Heidi:   Hi, I'm Heidi Burgess with Beyond Intractability. And I'm here with Lorelei Kelly, who is the Research Lead on the Modernization of Congress in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. Thanks, Lorelei, for taking the time to do this.

Lorelei: Yeah, it's my pleasure. It's good to see you.

Heidi: Good to see you, too. We've been friends for quite a while, or colleagues anyway.  As I told you before we started the recording, we've been talking to a number of people, most recently, Grande Lum, about the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. And he also told me about the Rebuilding Congress Initiative. And I see that you're doing something you've got something called Congressional Modernization. So I guess where I'd like to start is for you to tell me what you're doing and then how it links to and how it is different from those other activities, all of which are trying to make a very ineffectual body more effectual, from what I understand.

Lorelei: For sure. So yeah, I'm the Research Lead on the Georgetown faculty at the McCourt School of Public Policy on Modernizing Congress. What that means is I spend a lot of my time on Capitol Hill helping support the committee — the members and the staff who were on the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. That started in 2019, and it ran for two sessions, which was an achievement all on its own. Usually, select committees don't get extended. This one was extended for four years with 12 members each time.

It created a group of bipartisan members whose goal was to help Congress update and reform itself to better serve the American people. The Fix Congress Cohort that exists now, and also existed then, is how I've worked with these other folks in the Rebuild Congress world.

I am part of a civil society cohort working adjacent to the institution that philanthropy funded to support the Committee and the staff so that they could be as successful and optimize their time and work on implementing the recommendations that they created. The heavy lift for Congress has been done. It passed 202 recommendations, all bipartisan, mostly unanimous.

And the good news, under the radar screen that people don't see, right [is that part of Congress actually does work. On the outside,] It looks like a three-ring circus right now. But under the radar screen, there's a huge amount of work being done to reform and transform the sort of information architecture of Congress so that it can better adapt and be present and defend public goods in the modern world.

And it's a huge accomplishment when you think that the institution still today has some pockets of 1870 document formats in the digital era. It's sort of like Congress, the House anyway went from yellow sticky notes to a blinking VCR during the course of the Committee. And now it's moving on to  Zoom during the pandemic. That was huge. I don't think it would have gotten on Zoom, unless we had a pandemic, The silver lining is two years later, every single of the 441 members of Congress now is a competent content moderator on Zoom. Before COVID, you would have never said that. And so these are little steps forward that seem sort of innocuous and unremarkable. But for an institution, not only marinated in the past, but really longing for tradition and its sort of vintage worldview [it's big.]

Congress just got routers inside the building for Wi-Fi recently. And only last year did district offices get included in a common House Wi-Fi system. So think about that. Communication was defeated by marble walls. That is true in a lot of government. I'm sure it's not just Washington, DC. And the institution has harmed itself desperately over the last two decades because of that.

Certainly, my life working in and out of Congress, which is now for  23 years, I've seen it. It's diminished itself by not keeping up with the executive branch, the private sector, or the media in its ability to be present in the modern world.

Heidi:  How do you see that having affected it? Having the lack of communication at technology, how has that harmed Congress? Just be a little more specific.

Lorelei: Yeah, I can be specific. So you know until the 1940s, actually, Congress had a functional right to petition, which is Congress's duty in the First Amendment, the right to petition, which is to take your voice [to Congress] and to have your grievances addressed. And the reason the right to petition existed and was so robust as a functional way to process grievance for the American people was because so many people couldn't vote.  When Congress was set up, when the House — when I talk about "Congress" right now, I'm meaning the House. I include the Senate [by saying "Senate"] specifically. The Senate is nowhere near the House right now in terms of its reform effort inside. We're trying to reel it in. It's got some great upstart members, but the House of Representatives is the one that has really taken the initiative on this and leaned into it.

So the right to petition Congress on its agenda was set by petitions brought from the public.  It's how women got the vote. It's how slavery was addressed inside the institution. So there was this side door into the representative process because so many people weren't included and didn't count, essentially, in the vote. That petition function was in the House clerk, and it existed until the mid-40s when Congress offshored this capacity to the executive branch, essentially, by creating specific agencies to handle Social Security, veterans. Pensions, prisons. So it's really interesting, like not thinking what the long-term consequences would be, it gave up its internal barometer of the American people. So at every level, the sort of way for the House of Representatives, your content moderators between the people and the federal government, has been rendered incommunicato or gagged or cut off.

So the right to petition now kind of exists as activism or advocacy and purchased access through lobbying. And so there's this what I call "a constitutional wasteland," basically, in between very expensive purchased access [and the people]. And we've seen that kind of capture by millions and millions of dollars being spent to get in front of lawmakers and, in fact, do a lot of the content work for them for private interests, narrow interests.

 And advocacy groups — and I'm not complaining about this, in the sense that it's all constitutionally okay in the law. The problem is it's so distorted and uneven. So advocacy groups, a lot of them do wonderful work for humanitarian causes, for civil rights. The problem there is it's very narrow. So it's still a very narrow interest, usually. It's not giving them situational awareness about how an issue fits into the context of society or lawmaking in the past or the potential outcomes of the issue that they're advocating. It's not related and connected. It's not a systems approach. And I think that's been very damaging. And we're trying to fix that with all this digital reform.

