The topic of this episode is, “Does Congress need a Congressional Capacity and Technology Office?”
Congress has a reputation for being behind the times when it comes to technology. Legislators often do not understand new technological developments, and the Hill itself has lagged in adopting technology. I recall being employed at a legislative branch support agency, and we were handed Blackberries while the rest of the country was using iPhones and Androids.
So what can be done to help Congress catch up? A solution has been suggested by the POPVOX Foundation, a nonprofit organization that tries to “help democratic institutions keep pace with a rapidly changing world.” It has proposed that Congress create a Congressional Capacity and Technology Office.
Here to talk with me about this idea is Aubrey Wilson, POPVOX’s Director of Governmental Innovation and Global Initiatives. Aubrey has been working on congressional reform for a long time. She previously served as Deputy Staff Director for the Committee on House Administration. In this role, she coordinated efforts to make the House work more effectively. Prior to that, Aubrey and I worked together on governance reform at the R Street Institute. Aubrey also edits the Future-Proofing Congress newsletter, which informs Hill staff of “operational improvements and new resources on and off the Hill” that make their jobs easier.
So who better to have discuss this topic?
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it. But Congress is essential to our republic. It is a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be.
And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I am your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.
Aubrey, welcome to the podcast.
Aubrey Wilson:
Thank you, Kevin. I’m so excited to be here.
Kevin Kosar:
The POPVOX Foundation makes a case for a Congressional Capacity and Technology Office. A key argument in that case is a phenomenon called the “pacing problem,” which perhaps all listeners out there have not heard of. What is this pacing problem?
Aubrey Wilson
If you’ve come across POPVOX Foundation’s work, you’ve definitely heard us talk about the pacing problem. The pacing problem is the idea that, as the rate of technological change takes off in society and in industry, our governing institutions have a really hard time keeping up with that rate of change. And so the gap between how quickly things are changing beyond the walls of Congress and how slowly that change seems to take root inside of Congress, that gap is what we call the pacing problem. So it’s a phenomenon that I think any congressional staffer has felt, and that a lot of people have probably felt just being citizens and trying to watch laws catch up with real-life experience. That tension between how quickly things change is the pacing problem in real time.
Kevin Kosar:
And here it’s important to underscore that we are talking about Congress and legislators. Their staff, for the most part, are generalists, and they are not the ones working on bleeding-edge financial securities innovations, biomedical innovations, and technological changes. They’re not working on this stuff day to day. All those experts are out there in the world, and they’re the ones who are rushing forward and are responsible for innovation. Legislators are in this position of having to catch up with it. And of course, they can’t focus on just one single thing in the course of their jobs. They have to focus on a whole bunch of issues, since that’s the nature of the work. And so this is a problem inherent to representative democracy.
This is not some condemnation that Congress is just inherently stupid or incapable, and if we just had smart people there, it would be better. It’s a challenging situation. It’s just inherent to the nature of the enterprise, and just makes things even tougher.
Now we have artificial intelligence. What is that doing to the pacing problem?
Aubrey Wilson:
And I’m a prior congressional staffer, and when you say that it’s impossible for staff and members to keep up and that they don’t have to be those leading experts themselves, that’s actually probably a reputation that a lot of staffers struggle with because they see what’s happening in the news and the headlines. They have constituents calling with immediate concerns about what’s happening in the world, and they expect their member of Congress and their congressional office to respond really quickly and be as dynamic in their policy solutions and in the way that they’re serving constituents. They expect them to be as dynamic and responsive as the news cycle is, or what’s happening on the outside. And that agility for congressional staff to get information more quickly and to find out policy solutions and figure out who those experts are that they should contact—that’s always been a capacity challenge for Congress. And so when you’re talking about the idea of these overnight experts, I think that that’s how a lot of staffers feel that they have to be, that they have to become these experts in these issue areas very quickly. And the most recent issue area that’s on everyone’s mind is artificial intelligence.
It’s popping up everywhere. We’re hearing about it across every industry. And it’s a really interesting problem in itself because AI is a technology, and usually every congressional office will have a technology staffer, who is supposed to keep track of what’s happening in the technology sector. But AI isn’t just a technology. If you’re a healthcare staffer, you are suddenly having to answer questions about how AI is affecting the healthcare industry. And you can see that same dynamic across every issue set on the Hill. And so suddenly, every staffer, regardless of what they’re supposed to be an expert in now, also has to have some knowledge of AI.
