Learn more about our January 2025 Congressional Fellowships by listening to a recording of one of our info sessions.
We’re looking for up to 16 engineers, computer scientists, and other technologists to join us as fellows in January 2025.
We award $500 to someone who refers a veteran or transitioning service member, underrepresented person of color, woman, or nonbinary individual to the fellowship.
We are excited to highlight our June 2023 Fellows and their placements in Congress!
The fabric of the United States is made up of so many threads -- some are frayed, some have snapped, some were hastily sewn in during a bygone time, and many are beautiful. That beauty and the continuing complexities it faces and where that leaves you or me or our families is something that connects every single one of us.
As a Congressional Innovation Scholar, it’s important to me to bring in diverse voices from these communities and experts to address critical policy questions. By doing so, we can minimize the disparate impacts of information and algorithm-driven systems while also creating a new landscape for technical innovation without potentially harmful outcomes. I am committed to helping inform technology policy that addresses digital equity issues, as well as transparency and privacy concerns for historically excluded communities to ensure that underprivileged people have an equitable and livable future.
Through the Congressional Innovation Scholars Program, individuals like me who were told it's impossible to achieve specific dreams are now making it possible! I enter this program with clear eyes and a whole heart ready to build on the legacy of those who have served before me. At the end of this year, I hope that I will have made meaningful change for the citizens of our country.
Working in tech has allowed me to come back to the public sector with a new urgency. I believe the most important policy question of our time is to figure out how to increase the government’s technical capacity. Everything from improving the technical tools a government employee uses to increasing the knowledge government officials have about ubiquitous and emerging technologies should be a priority.
While I loved my time in Silicon Valley working on some incredible projects and companies with brilliant people, it became patently obvious that what I viewed as “world changing” was not shared with what most venture capitalists and many of my peers thought was worth investing in and building. I have nothing against people who want to build a startup that enables home delivery of groceries in 10 minutes instead of an hour, but it’s not the sort of thing that gets me out of bed in the morning. And in a city when my morning walk was past multiple tent communities full of mentally ill or drug addicted people literally dying on the streets, the cognitive dissonance of not working on solving the most urgent problems for society when you have the resources to do so got to me and I seriously began to rethink what enabled entrepreneurship, how incentives are structured, and how to really do good in the world at scale.
I joined TechCongress because I want to help shape a safe, secure, and accessible future for all Americans, and grow while doing so. I've seen firsthand the ability that policy has to make or break services provided to the American people. I’m excited for the opportunity to learn in the first branch and can’t wait for what’s to come!
For me, the Congressional Innovation Fellowship was a natural next step. And it’s part of my responsibility as an American to take my local government experience in Miami to the federal level. The same way that I’ve contributed my small grain of sand to make Miami a more resilient City, I will make Congress and our nation more resilient. Whether contributing my expertise in emerging technologies, leveraging data to measure the impact of policy making, or helping facilitate rocket launch and reentry licensing - I’m here to make sure our nation excels at being the beacon of freedom around the globe.
However, as I have gotten older and spent more time on the same sorts of problems over and over, I have become deeply dissatisfied focusing on the narrow scope of problems for which building technology is an actual solution, and I have seen the alarming effects that bad tech policy has had on vulnerable people everywhere. I have increasingly found that my ability to help people, even through innovative technology, has been hindered by the limitations of state and federal policy made by legislators far removed from the people affected by their decisions.
When the opportunity came around to apply to and join TechCongress, I knew that this was the opportunity. I want to dedicate my life to having a more direct impact on social change. From my experience in the Net Neutrality fight, I knew what it was like to change the minds of one company on one issue; what excites me about working in Congress is the ability to have more of a profound impact. My fellowship is just beginning, but I’m incredibly excited about the work I’ll do over the course of this year.
Since being placed, I’ve drafted bills, staffed hearings with Facebook, met with interest groups, and had countless other illuminating experiences about the legislative process that only working in the United States Senate can provide. It’s been very rewarding to combine my background in information privacy and emerging technology with the legal reasoning skills I developed from law school. There’s simply no other place quite like the halls of Congress, and no other place where I could apply my skillset in service of a goal as laudable as making sound policy decisions for the American people. This is just the beginning and I look forward to what the future holds.
As a Congressional Innovation Scholar, I have the opportunities to leverage my training and knowledge to help promote science-based regulation of AI and other technologies that can be used to disenfranchise and discriminate against minority groups, threaten democracy, and propagate disinformation. I am excited to grow and learn through the fellowship as I continue to support the pursuit of knowledge while also promoting a more equitable and better informed society.
During my short tenure on the Hill so far, I’ve become convinced that policy is only as good as its implementation, and that technology (along with good technologists who can build it) is one key to this implementation. Poor implementation means fewer people access the services they need and ultimately contributes to government distrust.
Many of the problems I had encountered, however, had reached the halls of Congress, and I understood the value that those experiences of mine would bring if I ever worked for Congress. Considering all of that, it’s hardly surprising that I joined TechCongress. I did not come here with some grand political ambition, nor do I have my path fully laid out, but I did make one important decision about my path: once again, I would not put my head down and ignore the problem.
For twelve years, I was a foreign correspondent covering technology and authoritarianism regimes. I lived in or reported from China, South and North Korea, Myanmar, Vietnam, Russia, Cambodia and Turkey, where I covered authoritarian politics, civil wars and a genocide, as well as their links to technology.
