TechCongress’ team has made the difficult decision to recruit and place only one class of Congressional Innovation Fellows in 2024. This was the result of a great deal of planning and conversation, which began in April 2023 at a team retreat in western Virginia. '
In our conversation during our team retreat, we incorporated post-fellowship feedback from TechCongress fellows and alumni to see how we could adjust the fellowship to better suit the needs of the fellows, the program, and Congress.
We decided to test a new model in 2024, with one larger class of fellows in January, as opposed to the typical two smaller classes a year in January and June.
This decision was rooted in a few key elements: prioritizing the fellowship experience, embracing the critical moment created by the growth of Artificial Intelligence, testing a once-a-year model, and creating space for TechCongress to think about refinement and growth.
Prioritizing the fellowship experience is our primary goal, which inherently means being in tune with the structure, function, and timing of the House and the Senate. Since our fellows work in Congress for 10-12 months during the fellowship, we must align their experience with the congressional calendar.
Depending on a fellows’ placement, they may be on the House or Senate side. The House of Representatives is up for reelection every two years, while only one third of the Senate is up for reelection every two years. In 2024, there are elections for President, all House members, and one-third of the Senate.
Elections can complicate the fellows’ experience, as about halfway through the election year, Members of Congress put their legislative agendas on the back burner to focus on their reelection. Our June classes typically go through placement in July, followed by an August recess, a long recess in October, the election in November, and then the preparation for shifts in leadership in December. This means a potential significant amount of downtime for fellows, in which they would not have any significant movement on legislation or hearings for the first 5 months of their fellowship.
Additionally, at the beginning of a new Congress after which the majority flips, the House of Representatives has to elect a Speaker. In 2023, the 118th Congress began with a speakership battle in the House of Representatives. This event made placement for the January 2023 cohort more difficult as the House was not able to make committee assignments without a Speaker.
In some years, however, the June classes were critical to the success of Congress. In 2020, we were able to place six fellows in June. June 2020 was a unique time, when Congress was confronting a once-in-a-century pandemic, and tech was at the center of pandemic response– from broadband deployment to determining how to deliver key social safety net benefits (UI, SNAP, emergency rental assistance) through digital means. August recess was still a significant factor in their overall fellowship and did reduce work levels for some fellows.
To address these timeline challenges in 2024, we wanted to test a January-only class, as January classes have more time to work on time-sensitive legislation while more policy windows are open, prior to the election cycle.
Earlier in the year, it is easier for bills to move, hearings to be scheduled, and for Congress’s attention to anchor squarely to policy, rather than elections. Pertinent tech issues are more easily addressed earlier in the year.
In 2024 in particular, AI has been front and center in the policy discussion in Washington DC. The Senate held AI Insight Forums starting in 2023. The House of Representatives created an AI working group to take on these critical issues now. TechCongress is using this single-cohort fellowship model this year as an opportunity to front-load our fellowship by condensing into one class, helping place 17 fellows beginning in January 2024, to meet urgent challenges related to AI and critical elections.
Additionally, we are extending a portion of existing 2023 fellows, including fellows serving with the Senate Finance Committee under Senator Wyden (D-OR), Senator Lummis (R-WY), the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Senator Ossoff (D-GA), Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA), and others in Congress through late 2024 meet the need for technical know-how during a critical stretch of time.
During our team retreat in April 2023, we developed two different fellowship models and assessed the pros and cons of each, ultimately deciding that we should move forward with a one-cohort model in 2024 to take the time to assess any inefficiencies.
Under the two-cohort-per-year model, TechCongress staff are operating recruitment, selection, placement, and orientation processes twice each year. Under this model, we are conducting one of those activities for 10.5 of the 12 months of the year, leaving minimal time to adjust the fellowship, any of the processes within it, or implement improvements.
Furthermore, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the TechCongress team has been operating at full tilt. Prior to 2020, we’d only had 23 fellows. Since then, we’ve placed an additional 85.
We ramped up and launched a Congressional Digital Service Fellowship, a Senate Modernization Fellowship, and added other supports for fellows. Because we are big believers in iteration, and trying new approaches, we decided to take these steps. This became an opportunity to test a new way of operating that could better serve fellows and our public interest mission through having the space to refine our key activities, and for TechCongress to think about our refinement and growth.
During the retreat, we identified several areas we wanted to focus on with the time we would gain from a one-cohort model trial: bipartisan recruiting, confronting structural problems within Congress, and other ways of defining success given attrition in Congress.
Our model in Congress is working. So far, 25 TechCongress fellows have been hired into full time staffing roles in Congressional offices or committees. We have other fellows who have gone to key roles at Executive Branch agencies after their fellowship, such as the White House (Alumnus Seeyew Mo), CISA (Alumni Jack Cable and Leisel Bogan), the Department of Energy (Alumnus Sohum Pawar), and the State Department (Alumna Katerina Sedova).
In 2024, we’re considering how we can build on this and how we can mitigate attrition in Congress, which is both natural but also a key structural challenge given the low pay and long hours of the institution.
Congress may be front and center on tech policy, but it’s not the end all be all. And in fact, while many tech policy efforts in Congress have stalled, Europe, the states, and State Attorney’s General are acting.
In 2015 we launched TechCongress on the premise that very soon technology would touch every issue in Congress and every committee’s jurisdiction. We’ve now reached the point at which that premise has become a reality. And now we have to find a way to grow our work.
This break will be a critical opportunity to do that.
P.S. Applications for January 2025 will be opening on July 9th. You can sign up here to stay in the loop about those developments.