Daulby is CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation.
As Mr. Rogers famously said, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
A few months ago, I became the new CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation with a renewed mission to lead the helpers back to the Capitol. After a career on Capitol Hill that started as a paid intern and ended after being the staff director for the House Administration Committee on Jan. 6, 2021, I have been called back to serve the institution. I agreed to do so because we are in desperate need of the helpers, and having been a doer for the last two decades, it is now time for me to be a helper.
In addition to the presidential election, all 435 seats in the House of Representatives were on the ballot Tuesday along with roughly a third of the Senate. Our institution is rapidly turning over and we will see hundreds of new staff come to Washington in January. I have watched with much joy and enthusiasm the progress that has been made on Capitol Hill, and particularly in the House. Staff have access to a team of bipartisan coaches and online resources from which to learn and grow in their current positions, thanks to the office of the Chief Administrative Officer. Staff retreats are now commonplace and offered by three entities in the House. While I was on the Hill, my team established the Congressional Excellence program that continues to provide individual leadership development and coaching to members of Congress.
We are making progress.
However, for outside organizations like the Congressional Management Foundation to move the needle on making Congress work more and squabble less, we need more helpers. With the growing popularity of the “fix Congress” movement and acceptance that we need infrastructure like the House Administration Committee’s modernization subcommittee, we started a trend … which has become a habit of telling Congress what it can do better. Most members and staff know that Congress needs improvement, but they need a helping hand.
Well-meaning organizations have sent letters, published op-eds and spoken on panels in a silo. So much of this important work never gets communicated effectively to the Hill and so few resources have been committed to directly sharing our work and executing programing that help the members of Congress achieve what we are publicly telling them to do. That is why CMF will continue to support leadership and professional development opportunities, building a community that strengthens bipartisan relationships and facilitating educational opportunities that leverage private-sector expertise.
CMF’s Revitalizing Congress program is just one example of the work we do to help Congress function more efficiently. This program works with members of Congress to:
- Improve staff work life.
- Transform constituent and public engagement.
- Provide professional development services to members.
- Encourage innovation.
- And much, much more.
So many American feel Congress is broken. These beliefs have become so embedded in our society that it seems most Americans have lost hope in an institution that seems ineffective, unresponsive and unable to address the challenges America faces. Most Americans see only examples of ineptitude, petty partisan politics and the occasional scandal on Capitol Hill.
But what if Americans got a glimpse of a different Congress? Americans' views might change if they saw examples of members of Congress employing innovative practices to engage with citizens, or congressional offices employing private-sector business practices to improve their operations. And what would other lawmakers do if they also saw how their colleagues enhanced their operations and citizen engagement?
In this spirit, CMF created a distinctive honors program — the Democracy Awards — to recognize non-legislative achievement and performance in congressional offices and by members of Congress.
And we do so much more.
In the coming weeks our congressional management guide, “Setting Course,” will be published and distributed to all new members of Congress and their staff. We will follow that publication with a series of workshops for new staff in 2025 that will help them onboard to these new positions. We will offer staff academies on pressing topics and cohort dinners with staff from both sides of the aisle with private-sector leaders. Staff are desperate for hard skills and professional development tools. We will continue to conduct retreats, offer webinars on office skills and run management classes.
The work of the helpers never ends. I hope you will follow us on our journey.
Ben Droz
Ben Droz
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Pinnacle Bank Expo Center on the Nebraska State Fairgrounds on October 05, 2026 in Grand Island, Nebraska.
The President Invited Iran to Bomb My Home
I was driving home to San Diego from Los Angeles on Monday night when I heard that the President of the United States had offered both cities up to Iran as bomb targets. At a rally in Nebraska, defending his war, Trump told the crowd, “let [Iran] take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego.” It was, he said, “a very small price to pay.”
I was coming from a Bernie Sanders rally for Proposition 40, the one-time tax on California billionaires that would send 90% of its revenue to healthcare. We desperately need it to pass because, in order to give tax breaks to billionaires, Trump signed a law that will strip health coverage from 10 million Americans; this tax will make sure we can still cover Californians. Call me crazy, but I think taxing billionaires one time so we can make sure kids in California get to see a doctor is a very small price to pay. I also think that even if Trump were joking, it is indefensible to make jokes about the potential destruction of so many lives. Human life is never a small price to pay. Human life is priceless.
Plus, the reality is: here in San Diego, we’re already paying the price for Trump’s actions, and it’s not small at all. He has gutted FEMA, tried to kill climate resiliency programs, and destroyed public health standards, while his signature law is set to cut off health insurance and food support for hundreds of thousands of San Diegans. Like plenty of American cities, San Diego is already busy finding local solutions to respond to the problems this president has recklessly created.