You know I came into this from national security. And one of the reasons I got out of working specifically on defense budget and other war and peace issues was because it was obvious to me working with the committees that Congress had no situational awareness ability about how the world was changing.  And it needs to know itself before it can know the world. And I think that's what we're doing is helping it understand itself far better. So that's an interesting way to think about it. But there's a real reason people feel so disconnected and disenfranchised. They do because it's real.

Heidi: You said something that you just glossed over in the middle of a sentence that I know was something that really jumped out at me in our conversations years ago about how a lot of these massive laws, which are hundreds or thousands of pages long, aren't actually written by our legislators, but they're written by private interests. And that struck me as awful. And I gather that's still the way it works.

Lorelei: Not always. I think you've got a lot of members that tried really hard to read everything themselves, that try to represent civic voice from their own constituents. But remember that Schoolhouse Rock video, "I'm only a bill?" Where the initiative starts because they want to crosswalk at a train crossing, and it goes to a committee, and then they deliberate, and there's this sort of contention, and then it goes to the other one, and there's more, and then it goes along, and it's voted on. Congress right now isn't doing its deliberative process. Over the last 20 years, what you've seen internally is a consolidation of both recognition and power and voice into the party leadership. And both parties have done it, and they've consolidated actual policy staff into communications staff. And I think what's happened overall is that you know the incentive system for a member of Congress now is performance, not governing. And I think that is obvious to people when you look.  Things aren't going to committee and then to a conference and then working out the details and then to a vote. Very often, you have this complete skipping over of the deliberative process where things will get taken straight to the floor. There's a lot of old archaic processes and rules that are being used right now to, not just diminish the deliberative process, which is how the rank and file have a voice, not just the American people, but regular members who might be younger or new or not a party favorite. Essentially, the workhorses, the rank-and-file workhorses of Congress are really the ones who I think suffer the most. Because they're there to do a job. And they exist in both parties. But they're not the ones who get the attention. And that's part of the media ecosystem that we live in. It's not a healthy, balanced, civic serving media system right now. We need to change that. So when I talk about Congress modernizing, we also need a lot more media reform so that people are fed a more regular diet of nonpartisan, nonprofit, public-serving information about how we govern ourselves.

So these are all my dreams, right? It's very hard. I'm sure you see how gutted the media, local news especially, civic serving news, how hard it's been for them because their revenue model was destroyed with classified advertising going away. So yeah, we have a bundle of entangled problems that we need to figure out to strengthen democracy right now.

I think the members, lots of times, turn to lobbyists, not because it's some kind of venal corruption regime. It's because they're really smart. They might have had the job in the committee a few years prior. And the incentive system for staff right now, too, is not to stay on the Hill long-term. It's to do a few years to learn the system, memorize a few must-pass bills, and then trade up to a far higher salary on K Street and basically sell out.  I hate to say that because a lot of my friends have done it. But there's not a way to live in an expensive city like Washington DC and have a family and pay for them to go to college. It's almost impossible. And that creates all these other distortions, right? Is working in Congress just for rich kids who don't have to have a summer job? One of the things we got through with the Modernization Committee is paying interns.  So that's now a line item. Another thing that we got through in the Modernization Committee is allowing members to pay for continuing education for staff, to help them pay back loans, all kinds of really interesting, important things to actually make the institution more representative, because now it's possible for people to do these jobs. That said, it's really hard to compete. For every one of me that's just doing pure public good, there are hundreds of lobbyists getting paid far more than I ever will get to do this kind of work.

Heidi: So going back to the beginning when you were talking, you said the Modernization Committee passed over 200 bills or recommendations unanimously. What happened to them once they got to Congress?

Lorelei: So Congress created the recommendations and they were all passed as recommendations within the committee. And the brilliant way this was done by Derek Kilmer from Washington and his first co-vice chair was a guy named Tom Graves from Georgia. And his second Republican vice chair was a gentleman named Bill Timmons from South Carolina. And again, it was six Democrats, six Republicans. And of course, some of them were more invested than others, but these were great members. They all showed up and did the work. And this was an extra credit committee.  It was on top of their other committee assignments. So Congress passed them in what's called "rolling recommendations." So they passed them in chunks at a time. They didn't wait until the end of two years and then try to pass them all, which is kind of a vintage method from the business world. This waterfall method is you make a plan, carry it out, and then evaluate it.

What we do now is these sort of sprints and iterations. And so it was constantly iterating with the members and I think that's the reason it was able to pass 202 recommendations. I think almost 60% of them are either implemented now or in process. So it's been hugely successful. The remaining 40% or so are the really hard ones, including, for your interest, the peacebuilding and conflict resolution piece. There were a handful of recommendations specifically about social cohesion and helping heal the divides in the country. And there were some bills introduced on the side, the Civic Bridge Building Act, for example. Community grants came back. Those used to be called earmarks. Now they've got ethics rules around them, which means a considerable amount of money now is going out as determined by communities.

It's kind of the closest thing we're going to get to participatory budgeting in the United States. Members work with their community to apply for money in the appropriations process. But the issues and the projects themselves come from the communities. It's a huge and I would just say anybody who's listening to this, if you do a search on your member's name and community grants, you'll see what's being funded in your district right now.

