powered by cable. >> house committee heard recommendations on modernizing how the house operates. they discussed adding more members and using artificial intelligence and technology to connect lawmakers and constituents.

>> the committee was once again extended this time through the end of the 117th congress. here we are at long last. i want to make clear that this committee has been part of the plan from day one. it involves focusing on tangible

solutions. we have held 37 public hearings and past 171 recommendations. the structure requires bipartisan agreement. we need to think big. we should be open to creative problem-solving and considering ideas that fall outside of our comfort zones. congress is not a static institution. it is supposed to reflect the diversity of this country. new problems demand new solutions. our founding fathers designed a system of government that has lasted over 200 years but if it were perfect, there would be no need for the constitutional amendments. none of them would have passed if citizens and policymakers were willing to think big and take risks. there are plenty of innovative

solutions to the big and small challenges that congress faces and today, with joined by a panel of big thinkers. the committee will use its rules that allow for a more flexible hearing format. in accordance with the house rule, we will allow questioning per witness and the time will not be strictly segregated by witness which will allow extended back-and-forth between the members and witnesses.

there is a lot of work to be done. i appreciate that we can spend time today exploring ideas to improve congress for the betterment of the american people. we have heard from several of you before on other issues. today we will hear about five different ideas for fixing congress. such as expanding the size of the house, i believe the founders new exactly what they

were doing. our system of self-government and checks and balances is the best the world has seen and i think we must tread carefully when we explore ideas that would require amending the constitution. if we are going to access -- assess what is best, we should do a good job of understanding where the system we have today came from. another topic we will be discussing today ai and machine learning in the legislative process is a big idea that we should prepare for. the future is now and we should ensure congress is at the forefront of technology in civic

spaces. i would also like to talk about the calendar and schedule and how ai can help what we have been grappling with that. >> i would now like to welcome our five expert witnesses. we have a bigger panel than usual. witnesses are reminded your written statements be made part of the record. our first guest is a lecturer at the johns hopkins university. he was a senior fellow at the sunlight foundation. he is an author. he earned his bachelors from round university and his phd in

political science from cal berkeley. >> thank you. on the modernization of congress, i appreciate this opportunity to participate in the hearing. one big idea is increasing the size of the house of representatives making it bigger. since it is something that we did for the first 120 years. let's get into the history. in 1790 when the house first met, there were only 65 members each with approximately 30,000 constituents. there were only 13 states and the country was much smaller population wise. framers envisioned representatives would have close connections to their constituents in districts small enough to make that

representation meaningful. the country has grown considerably since then. as the country grew after each census, congress added more seats to reflect the growing population. after the last expansion in 1911, the house settled on 435. they couldn't agree on how to add more seats during that time. as you know since 1911, the population of the country has more than tripled and with women suffrage -- eligible voting population has increased more than sixfold. but the number 435 has not budged. the average number of constituents per district is 760,000. the larger the district, the more distant the constituents

feel from the representatives and vice versa. distance breeds distrust and frustration. it is bad for our form of democracy. a report that i co-authored which i'm submitting for the record recommends increasing the house by 115 members. this would correspond to the number of seats that have shifted between the states even as the population has grown since the cap was stuck upon. this doesn't have to happen right now. the ideal timing would be after the 2030 census. once instituted, the number would continue to expand as the population grows.

an expansion would have other benefits, one is that it would bring new faces and new ideas to washington. the peoples house should be close to the people. all of this could shake things up, but given how dysfunctional things seem to be right now, this could bring new energy and creativity to congress and even help short-circuit some of the hyper-partisan polarization. on that front, i think that pairing this with other recommendations, it will go a long way. you would have much more diverse

perspectives in congress. more broadly as a scholar of political science and history, i see that the decade ahead is likely to be a real moment of transformative change in our democracy. it is clear that the status quo is broken. there are those who want to burn it all to the ground, but i think you all want to restore and renew the privilege of publican democracy in america. i am 100% convinced we will need big bold ideas to make that work and to innovate and modernize toward a broader future. i look forward to working with you all to achieve some of these

innovations. >> our next witness is danielle allen. she is a political theorist. she is widely known for her work on justice and citizenship. she is a member of the american academy of arts and sciences. she earned her first phd in classics from the university of cambridge and her second and government from harvard university. you are now recognized for three minutes.