Not to mention, at least 19 American service members have been killed in this war already. Human rights monitors have documented more than 3,600 dead in Iran by April alone. Here at home, gas is sitting just pennies below its all-time record. Taxpayers have already spent more than $45 billion on the war, while Trump’s oil and gas portfolio has grown by roughly $15.5 million this year alone. Of course anything is a “small price” to someone paying free.99 for this war, and profiting from it. Meanwhile, We the People are paying twice: first for the war, and then for the consequences of that war. But now he wants San Diego to pay a third time, flippantly offering us up to Iran.
It is worth noticing which cities he thought to name. Were San Diego and Los Angeles strategically chosen to signify something to his audience, or were they simply the first cities that came to mind as expendable places? Either way, the effect is to normalize—-and to gauge a crowd’s reaction to–the idea of massive violence in major California cities, suitable targets because of their perceived liberal lean. So what if Iran needs to bomb a little bit of America before the war can be over? Who cares, says Trump, if they target Los Angeles and San Diego?
By the way, why didn’t he offer up San Francisco, the free-love hippie-town MAGA loves to hate (and also my birthplace)? Could it be because that’s where the tech titans live? The same ones who joined Trump for Xi Jinping’s state dinner, a guest list worth a combined $2.4 trillion?
San Diego may have fewer billionaires, but it is home to more than 115,000 active-duty service members and 230,000 veterans. One in six active-duty sailors–in the entire Navy–is stationed here. So is one in four Marines. You cannot throw a rock in this county without hitting a military family: brats and spouses and veterans are among us. I got out of the Navy last year after ten years, and eight of those were here in San Diego. When Trump says “let ‘em take out San Diego,” he’s talking about the backbone of the United States military. He’s also talking about the people fighting his war.
San Diego has not been watching this war from the sidelines. Today, the USS Abraham Lincoln returns to North Island after an almost yearlong deployment to the Middle East that featured food shortages, broken toilets, and mold in the showers after 286 days at sea without a single port call. Eight sailors in the Lincoln’s strike group attempted suicide, but in August, when a reporter asked whether the deployment had gone on too long, Trump said “not nearly long enough.” Now he has told a crowd in Nebraska that we should let Iran take out the city those sailors call home. These are sociopathic sentiments.
Last week at Quantico, Pete Hegseth closed his address to the force by telling them, “President Trump has your back and so do I.” To the contrary, President Trump has put one of the biggest military towns in the country forward as a target for our adversaries. With friends like these, the “domestic” in “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” starts to sound a lot less hypothetical.
San Diego is home to Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Base San Diego, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, the Point Loma submarine base, Camp Pendleton, and Miramar (and I have been permanently stationed at or trained at all of them). If Iran bombed San Diego and Los Angeles, aside from the devastating loss of life, it would cripple an immense share of our national security readiness.
And for what, exactly? Trump says the war is “essentially almost over with.” This is the same man who claimed in June 2025 that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated,” then launched a war over it anyway on February 28. More than seven months later, he wants us to believe two things at once: that we’ve basically won, and that we might need to sacrifice an American city or two to finish winning. If the war is almost over, why does anybody need to take out San Diego?
I wonder if Trump’s endorsed candidate for California’s 48th District here in San Diego County will respond to these remarks. He recently said “no pain, no gain,” when referring to the gas prices San Diegans are paying. Jim Desmond, would you apply that same mindset if we were bombed? Or do you have the moral courage to stand up for the people you’re running to represent?
Last November, six Democratic members of Congress, all veterans, including Senator Mark Kelly, recorded a video reminding troops of their duty to disobey unlawful orders, restating the law that says so. Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” and then his Justice Department went looking for an indictment, which a grand jury refused. The president treated reading the law out loud to the troops as a capital offense, but then he himself invited a foreign enemy to destroy two American cities, possibly as a punchline. Is anyone calling the latter sedition? Who is demanding accountability?
Calling our lives a small price to pay affirms a moral bankruptcy, as well as an obvious dereliction of duty to the office he holds. While we can’t impeach him or invoke the 25th Amendment ourselves, we must stop being so quiet about what we’re paying already. We can make our voices heard by calling our representatives, writing op-eds, knocking doors, phone banking, and voting in defiance of the man who threatens the safety of our city. Ballots are already arriving in mailboxes. Vote, and vote yes on 40 (and no on 41 and 42).
Trump has been harming our cities for a while, but now he is inviting our military adversaries to join him in the harm. If we have any self-respect as Americans, we must not tolerate our leaders disregarding the dignity of lives in this way. We must fight for our home.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.