That’s a really hard thing for staffers to understand how to get smart on that because there’s so much information out there, on top of the idea of them personally knowing how the technology works. Most staff and members feel so behind right now and really overwhelmed because AI isn’t taking a break. It’s not taking a pause and saying, “I’ll let everyone catch up every week.” It seems like the technology is just rapidly changing and evolving. New functions are coming out that, for somebody who already feels behind as a staffer, it really just seems like you’re drowning and just not really able to catch up at all.
And so once again, that’s that pacing problem. And AI is just exponentially growing that gap between where the tech industry is and where Congress is.
Kevin Kosar:
Has Congress started using AI to not just treat this as one more thing to try to keep up with, but rather deploy it?
Aubrey Wilson:
From a business standpoint, the House’s and Senate’s internal operations have both approved AI tools for use internally, and so there’s a really long technology assessment process that goes into designating whether a new technology is safe for congressional use on official devices.
As of the beginning of 2026—and actually, the most recent guidance was updated in the middle of March—both chambers have put out guidance allowing for some commercially available large language models to be used by staffers in the House and the Senate. In the House, this includes ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. In the Senate, the list is a little bit smaller. It includes Claude, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. And there’s a lot of guidance around the appropriate and responsible use of those tools and offices, one by one, kind of individually have their own guidebooks with additional restrictions on how to use them appropriately, member by member.
I think that a lot of staff and members came back in 2026 in particular and realized that AI is here to stay and that it’s a technology that has a lot of potential to help with the capacity issues that a lot of offices struggle with, just because of how much work there is to do with supporting a member who’s supporting a huge district back home.
Kevin Kosar:
There’s no doubt that there are various aspects of Hill work that AI could be super helpful with. We already have indications that some staffers are using AI to kind of help draft speeches or press releases, to create a framework of something that they can start with. At some point, they’ll probably be used for dealing with constituent inquiries that are coming in, if they’re not already using it. To say nothing of just trying to process the sheer amount of information that gets dropped on them on any particular topic.
Now, listeners out there hearing the name Congressional Capacity and Technology Office may wonder what it means. They may wonder if the POPVOX Foundation is advocating for an IT office to help the old guys on Capitol Hill figure out this new AI stuff, or some sort of help desk. But I’ve read the report. That’s not what you’re proposing. Why don’t you tell the readers what the duties of this new office would be?
Aubrey Wilson:
Sure. So, as a prior congressional staffer—and actually most of the staff at POPVOX Foundation are prior congressional staffers—I think that having that experience of working on the Hill does really stick with you and showcases the kinds of institutional tools and resources that members of staff could really benefit from.
One of the types of resources that has been on people’s wishlist for a really long time is one that helps with professional development and the use of new technology and tools. Even though right now, AI is kind of the hot topic, a decade ago it was social media, and in more recent years we’ve also had 5G. There’s a lot of technological innovation that takes place. And I think that going back to what we were talking about earlier—about how staff constantly feel behind—there’s this interesting dynamic because technology is both something that affects policy as a policy topic, but it also is something that you can use in your personal life as a staffer. So with artificial intelligence at this moment, you’re having this dynamic where staff are kind of on the back foot across all playing fields of this technology. They personally don’t know how to use it and don’t know where to start. They know it can help with their job, but they don’t know exactly how, or they don’t have the time to figure it out.
It’s having workforce concerns, and there’s a lot of chiefs-of-staff on the Hill who are wondering what this is going to do to the intern pipeline on the Hill or to junior staff. They don’t want it to replace staff; they want to augment staff, but they’re not sure how to run that change management. If you’re on the policy side, you have questions about what agentic AI is and what bots are. How is a bot different than an agent? What is new or what is coming down the pipe for the next big thing that’s going to happen with AI that could affect my district or affect an industry that’s very important to our district? All of these dynamics at play are resulting in staff not having a place to go.