also known as square, right, that's what you get for that. doctor doctor, good morning chair kilmer, thank you for the invitation vice chair timmons. representative lata. it's an honor to be with all of you and thank you so much for your commitment to self government. you've heard my background. i've also had the honor of being a co chair for the american academy of arts and sciences commission on the practice of democratic citizenship, but i want to share a little bit more about myself for context where my views come from. i grew up in southern california in a family that prized civic engagement. on my mom's side, my great grandparents helped fight for women's right to vote and my great grandmother was president of the league of women voters in michigan in the 30s. and on my dad's side my granddad helped found one of the first chapters in northern florida. so as a matter both of family inheritance and personal conviction. i bring a deep belief to this hearing in the value to all. people have the chance to participate in self government as free and equal citizens. i speak therefore from personal conviction, but also speak today on behalf of the academy's commission. the american academy of arts and sciences was founded in 1780 before the constitution by the same people who led the revolution. it was founded to

secure for the new nation, the knowledge resources needed for the daring experiment in self government. in 2018 the academy convened a bipartisan commission to address the widespread sense that our constitutional democracy is in crisis in 2020 we issued our report, our common purpose. you've heard about it a fair bit. i bet the report makes the case that improvement of civic culture and of political institutions must go hand in hand if we're going to secure the health of our constitutional democracy. so my core message is that tweaking how congress operates is not enough to restore the strength of the first branch of government, healthy congress can grow only out of the soil of a healthy civic culture. so investment in our civic well being through civic infrastructure is investment in the health of congress. civic infrastructure consists of the local places, programs and people that encourage all residents of

municipalities and regions to interact, find common ground and solve problems together. we currently under invest in this infrastructure and under investment shows up in isolation, disengagement, mistrust and contention instead of participation and collaboration against this backdrop, residents and local communities, just like my great grandparents and grandparents are seeking to turn the tide in inman south carolina, local government business people and community residents have collaborated on a revitalized downtown with a new public library and physical infrastructure to better support connections among residents and visitors in lexington kentucky. the nonprofit civic lex builds civic health through accessible coverage of local government meetings and programs for residents and relationship building activities and resident engagement in local government. the citizens campaign from new jersey, educates local residents and techniques of no blame problem solving and participants

form civic trusts as they call them non partisan community based civic associations that search for successful policies at work in other communities that might be adopted in their own local communities need a vote of confidence from national investment. in our report, we recommended the creation of a trust for civic infrastructure, a new national organization for grant making, knowledge sharing, public education and research and evaluation to strengthen civic capacity and connectivity in local communities. a pilot trust is currently forming with private support but the scope and scale of needed investments means civic infrastructure should also be a priority for the national budget. future members of your body need a chance to learn the practices of democratic citizenship. enrich schools of democracy at the local level. when local communities know how to bridge divides and engage residents and productive collaborations, we

will be on our way to securing a healthy political culture nationally. this will improve your working conditions only with innovation. can we pass on to future generations our valuable inheritance of constitutional democracy in better shape than we currently find it. so again, we thank you for your willingness to renovate our constitutional democracy. >> thank you. dr allen our next witnesses, joe mariani, did i get that right. alright. mr mariani is the technology and innovation leader at the center for government insights at deloitte services lp. his research focuses on the intersection of culture and innovation in both commercial

businesses and government organizations. previously, he worked as a science teacher at saint anselm abbey school and served as an intelligence officer with the us marine corps. mr mariani earned his bachelor of arts and philosophy from the university of chicago and his master of arts from dartmouth college. mr mariani, you are now recognized for three minutes. >> excellent, thank you. chair and vice chair timmons members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. as you heard, i'm joe mariani and i lead research into emerging technologies for deloitte center for government insights and i've come to that role with a broad range of experience from marine corps intelligence officer to high school science teacher, from consultant to the government to commercial technology researchers today's task of kind of mining the breadth of industry and academia for the big ideas that can help transform government is exactly what gets me out of bed in the morning. so for the past five years we've been looking at the potential impact artificial intelligence or ai could have on government and from that research we've identified two ways that we think could help transform the legislative process. the first is ai microscope that is using ai to assess the impact of existing legislation. so machine learning or ml models can accurately find patterns in data without having to specify ahead of time what