And now we're going into the third or fourth year of them.

Heidi: Sounds good!

Lorelei:  Yeah. No, it's great. I feel if Americans get more actual feedback and see themselves and their voice and their priorities, at least being recognized in the deliberative process of Congress, and then maybe get a community center or a new road or a bridge or a new firehouse or a hospital extension, like the mental health center in my hometown in New Mexico, they'll think, "Wow, there's something that's working here." And there's no excuse for us to not have this tiny percentage of the budget.

We should keep building and building and building, so that far more of the budget is determined by local communities. So it's a huge step forward. To me, that's really the most significant thing we did with the Modernization Committee was bring back this idea of member-directed spending, this time with ethics rules around it. So it's not for private corporations and your family members can't apply.

Remember, it was in 2012 where Jack Abrimoff and those terrible scandalous corruption cases with casinos and golf in Scotland really blew up the whole process. And what ended up happening at that time was the whole thing got thrown out. So the baby with the bathwater was the response, which is a shame.  Because those local-directed spending, the reason the Modernization Committee did it, was to start to incentivize members to work together across parties and across geographies.

Heidi: What were some of the other peacebuilding and conflict resolution recommendations that are still on the table?

Lorelei: Sure. Yeah. So one of them is figuring out how to look at better negotiation and conflict resolution skills as a leadership quality. So as part of leadership training, I've been sending it out to my friends who are doing that kind of conflict resolution leadership training. So the issue there is, again, members need to be incentivized to do that kind of work. Right now, you saw it with the State of the Union. They're incentivized some of them, at least. And it's not the majority. It's like twelve on the fringe who are violating the rules, wearing hats, screaming, behaving badly. But they're getting elected by people who know they do that.\

Heidi: And so they like that.

Lorelei: So I've always tried to think, how do we get the people in those districts to realize how they're making it so none of us can have nice things? Which would be a functioning democracy.

The other ones [recommendations still on the table] were using technology to improve connection and civic engagement at the district level. I have done a bunch of research on that.

Heidi: That seems like a no brainer. Why is it contentious?

Lorelei: Well, because part of it is because the use of modern technology in Congress isn't just because it doesn't fund itself to be modern. I testified three years ago in front of the Appropriations Committee on Congress and Technology, and I did a little research.  that year, Americans spent more on Hamilton the Musical tickets than on the entire technology system of the most powerful legislature in the world. There's something deeply wrong with that, that we are fine singing and dancing about civics, but we don't want to pay for it.

By the way, I hold the American people equally responsible to the Congress. It's a two-way street. We have to have a little love and compassion in our hearts for this old institution. There's no way it can live its best life when it is underfunded. It's still right now only at 1990 levels of capacity. Committees are still in 1975.  Every time members try to raise the funds, to appropriate more money for the legislative branch, they get accused of feathering their own nests. They're not paid well — commensurately with others who have real power and responsibility in society. They have to maintain two households. We need to figure out a different set of incentives and implement them system-wide. Because right now we've got a systemic problem that is degrading the position. Members are getting 300% more death threats right now than they did before January 6th,  You've got really great members retiring right now and they're polite and they don't say why, but I know part of it's because it's just not worth it anymore. You have to get on a plane and switch planes at midnight in Denver and sit in airplanes and hotels and you're away from your family and your pets and everything you love. And then you come here and get screamed at and don't get work done. So we have to, as a people, decide that we're going to change the incentive system for them. I'm thinking all the time of what that would look like in the federal system that we have. But this shared vision of the future really depends on it, right?

If we're going to stick together as a nation, it depends on us getting to a more shared vision of the future.

Heidi: Absolutely.

Lorelei:. The other ones, there are probably three others. So technology for use with constituent services, simply improving communications technology in general, developing new ways to connect with civil society in your district. Let me tell you another — I'll just say two really archaic things that people don't realize.

For Congress to get a cloud system like the rest of us have on our phone, it's a constitutional issue. It's a separation of powers issues. So the executive branch and the legislative branch are not allowed to be in each other's business. And so you can't just have a common cloud at Amazon and get it off the shelf because then you can subpoena Amazon to get Congress's information. And so all the information has been kept on site. Literally in 441 closets on the hill.

People have their own servers. So simply creating a unified correspondence management system is something we're working on. Things like a collaborative calendar, like a doodle for Congress that had to go through law to create a collaborative calendar. So when you don't see members showing up for their hearings, it's not because they're like having a beer down at the steakhouse. It's because they are scheduled over three times in one time spot. So they're running in, running out, running in, asking two questions for C-SPAN, running out.  So again, it just defeats the deliberative process, because as you know, you need to be present in the room, listening, responding, synthesizing for the hour and a half that the hearing lasts. The Modernization Committee developed new models for hearings, much more working group models, took away the sort of dais where you're way up high, talking down to the witnesses, and made them roundtables, changing the speaking sequence. So most of the discussion was the witnesses talking about what they know, which is the point, right?

My other favorite thing that happened during the pandemic was we put hearings on Zoom for remote hearings, which meant that all of a sudden, every single American could be a potential witness in a hearing. I haven't seen the data yet, but I would argue that the diversity of witnesses in hearings, which is the official record of Congress, tremendously increased in its diversity during those three and a half years.