They don’t need just IT help. They also need management help. They need training. They need a place to ask a question to get a definition of a new tech term that isn’t from a biased source, and there isn’t really a place on the Hill that can offer all of those things to congressional staff to help them take a holistic approach to understanding a new technology. So what we are proposing at POPVOX Foundation is the creation of this Congressional Capacity and Technology Office, which we’re calling C-TECH because everything on the Hill needs an acronym. But the idea with the C-TECH office is that it’s a place where it combines all of those needs into a one-stop shop for staff. And the reason why it’s different than kind of existing offices is that, as you heard me talk about earlier, the House has one set of guidance and the Senate has its own set of guidance for AI use. The Congress as an institution needs one place to go that’s bicameral and gives everyone the same information that supports everyone, the House and Senate. And so the goal for C-TECH long-term is that it will be a bicameral office that serves the whole institution. And the reason why it’s not called an AI office is that AI is new right now, but in reality, this is a technology office or capacity office that can help the institution long term for not only AI, but whatever the next big technology boom’s gonna be in the future.
Kevin Kosar:
Right, that makes sense. Those of us who know congressional staff, who know legislators, we know that they are harried people. They’re just relentlessly busy and swamped with work. There are occasional down periods, but those are like recovery time from the exhausting surges of work that hit them. And the basic challenge they face is, how do you make time to figure out how to use this new technology? I personally am probably not as busy as the frantic congressional staffer, but I have found it challenging to figure out the difference between an AI agent and more generalized AI purposes, and how to integrate this into my workflow. And I’m kind of flopping around as I try to figure this out.
So it makes perfect sense for the Hill to have people who are not advocates or representatives of any particular company trying to sell them a good, but rather just telling members and staff that they are the ones who can help them think through this, and show them some good case uses for it that other offices are taking up this technology for.
Aubrey Wilson:
Exactly, and if you think about the other resources that are available on the Hill, you have the Congressional Research Service, but that kind of policy analysis and research, is something that the staff or the member has to put in a request for. So you request research to be done by the Congressional Research Service. On the House side, for example, you have the Chief Administrative Office, and under the Chief Administrative Office, you have House Information Resources, which is really the IT department, and their job is procurement, risk analysis, and keeping the House safe from a cybersecurity and technology perspective. So whether it’s kind of the policy resources that are out there with the existing congressional environment of support agencies and offices, or it’s those more business operations-focused offices, neither of those has a proactive mission to be dedicated to the staff as the audience, knowing that they want to learn and be something that’s a proactive information flow that says:
And so that all-levels-of-help approach that’s proactive is something that’s missing, and I think that could really benefit Congressional staff and members, especially right now. And as you said, they’re just so far behind, and they really don’t know where to turn. A lot of them are just putting it on their to-do list, and they’re never getting around to it. And so we’re seeing AI uptake on the Hill be very slow, and that’s hurting Congress’s effectiveness in the long term.
Kevin Kosar:
I should interject here that we’ve got some very savvy listeners to this podcast who know the Hill pretty well, and they may be rubbing their chins and saying, “Wait a minute. Right now, aren’t the Hill’s technology needs already handled by the House’s Chief Administrative Office and the Senate Sergeant at Arms? Is this thing just going to duplicate those entities in some way?”
Aubrey Wilson:
That’s a good question, and we actually love that feedback, and one of the ways that we were thinking about the original problem and why that problem existed was, why is it that Hill staff right now are having such a hard time understanding AI and feeling supported and adopting it and feeling like they have lots of resources to go to educate them on this topic. Where’s the gap? And one of the best analogies to the C-TECH office proposal is actually one that comes from inside the House itself, which was the creation of the Office of the Whistleblower Ombuds back in 2019. That was a recognition at the time that the House wasn’t taking advantage of supporting whistleblowers and using whistleblowers as productive partners. CRS was writing reports about whistleblower laws and case studies, and you could go to committees and they had examples of how whistleblowers have helped them in the past.
But for member offices, just on a one-by-one case basis, who had staffers who wanted to know how to handle a whistleblower when they call, they would want to know:
Those kinds of questions weren’t being solved by anybody, and so that was why the House created the Office of the Whistleblower Ombuds. Its mission is proactive outreach, and it’s everything from being a hotline that members and staff can call if they have a question, to personalized training, to partnering with the Congressional Staff Academy, to have full learning courses like they use the existing resources and complement them, but also fill the gap since our current capacity isn’t there.
And that’s how we see C-TECH, as something that directs people to the resources if they exist. But if they don’t exist, CTEC will fill that gap.
Kevin Kosar:
Hearing you say all that occurs to me that there could be some really interesting—I hate to use the word—synergies that could be produced that are totally unexpected. Like you have legislative branch support agencies, like the Congressional Research Service, the Congressional Budget Office, and the Government Accountability Office. These are agencies that have produced tons of reports on particular topics, and they’ve been doing this for decades and decades and decades. There’s this whole massive trove of knowledge that’s out there, but it’s all in discreet PDFs and other formats.
