It’s time to take back the power in politics
We have officially endured the longest government shutdown in US history. The US has gone through perilous times and disagreements — disagreements on wars, taxes, civil rights — and we’ve never had a shutdown go so long.
Government shutdowns are frustrating. It feels like the leaders we voted into power are shying away from making decisions — opting out of doing the job we hired them to do.
The most frustrating part out of everything is that I feel powerless. I feel powerless in the sense that I don’t have a good way to give feedback to my representatives. I have to sit here, reading the news, and hope that my representatives do the right thing.
What are our methods for giving feedback or interacting with our representatives? When I think through them I can come up with 4 main ways:
- I could try using social media. But I have to reduce my thoughts down to a couple sentences, post on a social media site, tag my representatives, use a catchy hashtag, and hope that someone reads it. It still leaves me powerless and forces me to wait for the twitterverse to put my tweet in front of a representative.
- I could call my representative’s office or write an email/letter. This also presents an issue as most of these responses aren’t taken into account by offices. A study conducted by The OpenGov foundation found that many politicians offices don’t hold constituent correspondence in high regard and do not consider it when making policy decisions.
- I could join a protest. Well, first I have to hope that there is a protest organized and then even if it is, I’m not really able to provide descriptive feedback. I can just provide a general overarching feedback that I’m frustrated. While this does a good job of telling our representatives that we are upset, it doesn’t do a great job of telling them how we’d want them to change.
- I could record my response as part of a poll. But that requires me to hope that a pollster calls my phone and that I’m there to answer when they call. And while I’ll wait all day by my phone for that call — I’ve never actually been called by a pollster for political feedback.
Now there have been great movements that have utilized the above methods to get ideas and points across to representatives (i.e. march for our lives, #metoo), but the percentage of effective campaigns is still low. In our age of technology, how is there not a better and quicker way to give feedback?
The worst part isn’t even the lack of a consistent and effective medium to give feedback. The worst part is that even if our politicians do happen to hear our feedback — we have no way to truly hold our politicians accountable to change until they are up for re-election, in some cases being as far as 4–6 years away. No job in the world has such a long turnaround time for a feedback loop. How can we expect our politicians to improve if we can only give them feedback every 4 years?
The impacts of this extend farther than you’d expect. For example, the government shutdown not only forced federal employees into furlough, but it also had negative effects on entire the US economy. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), estimated that due to the last shutdown, the US economy lost $11 Billion, with $3 Billion of that being completely unrecoverable. Now while that might be a small drop in the bucket when compared to the global economy, I know if I caused my company to lose that amount of money there would be real consequences for me.
These consequences affect everyday people. It’s constituents not receiving paychecks and it’s constituent businesses who are losing money due to shutdowns and policy decisions.
That’s whats frustrating. The fact that our politicians have no efficient way to hear our feedback before making decisions, and that these decisions have consequences on you, me, everyone. This is when the feeling of powerlessness really sets in.
We just heard this years State of the Union, and then became enamored with opinions and commentary on it from pundits to politicians. How are you able to tell representatives how you felt about it? How are you able to hold your politicians accountable to what they said? Why does it feel like we spend hours reading politicians, lobbyist, and special interest groups feedback on the State of the Union, but no one spends time listening to our feedback or how we feel?
This is what we want to fix. At Govrn, we’re in the business of giving people the power back. We believe no matter who you are, you should be able to provide feedback to your government officials, and they should be accountable to you — not lobbying organizations, PACs, or Pundits.
We’re currently developing a solution to fix this problem, and we need your help. We’re creating a platform that allows you to participate in outcome based donations(we call them Channels) which means politicians only get your support, if and when they get the job done. Essentially, we’re taking the tools that only big money(e.g. Lobbyist, PACs) had access to and giving them to you, the people.
The more people we can get involve, the more power we can give back to you. If you’re ready to help be a part of the solution and make sure politicians hear your voice — come join us. You can learn more information about Govrn and how to sign up at our website, Govrn.io. Over the next months will be sharing more information about our project so please follow us to stay updated. Also if you have any thoughts, questions, comments, or want to find out how get more involved, shoot an email to(Aaron@govrn.io). It’ll go directly to me :)