those patterns should be. so just as a microscope can look at a leaf for example and find structures and patterns invisible to the human eye. these machine learning models can look at programs and find patterns in their outcomes that may be invisible to humans just because of the size, scope or even age of the data. so for example, machine learning models have found that patterns in government r and d. investment during world war two have impacted the location of innovation hubs even to today. and you can use these machine learning models on more recent policy problems as well. so in allegheny county pennsylvania, researchers have used machine learning models to help understand which interventions are most effective at reducing infant mortality. and it's that ability of machine learning models to predict policy outcomes. it kind of begs the next question which is what if we did something differently? what would change? and answering that question is exactly our second use of ai ai is simulator. so creating an ai simulator for problems can help policymakers test different approaches in much the same way that a flight simulator allows pilots to test different ways of flying an entirely new airplane. so researchers in ireland have recently taken advantage of this to simulate parts of their economy. so they use data from patents, knowledge flows other economic trends to simulate how

individual companies and investors might react to different policies. so for example, the researchers could examine if different tax incentives or offending funding methods would support the creation of new high tech small businesses in certain specific parts of the country. and using ai in this way to simulate the complex systems that congress deals with every day can actually improve the quality of debate and do so in three key ways. first, it can articulate the often unspoken assumptions and values that we all bring to these issues second, and can uncover the drivers of particular problems. and third, can help us understand which interventions will be the most effective and at what cost. ultimately, these simulations can help members agree on what they disagree on. and in fact, there's even evidence that just experimenting with these models alone can help drive consensus on emotionally charged issues. now, using ai in the legislative process is certainly going to uncover some unique challenges, new skills, new security requirements, new business

processes will likely be required. but examples already at work in other industries show that with the right human machine teaming ai can help provide common foundation for debate, encourage consensus and produce meaningful results for the american people. thank you, i look forward to your questions. >> thanks mr mariani. uh next up we've got kevin kassir dr kassir is a senior fellow at american enterprise institute where he studies the us congress, the administrative state and election reform. prior to a e i he was the vice president of research partnerships at the r street institute and was the co founder of the legislative branch capacity working group. he also served for more than a decade as an analyst with congressional research service. he is the co author of the book. congress overwhelmed the decline of congressional capacity and prospects for reform. doctor costar earned his bachelor of arts in political science from ohio state university and his master of arts and phd in politics from new york university. dr costar welcome back. you are now recognized for three minutes. >> all right, well, thank you

much. chairman kilmer, vice chairman timmons and uh members of the select committee for having me here. and i also appreciated the setup. you gave my topic in your introduction, you referenced rule 11, clause two j two. um kind of gets to my point and i think it's also interesting that this room is located right next to energy committees room and above that is a portrait of the late john dingell who had many famous kips, one of them was that, you know, you can write the bill, but if i write the rules, i'll win. but being john dingell, of course, the language was much more salty. uh the importance of rules to the legislative process and the fact that rules on the waving of the rules ultimately can be very determinative outputs is, you know, little appreciate, i think, out of outside of capitol hill, it's only when you get here and you start seeing how the wheels turn, that you realize how impactful they are. so yes, i'm here to uh i was called here to talk about excessive complexity of house rules for moving legislation. um, your staff had

flagged a committee had written for the hill where and i decried excessive complexity, particularly citing a process by which the debt limit was raised by something like $400 billion dollars or more, which was baffling to even long term congress watchers who follow this stuff. so if it's baffling to us, i mean, my goodness, how can anybody else in this country understand what occurred now? i want to say? of course, you know, there's nothing inherently wrong with complex rules when you're dealing with humans who are interacting and legislative chamber. there's a lot of things that can go wrong. and so of course, you want to create rules and try to have them work towards a productive end. but i think what we've seen is over time that the number of rules have built up and this is not a phenomenon unique to congress. all organizations often face this blight. i mean, we often decry red tape in government agencies what's red tape. it's a surfeit of rules, its rules being layered on and aggregating year after year after year and ultimately creating an

incoherent jumble, which is exceedingly difficult to navigate and often can make it difficult for the organization to do what's expected of it. um, you know, ultimately, the rules governing any human actions within an institution need to serve the ultimate objectives of the institution. they should embody the shared values of the institution and they should be readily understandable by participants in the enterprise. and i think, you know, i am not a rules nerd. there are those of the current over congressional research service where i used to work, who working totally nerd out on the specifics of nerds, but just as somebody who's been watching congress for 20 years in this town, it feels to me that there are clear signs that the rules have grown overly complex. um you know, the committee here has previously conducted a deep dive on the budget process, which is just, you know, it's one slice of legislative process which is rife with arcana paygo three ot 30 to be allocations that goes on and on and on. um you know, their whole fields of expertise, nerds who devote their lives to