You could see where this office could, in some way, help yoke some of that information together, digest it, pull out lessons learned over a history of decades, yank data from these things, clean it up, create comparative charts, etc. People in the agencies themselves are probably also very new to the whole AI thing, so their own ability to do that would be limited, but like a new entity that’s got the people who’ve got kind of a proactive educational outreach mode to them. These are the folks that could help extract more value in ways and extract value in ways that would really benefit staff and legislators.
Aubrey Wilson:
That’s exactly right. And I think that goes back to what we were saying about how AI is something that is cross-jurisdictional. I think everyone is feeling it, no matter if you work at the GAO, CRS, CBO, or inside a congressional office or in the district. I think that everyone is on that learning curve of figuring out this technology because it’s constantly changing and having a place to go that understands Congress, that works for Congress—and isn’t funded by a tech company, isn’t trying to do a sales pitch, and isn’t trying to procure anyone or get a contract, but is truly just thinking about it from a congressional support and capacity standpoint—a resource like that could really benefit the whole congressional ecosystem.
And with the C-TECH report, you’ll actually notice that there are three phases that we propose for the office. The first phase is small, and it actually just calls for the office to be established with just six people, just to serve the House in a congressional capacity and technology office role, and just to do the mere jurisdiction and mission of the Office of the Whistleblower Ombuds, so proactive outreach and education, supporting offices on a one-to-one level with use cases if they need it.
Phase two is to expand that to actually have an AI officer. And I think that that’s one of the biggest capacity gaps we’re seeing in AI between the executive branch and the legislative branch, is that you’re seeing the creation of AI officers and task forces and like whole management structures that are being created to figure out this technology across the executive branch agencies. You’re not seeing that internal investment in the legislative branch, so we have this office expanding to include an AI officer who can be that technical advisor to the Speaker, to leadership, to House offices, and have there be more of a strategic approach to this technology adoption throughout the Hill. This officer would be an advocate for staff and members who know they need to start using this technology, but also be able to translate the staff member experience through what they’re experiencing with providing training to the CRS and to the GAO and these other agencies that are supporting that same audience, which is the members and the staff.
The third phase is expanding that to represent the whole legislative branch. And so to have it represent both the House and the Senate, and support both equally. We are hoping that this phased approach will build trust and an understanding of the current capacity gap that can be really filled by an office like this, especially now, when AI is just like a runaway train that I think nobody feels like they’re catching up with.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah, the idea that the Speaker and the various other individuals who are administratively responsible for the House and the Senate would have someone trustworthy to turn to in thinking about AI that feels really important, especially in light of the piece I read just the other day by my colleague Philip Wallach about Albania’s experiment with an artificial intelligence minister, this electronic creature who is being put in charge of procurement or some such, and how it’s not working quite as they expected. They decided to do a first user sort of thing and try to do something radical, and when you do brave things like that, sometimes they can go bad. Having somebody who could advise the chambers on how other governments are taking up AI and where the promise is, and where the perils are, would be extraordinarily useful. And again, this person would not be somebody who’s looking to sell them software licenses but rather is a nonpartisan civil servant.
You mentioned this office and how it would start small and be phased up. Doing all this presumably is gonna require Congress to enact a statute, something that will lay out its duties, authorize the appropriations for it, and then it would actually have to pony up the money. Legislators and staff who are among the audience members for this podcast might be wondering how much this thing is going to cost. If we could start small, what’s that going to cost? And if we scale up to full size, how much would that be?
Aubrey Wilson:
We knew that question was gonna come, and we wanted to be super transparent in the report and have thought through those questions.
So the report actually includes full budget layouts and the appropriations request that we submitted to the House Appropriations Legislative Branch Subcommittee this year to consider at the end of the report as an appendix, and so all of that is there.
Because AI is a topic that is obviously very prominent right now, we knew that having an office that was staffed with people who have experience, whether it’s in the industry or with the technology itself, that office needs to be staffed with people who really understand what AI is and also understand how Congress works. And so the biggest amount of the budget that we asked for actually goes towards staff salaries. You don’t need junior people in these positions. You need people who can actually be a resource for congressional staff and members from day one. And so that first phase of the C-TECH office, we have funded for about $1 million for those six FTEs. And then by the time it’s in its final phase, it’s under $4 million: $2 million for the per chamber for the office’s operations. And so, considering the amount of time saving that could happen and the amount of investment that it could lead to on the backend with boosted capacity for members and offices, I think it’s an investment that would pay huge returns in the future.