Unfortunately, they took that away last year in January. When the house turned over, they took away remote hearings. Or they made it so burdensome that nobody really did it — it's too hard now. You can't just have farmers in Kansas and people working on the mountains in Montana zoom in for a hearing, which was fabulous. I don't know if you watched them, but all of those hearings during the pandemic were extremely full of different kinds of voices.

And there's no reason we can't bring that back tomorrow, to be honest.

Heidi: Why was it taken away?

Lorelei: I think there was [concern about] remote activity, remote voting, all of that was extremely controversial. There were real constitutional reasons why voting has to be  within the perimeter of Washington, D.C. or you have a quorum.  We did get proxy voting, where all of a sudden, I felt like it took us back to colonial America, because the members who lived like a stagecoach away from DC made it into vote, and they ended up doing a lot of the voting for others. It was abused. Some members were just calling it in from conferences in Florida or whatever, but it wasn't largely abused. I understand the problem of voting by proxy. I think that the business of Congress is what a hearing is.

It's called the Business of Congress, and that should have stayed remote. I think it went back to in-person because the GOP just really insisted on this sort of much more conventional, traditional model that we all need to show up now, come back. I don't think it was very well thought through. I know it wasn't beloved by everyone to reverse that rule.. I do think that we will get remote hearings back at some point.

So some of the reasons like the technology in Congress — or the other thing I was going to say are the rules of Congress on the ethics [are a problem.] They call it ethics rules, but they treat a lobbyist from Lockheed Martin the same as the soup kitchen in your hometown. They're all considered outside interests that have potential conflicts of interest. If you do convenings, you have a box of donuts. It's nuts. And so one of the things that we're trying to do is like, "Listen, you've got to differentiate.  You have to be more specific than lumping everyone into this outside interest where gazillion-dollar lobbyists are competing with the Boy Scouts and humanitarian aid organizations. It's not fair! We have to change that. So that's another one of the things. It's kind of a norm change that we need to work on. And we are working on that too.

Heidi:  One of the things that struck me as interesting because Grande [Lum] and a few other people told me about all of the procedural changes of the Select Committee [on the Modernization of Congress], like having people talk around a table and have them seated so that it went Republican, Democrat, Republican, Democrat. I think it was Timmons who said, "If I hear a good idea, I want to lean next to the person next to me and talk about it."  And if that person is the other party, then you end up doing cross-party conversations. And I'm going, "Eureka, why wasn't this done in every committee?" And I gather that no other committees do that. Everybody's saying, "Yay, the select committee did all this great stuff, but we're not going to copy them."

Lorelei: Well, you know what's interesting, is I think that the members themselves did the best job they could letting people know about it.  So this is the issue of situational awareness in Congress itself, much less the outside world, right? There's no guarantee that other members even knew about the Modernization Committee. They did a lot of listening sessions and the members who led it, Mr. Kilmer and Mr. Timmons, they had wonderful staff. The staff was what's called unified staff, all sitting together in the same room. They shared everything all the time. So it's really dissolved the party lines. They weren't significant in any of it, which was like a beautiful thing to behold over the last four years.

The bigger issue to me is that the role that was missing was the sort of advocacy on behalf of the institution. So if we'd had civil society — we had that in the Fixed Congress Cohort. —  There were probably, I don't know, 35 of us at the most in the left-right coalition working to help this committee testify, write op-eds, show up, convene things on the Hill, help them be the best they could be, given this extra task of modernization and reform. But we didn't have a very informed or cultivated communications function or another set of partners in civil society that could have taken the word out. Like I wonder of the millions and millions of dollars that have been spent on the return of community grants, I wonder if any of them know that it came from the Modernization Committee. It should be a talking point every single time. "This is because your colleagues changed these rules so that you could have these projects in your district. Thank you, Modernization Committee. Oh, by the way, what are the rest of the recommendations? How can I act on them?"

I went up and did some field research in district offices in December, and only about half of the staff I talked to even knew that the modernization reforms existed. And this problem is the depletion of institutional memory in Congress.  And this goes back to the point of people just churn through at 18 months, and they leave, and then they go do something else. So we haven't incentivized a long-term permanent staff. If I had my druthers, every member of Congress would have two more staff. Right now, they have 18. That hasn't changed in, I don't know, decades. Meanwhile, the American population has doubled since the '70s,. But they're still working with the same number of staff now with almost 800,000 constituents and not the technology that is able to scale.'

I would love it if every member of Congress had a civic engagement staff person that was located in district offices.  I was a fellow in Congress. I've always been loaned into the system. And I feel like that would be a wonderful project if there's any philanthropy listening to this. Develop a fellows program that puts civic engagement staff in district offices that's simply implementing the recommendations.  These already have permission from Congress as an institution to move forward, but they're not going to move forward. And these are the harder open recommendations. They're going to need to be supported much more by outside groups. Piloting, prototyping new methods, sharing the new methods with everyone inside the institution.

