BFF Spotlight: Travis Moore

*Travis Moore is the Founder and Executive Director of TechCongress, which places computer scientists, engineers, and other technologists to work for Members of Congress and Congressional Committees on key policymaking challenges like AI ethics, election security, encryption, and data privacy through the one-year Congressional Innovation Fellowship. TechCongress has sent 109 technologists into Congress since 2016. *

*Travis worked on Capitol Hill for six years and was the Legislative Director for Rep. Henry A. Waxman, the former Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. He founded Congress’ first digital communications training program, the institution's first Congressional staff conference, and the Congressional Digital Service Fellowship. Travis is the Co-Founder of #CongressToo, a group of 1500 former Congressional staffers that brought the #MeToo movement to Capitol Hill and spearheaded a reform overhaul signed into law in late 2018. He also serves as a professional development trainer for New Leaders Council. *

These are the personal views of Travis Moore and not those of TechCongress. TechCongress is an independent 501(c)(3) organization that does not advocate or take positions on matters of policy.

Question: What does your day-to-day look like?

Travis: We are a technology fellowship for Congress, and our express goal is to be a pipeline for tech expertise on Capitol Hill and the public sector more broadly. It's hard to make a career pivot there. I think there are, and we have certainly seen, lots of folks working in the tech sector that, for a variety of reasons, want to work on problems at scale. People get into the work because they want to tackle problems at scale. Some have felt like the shine has worn off on the tech industry, and some just want to work on bigger problems than they can at a large company, feeling more like a cog in the wheel. They can do that in government.

Our goal is to find fellows that we think will cover the greatest distance in their fellowship of learning. Often, that means intentionally seeking really smart tech people who may know only a few senators but have a desire, commitment, and motivation to learn.

We look for individuals who, in a year, can travel a tremendous distance in their learning. We quantify this in the selection process, evaluating how much progress a fellow can make in a year in this program. If someone has worked in the public sector, there's usually much less distance to cover. We aim to be catalytic and think about it in that way.

The challenge is giving them the right kind of skills, education, and opportunities to apply their skills. My day-to-day involves recruiting, finding, and recruiting the right people. Then there's training and supporting those folks as they head to the public sector.

Being the founder and executive director involves raising all the money for it. We're relatively small, but it's a couple of million dollars budget. So, there's a lot of being out in the world and telling our story. Then there are grant reports and relaying information to funders.

We're approaching ten years. We're nine years in, as of last month. Our ten-year anniversary will be in January 2025.

Question: How do you envision the US federal workforce adapting to the rapid pace of technological change?

Travis: I think the executive branch is working really hard on this and is incredibly constrained in the AI executive order, which has a whole title on workforce from the Biden Administration. Agencies are tasked with having Chief AI officers, and there's a campaign for a surge of talent. executive branch is working tirelessly on this, but they face constraints from Congress, as almost no new dollars have been appropriated.

While the executive branch can authorize certain things around the edges, Congress needs to authorize new programs for many initiatives. In the case of AI, Congress needs to provide additional resources, as agencies are required to have chief AI officers, and top AI engineers in the private sector earn substantial salaries, which the current budget does not account for.

Congress is discussing this extensively, holding insight forums, but it needs to allocate the necessary resources to support the executive branch internally. There's also a lack of leadership-level conversations about what Congress should do to supplement its own staffing needs and technical capacity. The focus tends to be on the executive branch, but Congress is resource-constrained, leading to potential brain drain issues unless the institution is better resourced for staff, particularly those with technological expertise. I haven't seen enough leadership addressing this concern in Congress.

Question: Are you paying attention to what’s coming out of the Europe Union on these issues?

Travis: I follow it because they are legislating in a way that the United States is not. Europe is certainly taking regulatory steps in a more forward-thinking manner, and they've achieved results. Where Europe faces challenges at a legislative level is similar to Congress; they lack mechanisms and staff with technical backgrounds. I've spoken to numerous MEPs, and they don't have technical staff in the European Parliament either. While Europe benefits from a more formal expert consultation process as part of the policy process, they still lack subject matter knowledge within their staff.

The analogy I like to use, applicable to both European Parliament members and Congress, is Senator Orrin Hatch asking Mark Zuckerberg about his business model in 2018. It highlights the need for staff with subject matter knowledge sitting behind legislators. While external expert consultants can assist, having knowledgeable staff is crucial because external technical advisers don't directly inform the legislator. About every month or two, I receive emails from someone in Europe interested in our model because, to my knowledge, we are the only ones bringing technical expertise into the policymaking process. It's a model I'd love to see replicated, and we're exploring ways to help socialize it in Europe and elsewhere.

Question: Have there been forums or exchanges facilitating knowledge transfer specifically regarding technology and the federal workforce that you’ve been paying special attention to?

Travis: There's a really interesting organization that has just started in the last year and a half called the Integrity Institute. Their role is to work with companies in the integrity category, including trust and safety, content moderation, and individuals on product teams dealing with design implications for privacy or algorithmic bias. They convene these workers, facilitating connections with policymakers on specific issues as they arise. It's a new and intriguing model, being a nonprofit, they raise grant funds, serving as connective tissue between private sector expertise and key roles in policy-making when addressing specific matters.

Question: Is there anything on your mind as we head into the super charged election year of 2024?

Travis: When I started TechCongress and moved back a year and a half ago to Washington DC, I attended a conference with diverse startup founders. There was a panel of Y Combinator grads, which is the premier startup accelerator with companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, and Stripe having gone through it.

A woman on the panel mentioned that between her batch and the one before, there were five different companies focused on solving the problem of outsourcing laundry or dry cleaning. She highlighted that people tend to solve problems they know, and for this class of startup founders, the biggest problem was laundry. This analogy applies to the business community, especially working in Congress, where you face complex problems up front. In Congress, we live these hard, complex problems, some beyond our scope to fix, but some are fixable.

We need more pathways for people who have experienced Washington's problems to attempt to solve them. People often go into government affairs and lobbying due to inertia and path dependency, following the norm. Personally, I had to start a nonprofit to continue public interest work.

We need more individuals solving problems and thinking about the infrastructure required in Washington to help people address the problems they know. It's challenging to be a problem solver after leaving Congress when the incentives push towards making more money and compensating for the time spent earning less. The incentives in Washington often steer away from the public interest at a time when we desperately need more creative problem solving.

In the technology sector there are whole categories of infrastructure to help founders launch and scale organizations and solve problems. Venture capital, crowdfunding, accelerators, incubators, and lean startup methodology provide structure and support to startups. I 100% would not have been able launch and grow TechCongress absent the two accelerators I participated in. And I was only able to join these programs because I was living in San Francisco, where startups go through these programs as a default. We’ve got to find ways to a similar or parallel infrastructure in Washington to make it easier to solve problems in the public sector.