What Happens When Congressmen And Tech CEOs Brainstorm Ambitious Policies
For too long, Washington DC has viewed Silicon Valley simply as a fundraising ATM, while my colleagues in tech often see their East Coast counterparts as, at best, incremental bureaucrats. As a result of this cultural mismatch, the genius of Silicon Valley is rarely applied to solving the nation’s most pressing issues. This is especially troubling since new technologies are creating unintended problems faster than the government can solve them. But, I’m happy to report that there may be a better way.
Last week, a bill was introduced into Congress calling for a re-alignment of higher education, where newly-minted college graduates with a STEM degree could be eligible for complete federal debt loan forgiveness in exchange for serving their country in high-skilled public sector jobs. It’s an unusually ambitious proposal that was a direct result of what I think is a rather novel way for Washington DC and Silicon Valley to collaborate: treat bills like startup ideas and dream big.
Perhaps, some of the nation’s toughest problems could be solved if we approached policymaking with Silicon Valley’s signature strategic optimism.
H.R. 6134 was the brainchild of a brainstorming dinner last May between members of Congress and notable tech CEOs, all organized around one question, “Can you tell us your one moonshot policy, an incredibly ambitious idea that you think would make a big impact, but may seem politically unrealistic?”
Each participant, sometimes sheepishly, offered up their moonshot idea for a round of comment and criticism. One idea in particular, from Zynga Founder Mark Pincus, was a plan for free college through an entirely new labor corps of highly talented engineers that could make government more user friendly and prevent things like the disastrous healthcare.gov rollout.
Congressman Ami Bera of California, himself a former college teacher, immediately took to the idea and offered how to mold the still amorphous plan into a practical bill. Originally, Bera and Pincus imagined that they’d have to spend months convincing members of Congress to take the idea seriously, as is common with most potential bills.
But, evidently, many of Bera’s congressional colleagues liked the idea and it gave him confidence to introduce it as a bill sooner than anticipated. Now, this proposed “TechCorps” may become part of the national discussion in the policy-heavy post-Presidential news cycle this Winter (You can learn more about the bill here).
Some readers may have a difficult time shedding their skepticism that convening politicians and CEOs is anything but a thinly veiled strategy to lobby and fundraise. I initially shared this concern, but let me tell you how I became more optimistic.
The dinner was inspired by a roundtable that was held in Washington DC, when an innovation-oriented group of Democrats, the House New Democrat Coalition, invited me to speak at their weekly meeting about a book I had written on the politics of Silicon Valley. I thought I was being invited so they could read into my research how to better fundraise. I was wrong.
Members at the meeting expressed a deep frustration that technologists didn’t take policymaking more seriously, mostly because the world was changing far faster than they and their staff could keep up. The Silicon Valley presence in DC isn’t very helpful in this regard, because tech’s powerful DC lobbying agents focus mainly on blunting regulation or passing bills that immediately benefit their employer’s bottom line.
In response, I tried to be honest: many in tech have an “epic-ness” bias; they’re attracted to whatever has the largest impact. These are folks who don’t believe the government has a monopoly on large-scale change; they will literally replace NASA with their own rockets if they think they can do it better. A few members were admittedly incensed that tech leaders wouldn’t engage with what they saw as necessary incrementalism, but many came up afterwards looking for ways to engage with tech leaders on their own terms.
So, a meeting was organized during a tour of the Bay Area last Winter, but, most importantly, every single member who came to the dinner had to skip a fundraising event and there was to be no discussion (at all) about money or their company’s lobbying goals. Everyone was to put aside their short-term goals and think big.
It was a productive discussion charged with uncharacteristic optimism and curiosity. The TechCorps bill will (hopefully) be one of at least a few moonshot policies to be announced over the next year, on issues ranging from transportation to labor, voting and education. All will attempt to solve major problems through unusually ambitious policies. TechCorps and how the other bills are introduced may pivot and adopt more elements of Silicon Valley (like crowdsourcing). The strategy is being treated like a startup.
But, I hope it yields a new way for Silicon Valley and Washington DC to combine their superpowers for the betterment of the country.