That's something else I've seen in my life working in and out of Congress is the diminishment of what's called institutionalists, members who put the institution above the party. And that has huge implications for doing things like research and prototyping.  Why spend the time if you don't get rewarded for it? Why let your staff talk to someone like me who's a researcher talking about how are we going to use this technology to hear more civic voice? How do we surface unheard voices in your constituency? Instead of being required to do that by the norms and the rules, now members do it because they are good-hearted civil servants, right? They do it because they care.  It shouldn't be optional. It should be a condition and not a choice, in other words, to represent everyone in your district. And we have not kept up with that. Part of it's that Congress refuses to fund itself. But it would fund itself if it had a political constituency, even if like a dozen people in every district showed up and said, "Hey, let's do a refresher on modernization. Did you know that this happened?" And somebody should do that with every new member that comes in in November.

You know, members of Congress who are retiring now, have a year, basically, to do the stuff they love, instead of the stuff they have to do. Because all of a sudden, they're released from the responsibilities and obligations of party and fundraising. There's huge underused capacity in our democracy that I think civil society should be all over. And I'm seeing it a little bit now. But more often, I see how angry and despondent people are about Congress. It's a big challenge, how to get people excited about it again, now that we have a real chance to transform it.

Heidi: Yeah, I think that image is huge. And the thread that's going through everything you're saying is communication. When you said the public doesn't support Congress funding itself, I was thinking, I didn't know anything about that. The need for that is new for me, and I would advocate for t strongly if I knew about it, which I now do, and everybody who watches this video now will. But somebody needs to get this story out there. And there's such a huge need to not only get Congress to look at the context in which they're working, but all the rest of us need to look at the context in which they're working and understand the limitations and do something to fix that. So yeah, I think it is on everybody. But the main thing is all of us who share responsibility, don't even know it.

Lorelei: Part of it is that we're in this civic memory hole. And Congress is this trying to compete with everything from TikTok to Facebook to Netflix, everything else. I feel like there's a lot of content in Congress that could be produced much more interestingly. I always think about the incredible amount of work that goes into testimony of witnesses. And it's all sort of hidden. It's on a website now. Congress created what's called a document repository —docs.House.gov —if you want to look at it, where every hearing is listed and all the testimony is available, but it's in PDFs, right? So it can't be machine readable yet. They're working on that.  To the extent that we create a machine-readable format for all public information and documents, just take the First Branch [Congress]. The memory of democracy exists in the First Branch of government. It's not in the White House. It's not in the agencies, all the archives, all the libraries, It is in Congress itself. It's probably one of the largest publishing entities in the world, if not the largest. The amount of data and information that's being churned out by the US government [is staggering].

One of the things I love about the United States, and I realized this after living abroad, is we do a lot of the basic R&D for the world, and we share it with everyone for free. It's such a great quality that we have. So if we want to keep doing that in the age of data, we need to make sure that that information we're created is public, auditable, and accountable, because it's a democracy. It is available to everyone and is a foundational data training model for democracies and other countries that want freedom.

I feel like the extent to which we handle data and technology going forward, especially data, how we protect it and put some guardrails on the use of it, is going to be almost like a NATO for the 21st century. This is the alliance of democracies. You know If we want truth in liberated populations who have self-determination and choices, how we inform ourselves is critical. We haven't figured it out yet, but I can tell you that Congress on the House side is ahead of the curve this time on the use of AI in the institution, way ahead compared to social media. 

Heidi: So what does this mean?

Lorelei: It already got 40 ChatGPT licenses to experiment and to figure out how to use it for your duties and your workflow and where are the guardrails and what's ethical and what's not and how to spot a fake and all kinds of things. It's like the conversation you're hearing, even like in Europe, which is weird, is happening in Congress because now there's younger members who get it, and there's younger staff and there's staff who are now there staying after the Modernization Committee. Congress was able to keep a number of the people who are critical inside the institution. You've still got a handful of us working adjacent to the institution. So I help on all of that. And we're doing it for the public good, right? Like We're not trying to game it.  We're not trying to create an empire out of it. We're trying to just help the institution. 

I think that having that, having that group, this Fix Congress Cohort is what we're called. We have two groups we work with. There's a subcommittee that we work with now run by Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma. [In the video Lorelei mistakenly said that the subcommittee Chair is Brian Steil.  He is actually the Chair of the Full Committee.] It's Democrats and Republicans, again, doing really nerdy but very important things. We have a caucus of members called the Fixed Congress Caucus. It's 40 members. And we have Modernization Staff Association. And there's a new one on the Senate side. So it's this burgeoning informal sector of Congress, essentially, where a lot of the most important work is going to happen. One of the things that I think anyone's listening to this, talk to your member and say, "Have you joined the Fixed Congress Caucus?" I would love it as your constituent if you were a member of the Fixed Congress Caucus.

Derek Kilmer of Washington and Bill Timmons of South Carolina are the contacts, you know please contact their office and join. And then they'll be kept in that loop and they'll be able to support it, even if it's just getting emails occasionally. But one of the things we are supposed to do in the cohort I'm with, the Civil Society cohort, is create programming for the Fixed Congress Caucus. So last Tuesday, we did a digital delivery day in the Rayburn Foyer a beautiful, big, majestic room with only two plugs. Typical of these big, beautiful buildings. We did a digital delivery day with about 20 federal agencies bringing in their high-touch customer service applications. So like Recreation.gov was there. Social Security was there. The Transportation Security Administration was there. The White House was there with like 20 people talking about their digital services.