And it’s one of those moments where I think that when you look at the decades of legislative branch funding and not giving Congress and members the tools that it needs to really succeed, I think that we’ve seen staff caps be such a limiting factor in Congress with members having these huge and growing populations that they represent and being limited by the number of staff that they have to do the jobs to support all those constituents.
If those limitations are going to continue to be a thing, instead of funding more people, if that’s not an option, funding better tools and making sure that people who do work in Congress have better technology and know how to use that technology to the best of their ability in a responsible way seems like a no-brainer to me. And so that’s how the funding is structured for C-TECH across those three phases, and we submitted to the Leg Branch subcommittee this year, so hopefully we’re planting seeds that’ll bear fruit in the future.
Kevin Kosar:
We are nearly out of time, but let me slip in one last question. Let’s imagine this office gets created. It’s up. It’s running at full strength. It’s doing great. What does that mean? Paint us a picture of how Congress would be different and better.
Aubrey Wilson:
My job for the last multiple years has been doing 101 trainings for congressional staff and members. And unlike big box briefings, we realize that AI is something that everyone is at a different starting place with it, both with their familiarity and also their personal comfort level with the tech. Interestingly, it doesn’t even seem to be like age related in any way, shape, or form. I’ve had really interesting conversations with more senior members who are more adamant about using AI than their super junior staff assistants. There’s been this really interesting dynamic where staff and members across the political spectrum, across seniority, and across chambers are so hungry for information support right now, and we’ve been trying to fill that gap as the POPVOX Foundation.
But I’m honestly so tired of sitting across from staffers who are so overwhelmed and so busy and just say, I need to use AI in my office, but I have no idea where to start. I crave a future where they know where to turn, where there’s an email address, or there’s somebody that they can call that works inside of their institution that they know isn’t going to lie to them about the risks, or isn’t going to mislead them to use a tool in a way that actually isn’t the best way to use it, or that doesn’t understand what it’s like to be a congressional staffer.
So in the future, if a C-TECH exists, it really does lead to a more empowered Congress that just feels more confident using technology. I think that for a really long time, the joke among people on the Hill was that it’s just behind. If you start working on the Hill, you’re going to feel like you’re stepping backwards in time with the technology that you use. And I don’t want that to be the case anymore. I want to break through that expectation, actually, and have it be a situation where you’re a new staffer who walks into the Hill, having worked in industry, and think, ‘Oh, it’s just like I was when I was working in business. This is exactly the same kind of toolbox that I had.’ And so that’s what we’re trying to achieve.
Kevin Kosar:
Yes, in broad strokes, I could see a Congress that is a little smarter, perhaps a little more in agreement on what the weight of evidence or facts would seem to indicate, because again, AI is great at taking that sort of stuff together. I could see a workforce that’s a little more optimized, and I would also see a lot of people who could be a bit happier because they would not have to manually do a lot of the grunt work that the job entails.
That could simply be outsourced to the AI.
Aubrey Wilson:
That’s right. Even from my own personal experience being a staffer, I think of how much time was spent inputting data or organizing things, and that is time that humans can spend doing the human things: thinking about policy solutions, talking to people across the aisle, forecasting what could happen, reading reports to really understand how proposed policy solutions might affect constituents and asking those next level questions.
But so many hours of every single day on Capitol Hill are spent doing these menial tasks that if you were to be able to outsource that or just streamline it, that’s so much more time for people to do the big thinking that they should be doing in those policy positions that right now, is really just done around the corners, when it should be their full-time job and main focus.
Kevin Kosar:
Aubrey Wilson, thank you for being on the podcast and making the case for a new Congressional Capacity and Technology office.
Aubrey Wilson:
Thanks for having me, Kevin.
Kevin Kosar:
Thank you for listening to Understanding Congress, a podcast of the American Enterprise Institute. This program was produced by Jaehun Lee and hosted by Kevin Kosar. You can subscribe to Understanding Congress via Stitcher, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn. We hope you will share this podcast with others and tell us what you think about it by posting your thoughts and questions on X and tagging @AEI. Once again, thank you for listening, and have a great day.
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