Technological expertise has always been a rare, if not seemingly nonexistent, commodity on Capitol Hill.
This legislative branch's limitations were famously underscored for the country last year, when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress (and on national TV) and several members made plain they needed a crash course in Internet 101. Among the most memorable moment was when GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah asked Zuckerberg how Facebook sustains its business since it's free to use. "Senator, we run ads," was the social media titan's understated reply.
The Zuckerberg hearing is just one example of how Congress lacks the tech proficiency it needs — a shortcoming that, in the eyes of many working to improve democracy, is hobbling the legislative branch's functionality and ability to stand up to the president in balance-of-power tussles.
There's a technology policy fellowship, though, that's working to change this.
TechCongress offers stipends for a year to mid-career professionals in the tech industry willing to take a break from their regular work and bring more technological and computer science savvy to Capitol Hill.
Travis Moore created the fellowship program in 2015 after six years as the top legislative advisor to a powerful House member, Democrat Henry Waxman of California, a time when he says he learned how desperately staffers with tech backgrounds were needed.
"Health is well-represented. Education is well-represented. Technology is not," he said. "So we set out to address this with a fellowship program."
Applications for the next class of fellows are being accepted until Sept. 3, the day after Labor Day.
This year's eight fellows are working for both Republicans and Democrats, in member offices and on the staffs of committees with tech jurisdiction:
- Aaron Barruga — GOP Sen. Tom Cotton of Arizona
- Leisel Bogan — Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia
- Allison Hutchings — Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii
- Eric Mill — Senate Rules Committee Democratic staff and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota
- Emily Paul — Democratic Rep. Mark Takano of California
- Maggi Molina — GOP Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota
- Frank Reyes — House Homeland Security Committee Democratic staff
- Nate Wilkins — House Energy & Commerce Committee Republican staff
The goal is to help lawmakers who have a hand in shaping technology polices — from cybersecurity and artificial intelligence to election security and weapons systems — to understand how the world of tech is reshaping society and to explain the nitty-gritty details of tech operations to the people writing legislation to regulate that world.
The fellows are also intentionally involved in oversight, because too many offices lack on-staff experts who can ask probing and technically sophisticated questions of corporate officials, government contractors and agency officials under investigation.
"You don't know what you don't know," Moore said is the situation facing too many lawmakers on oversight panels. "Without this technical expertise, it's hard to know when you're being stonewalled. In this oversight function, we find the fellows to be really effective."
As a fellow two years ago, Maurice Turner worked on cybersecurity policy on the Republican majority staff of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee — an experience directly translated to his current work on election security at the nonprofit left-leaning advocacy group the Center for Democracy and Technology.
The most important change wrought by TechCongress is normalizing the idea of tech experts working in government, Turner said, which is crucial at a time when understanding some of the biggest issues before Congress requires some form of tech savvy.
But rather than rely on such outside programs bringing in a handful of experts, he said, the legislative branch needs to cultivate its own stable of talent.
"It's definitely time for Congress to recognize that there should be a more formalized role in understanding new technology issues," Turner said. "It really needs to be institutionalized."
That message appears to have been partly heard by the special House Committee on the Modernization of Congress, which voted unanimously last month to recommend resurrecting an Office of Technology Assessment to help lawmakers comprehend the fast-changing world — part of a package mainly focused on upgrading the antiquated computer systems and other technologies operating on the Hill.
Some TechCongress alumni have been hired to stay at the end of their fellowships. The bigger challenge, though, is expanding this sort of tech expertise pipeline so it can get more technologists and computer scientists working at all levels of government nationwide, Moore said.
"Tech isn't a slice of the policy making pie, it's the crust of all those issues. It's baked into every piece," he said. "Independent government requires this expertise in house."
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.