Recognizing that this is happening, talking about it, and helping it grow is really important right now because we're in a transition moment. We've got young people coming in, but they don't have the positions of power and presence. And the older people don't know about them and don't think it's nearly as much of a priority as it should be, in my view, anyway. So we had them up to the hill, four straight hours jam-packed, people coming through, House and Senate, off the hill, learning what their government was doing to adapt and serve better in the modern world. The first branch was there as well. It's unbelievable what's machine readable in government data right now. Anybody out there who's a techie or a nerd or a data nerd, oh my gosh, have a look at Gov Info. See what's available for machine-readable data.

There's several repositories on GitHub. The Library of Congress has an innovation lab. It's amazing. The Congressional hackathon in the fall just got made permanent. That kind of thing, it's not ever going to be moving fast and breaking things. That's anathema. But it is leaning into incrementalism is what we like to say. That's all we can do. But it's definitely iterating much faster now than when I started on the Hill, when it was really still metal file cabinets, shoeboxes, and cork boards.

Heidi: And how documents end up in garages?

Lorelei: Oh, my gosh. It's ridiculous. I know it's such an overwhelming when you think about the 2016 presidential [election] and a server in the closet. I think anybody who worked in government in or out is like, "Well, who doesn't have a server?" Who doesn't have a Hotmail account or a Yahoo or a Gmail or trying somehow to communicate? I'm at Georgetown, and I still have two emails. I use the Gmail because it's much easier to get into. Who remembers 200 passwords? I'm failing at that. So I've declared inbox bankruptcy. 

I feel like people should just have some empathy and love in your heart for these old institutions. They are doing the best they can right now, and we need new leadership who gets it. And it's not even ideological, right? It's younger people. Younger people get it. They're brand ambassadors for all the technology. They expect in the Congress what they had working in the hardware store or the business or a doctor's office or wherever they were before — a teacher. So right now, Congress is sort of caught up with eighth grade and they can get on Zoom to do their business/ But it's still behind Pizza Hut, so it can't track a bill.

Heidi: How do you think this can affect or can it affect the deep polarization that's got Congress in its grips, it's got the American public in its grips. This strikes us as one of the biggest threats to liberal democracy. Will these innovations affect that?

Lorelei: Yeah. Absolutely. If we develop sort of trustworthy, productive partnerships with civil society, I think the next step is somewhat out of the hands of Congress, although for elected leaders to introduce and normalize violence in the public square is a tragedy beyond — I have no words. Honestly, having  lived and worked in the former Soviet Union, sorry, in Germany and worked in the former Soviet Union in East Germany and really saw what happens when you have a totalitarian system crush the souls of people and especially the risk-takers in society. And what we've got going on right now is a sort of intimidation and violence in the public square. January 6th made it obvious.

I feel like what we've been missing — and this is from my peacebuilding and conflict resolution world, before I came to DC— when I was working in behavioral economics — is that we don't have a very defined sense of a long view of how you create and maintain a peaceful society that marginalizes deviance like violence early on, including wealth disparity, but access to violence, normalization of violence as a decision rule, things like intimidation and bullying.

To me, any leader that even suggests that's okay is eliminated immediately. They cannot be in power because one person does that. And you're seeing it now, this stochastic violence where it's called a permissive environment for violent extremism. I worked on terrorism issues for years, and I also worked at the World Bank in 2015 where we were writing the guidance for the Bank on preventing violent extremism. And we were looking at development interventions. So non-military, not even policing, but rule of law, education, culture and entertainment. How do you create social cohesion so that violence does not have a place? And I think if other countries are studying us right now, which they should be, we're in a typical pathway to violent extremism. I  hate to say it, but you know the elected leaders have to actively stand and denounce the suggestion of violence, intimidation, and bullying in public life. And what we didn't do after January 6th was create a face-saving way for, I guess, the rowdy tourists, not the people breaking in and hurting cops and killing people with fire extinguishers.

But the rowdy tourists, what I call MAGA light. You know I'm from right-wing America. I'm from Farmington, New Mexico, right south of you. It's bright red, oil and gas community, very religious. All my friends growing up were right-wingers. I love the MAGAs in my life. I don't not love them. But I do also think that we haven't, as a society, created a face-saving way for them to reject identifying with violence and still come back to the common table with the rest of us who say that it is not acceptable.

The biggest challenge for me in the peacebuilding and conflict resolution world is doing that kind of work at scale. Civil society groups like Rotaries and who else League of Women Voters, others, traditional vintage more models. I think those are the people that should have training and public voice in their communities. In foreign policy, we call them super validators. They're the imams in the mosques.  They're the Catholic priests. They're the community leaders. They're the people that have extensive trusted social networks. People look to them. They look outside of typical authority, official duties.  The police are going to say this. The mayor should be saying this across the country. This is not acceptable because it leads to total destruction. It's a slow erosion. And you see it with the violence in the public square with the members retiring.

Like I was saying before, it's not just because they're exhausted. It's not worth it. 

Heidi: And the thing that strikes me as particularly scary is that it's fairly easy to look at what's been happening and decide that violence works. They're getting people to retire. There's been a lot of violent threats against election workers, and they've been retiring in droves.  And if you are what we've called a "bad faith actor," it really looks like it's open season and violence is an effective approach. And until we make it a non-effective approach, you're absolutely right.

