their sources — an entirely different form of confession. The purpose is to allow journalists to report the news without fear the government will go after them for doing their jobs. Going after the press for “leaks” is a time-honored way of distracting from the substance of the reporting.