Lorelei: Yep. And that's why standing up for the rule of law. I mean, it's like it's for everyone or it's for no one. You have to stand up for it and you have to prosecute it. That's the system we have. Fully make it capable. The election workers, like one of the things I think that the tech companies in their massive publishing capacity should be doing all kinds of pro bono or extra work right now to support democratic infrastructure.

And for them to opt out, which I think they have with their trust and safety teams or they've completely gone off the edge like on Twitter or X or whatever it's called. What a tragedy, right? That was my favorite platform. I loved it. And I still use it, but not nearly as much. It's just bizarre now.  It's really sad because I don't think he understood that the power he had to create a much better society and then to go in the opposite direction is tragic.  And Facebook, too, though, right? They have a lot of power because that's one of the reasons that local news is being decimated is because they're not getting the ad revenue that Facebook and social media companies are. I feel like it should be regulated. I think there should be a chunk of that revenue and profit that goes straight into public news and local news for revitalizing it.

I often wonder why, you know came to D.C. from Silicon Valley. I remember, though, being at Stanford in the '90s, there was not a lot of civics. The people I worked with were very good and all about world peace and doing nuclear arms control deals on the side and traveling the world, trying to create a bunch of peacemakers. But I was also in the business school, and I think these schools didn't take their responsibilities seriously enough.

If you're going to be an elite university, or even any university with billions of dollars, your primary responsibility is to produce good civic citizens and take care of society. I don't remember hearing that very much in the '90s, and we have to switch that. It has to be a common shared vision of the future that we all are working toward or have capacity to work toward. I feel like my son, who's 17, gets it in a way, the millennials maybe do, but then you got to think they're the kids of the boomers, and the boomers haven't done that great as a cohort.  They're playing their great soundtrack on their mega muscle Tesla Winnebago. So I feel like I focus a lot on young people, giving them hope and courage, showing them, mentoring them, showing them care and love, and standing by their side when they do new things, all young people, because they're going to inherit this.

And right now, what I do notice is we need to be really intentional about building those bridges, getting intergenerational groups of people together, understanding that the institutional memory of democracy has been depleted very purposefully. I came to DC to do damage control against New Gingrich and the Contract with America. That was my job. When I came to DC and I worked with Democrats and Republicans, across the Hill, trying to supplement and repair and replace some of the common knowledge sharing spaces inside Congress. We had very successful study groups, caucuses, just rebuilding the whole informal sector of Congress. Because think about it. On the Hill, what it is, is a beautiful old building with lots of empty rooms. And there's no reason that we shouldn't be doing informal hearings, all kinds of sessions. But again, much of what I'm talking about at this point also needs to be incentivized at the local level. So that is something that peacebuilding and conflict resolution folks can be. You can be that voice in your district. And I do think that it's worth making the time to learn about modernization. The final report is online. You can Google me. I've written extensively on it. Just go talk to your member and say, "Hey, I understand this happened. What can we do to forward these recommendations? What can we do with you? What would you appreciate? You know, meet them where they are. 

One of the things that's happened, too, is that every touchpoint with the public has become compromised, partly because it's more dangerous now to show up in public to do town halls. And if it's not productive, right, members love to be with their people. That's why they got elected. But we've really deprived them and the institution of ways to do that. So reinventing ways to meet.

I've got a project with MIT, a voice into data project, where it turns the dialogue in a small group session into analytics so you can store it. I'm trying to figure out how we would create what's called a Civic Voice Archive that supplements the Congressional Record. So members have a resource they can draw back to their district on legislative issues where they can actually bring in witnesses, but also find the smart people in their districts who worked on the EPA implementation, who've looked at methane wells, who know where the water problems are, especially in our part of the world. You know, in the Rocky Mountains, that's huge. What's going to happen with climate disruption and weather change? Those are the things we need to be talking about.

Heidi: Absolutely. That's a great idea. I'm on a couple of groups who are looking at trying to support democracy at the local level. Nobody's talked about the Congressional Select Committee on Modernization and bringing those ideas into the local level. So I can't wait to feed this video and transcript to them and say, "Hey, we ought to be doing this."

Lorelei:  I'm trying to figure out a model of getting a group of us willing and able to go out around the country and do trainings, get people really confident and skilled at saying, "This has all happened. We aren't even talking about anything theoretical. Now we're talking about creating content for all these changes, which have everything to do with civics going forward and voice and self-determination.  It's all in the Constitution. To me, like this is the modern version of the Constitution, and we can't let that be hijacked by the Second Amendment taking over the First Amendment. Who's going to peaceably assemble when people are coming with guns? I think people really also separate the sort of the rowdy tourists from the people with real violent intent. Like Russia and China being involved in our civic communication is very dangerous, and it's happening.

But of course, if we thought we could reinvent democracy on an advertising platform, that was a fatal flaw. And it was a fatal flaw from the beginning. And I remember people mentioning it, and they were called cranks and scolds. It's true, though. It has always been true. You cannot have democracy be some kind of pro bono project. It has to be fundamental and a priority. And I feel like we've really given it short shrift.  My whole life, basically, has been damage control. But I think that we're coming to a point where we're going to have to choose. Are we going to all be in this together or are we not? And the jury's out.  So I think the more voices saying, "We can do this," and now we have new tools, is key. We have to do this.  And the private sector is a partner you're a collaborator. It's not going to save us. This whole trash-talking government also started with Ronald Reagan, who a lot of people love.

And he did some good things, but he should have never trash talked the government like he did, because everybody has riffed on that for the last 30 years. And what we're finding out now is that having a functional government is crucial to having a democracy. And you can't badmouth it until it falls off the cliff and think that you're going to maintain your democracy. These things go together like this. We're not going to like everything, but we also have to actively participate to get part of what we want.

And that's something that I think I do see happening.

Heidi: One of the things that concerns me is with young people, there seems to be less of a commitment to keeping democracy.

Lorelei: Yeah. It really worries me too. I've seen those polls.

Heidi: I know a lot of the students that I taught at the University of Colorado really didn't understand what liberal democracy was. They really didn't understand that the president wasn't a king and couldn't do whatever he wanted to do, that there's three branches of government, and they all work together, and each one has a different role. That wasn't there. And if you don't have a basic understanding of how democracy works, or why it matters, if you haven't lived in the Soviet Union or East Germany when it existed, to have a notion that this really is as messed up as our system is.

And of course, it's terribly messed up, terribly flawed. But was it Churchill who said" it's still better than all the alternatives?"

Lorelei: Yeah, exactly. It's a mess.

Heidi: But people don't seem to have as much commitment to trying to repair it as opposed to just burning it down, throwing it out, and going to something else that they think is going to be better. I mean, I'd ask people, "What out there is going to be better?"  

Lorelei: What did they say? What did your students say when you're like, "Okay, what would you like to build?"

Heidi: I actually never asked that.

Lorelei: I ask people that. I'm say, "Okay. So I understand you want to burn it all down. What do you suggest we do instead?"  All these sort of dreams of  intentional communities, like the Hollywood's in love with sort of dystopian chic with all these movies about wars and fighting and The Last of Us and Zombie Apocalypse. You have got to really hunker down in your community and know your neighbors — to begin with. But it's all part of a big collective output, right?  We have to start where you are. I think one of the things I always say is simply "know who your member of Congress is." There's a wonderful set of tools. Even if you go to house.gov or senate. gov, these are clunky kind of websites, but they have all the information you need and all the links you need to really explore what it is.

There's also govtrack.us. You can sign up for really interesting notifications about what's happening if you're a civics nerd. But more than that, I think come to Washington, DC and see this beautiful city. Understand what it means when your fellow citizens attacked it like they did.  Americans will protect their democracy when they see themselves in it. I went home for the pandemic to San Juan County, New Mexico, in rural America. I grew up on a horse farm there. And I was shocked at how angry people were and how disassociated they were from Congress after January 6th. Some people would say they deserved it. And I'm like, "Who's they? Like me? I work there. Did I deserve it? What are you talking about? "They" is "you." It's all of us. And I think we need courageous leaders.

This needs to be doubled down in schools to talk about civics and consequences of your actions and what it means and how we solve problems. And so, yeah, it's a huge challenge. And I think the next 5 to 10 years are going to be hard. And we're going to get something that looks different on the other side of it.  I'm never going to get the democracy that I wanted. But I have very, very high expectations. And you know I'm in love with the institutions. I admit it. I wouldn't have been here for so long if I didn't love them and also had hope. 

But I've also seen the work being done that's transforming them. And I think it is true that our next challenge is going to be to find the civil society groups. And maybe that's a way to get younger people more involved is to show them what's possible when they show up, when they show up for democracy. And that is all of our challenge. And the next big one is next November. So getting through the next election, I think, is critical.

And then, as you're saying, we need a much better communications team. People like me and others who work on this very directly within Congress need to get out there more, need to talk in communities, need to go home and talk in San Juan County, New Mexico. You've got a great member, Joe Neguse. He gets this. I see him every once in a while in the Capitol. He's great. He gets it. So, part of that, though, as you're saying, is like we need to figure out how to restore a much more of a community stewardship model of the news. And there's lots of local news upstarts now. A lot of philanthropy is investing in that. So I do have hope that we're going to find some models that work much better than what we have now.

Heidi: Well, that's a great place to end. And I want to say that I really appreciate all of your efforts that have gone back years and years. You've been in this for a long time. And I'm sure that there's lots of things behind the scenes that have your name on it that I don't know about. But I think you've made a real difference, and you've opened up a lot of people's eyes to what's going on. And what we need to do is clone you by about 10,000.And then we'd be in better shape. But I really appreciate everything that you've done and are doing. And so glad to see that you're still at it. I think that it's really important, and it's bringing hope to a very otherwise discouraging situation.

Lorelei: There is definitely a keyhole where hope shines through. And for sure, I hope I see you next time in person. All right.

Heidi: All right!  And it might be more likely in New Mexico where I often hang out. 

Lorelei: I'll let you know next time I'm out there. My son's going to college in the fall, so I'll be able to travel more.

Heidi: Very good. Well, thank you so much. And I'll be in touch soon.

Lorelei: Take care.

Heidi: You too. Bye-bye.

Lorelei: Bye.