studying budget process and just budget process because it's that complex and then you consider that's just part of the whole i mean, my goodness, house legislators supposed to operate in this environment. um the ♪ 7rules setting aside the budget rules, the rules governing legislative process are prolix to put it mildly, you know, they begin on page 345 of the house rules and manual and they conclude some 700 pages later, emmanuel holds rules, you know, 130 devoted to committee procedures, like the one you cited, 56 pages address motions and amendments, 86 pages relate to the aforementioned budget process and so forth. um, you know, as a point of contrast, the great state of ohio, its legislative rule book has only 200 pages and not all 200 are devoted to rules of moving legislation. they're devoted to other stuff. member conduct and such things. we really need that

many rules here compared to state of ohio or perhaps other states. i think it's a fair question to ask. um, and i think, you know, when you talk about rules piling up, they ultimately are going to come with the cost, um, not least as alluded to the more rules an organization has the fewer people who can understand them and of course that's going to create power imbalances. you know, i referenced the iron or iron law of oligarchy, oligarchy. there's always somebody at the top of the organization who knows more things than other people and therefore is able to get their way. um, that's kind of inherently problematic if taken to extremes for a representative legislature where you're all supposed to be equal and you all have constituencies and states to take care of. um, you know, when i conducted a study um, with timothy lapierre, a professor and lee druckman and we surveyed congressional staff some years ago we saw some clear evidence that even staff whose

job it is to help you guys do your work. we're struggling to understand the rules and we weren't asking arcana were asking some pretty straightforward stuff and the percentage of folks who understood it wasn't especially high.

another cost of the complexity of rules is that, you know, regular order starts to your road no longer can you, you know, do the schoolhouse rock thing where you say, okay, i'll introduce the bill, it's gonna get referred to committee or multiple committees, there'll be a committee process, a bill will emerge from its gonna calendar to go to the floor, etcetera. no, not so much doesn't work like that. it's exceedingly complex. and as you all know, and have experienced, um, frequently, you know, if something does get out of committee, all the rules get waived suddenly goes into rules committee land where special rules are written. and the thing is handled in ways that are often surprising and confusing and it's bundled up with other stuff. so i suggest that, you know, it sounds pretty rich, but select one thing i suggested, the select committee considers establishing a select committee to study the rules in a bipartisan way and think about ways of simplifying them and making them better and value body the values that you all want for the institution, one of which i think is legislator participation in a meaningful way. um, it won't be easy. rules tend to change slowly here and the process for changing them inevitably is a majority vote by the majority party at the start of each congress. and so that naturally drifts the rules towards being increasingly partisan and arcane. but if nothing is done, then the institution is going to continue to get bogged down in the

equivalent of red tape with that. thank you. >> thanks. dr kassir and our final witness, last but not least, is our colleague, representative john larson, mr larson has represented connecticut's first district since 1999. he serves on the house committee on ways and means, where is the chair of the subcommittee on social security? mr larson is also the former vice chair and chair of the house democratic caucus. mr larson welcome. you are now recognized. >> well, thank you. mr chairman mr timmins mr later, uh great to be here and i applaud you for the big ideas that are coming forward and i think they're essential to a democracy. there are many that i would like to explore and i apologize, i got here a little late because i'm very interested in the, in the testimony and what kevin was just alluding to. i think part of the problem whether it's a member or staff is getting acclimated to congress, especially for the first time, even if you've had state legislative background or interest and you may understand or have a grasp of the legislative process, but it's different here and it's compounded by the distance that a number of people have to travel. not everybody has a short trip like you do representative kilmer. but uh, it's uh, and the stress that that creates both on the

individual and i dare say uh families as well. uh, we could spend the day talking about impact on spouses and families and how little congress does with regard to that too? the ongoing, um, i think atrocity that people have to sleep in their own buildings because of the cost of living here and they sleep in the house and shower down in the uh, in the locker room, you know, contrary to what public opinion is about, what happens to congressional members. so some time ago and i think i was on house administration at the time, had introduced a bill that said, one of the ways that we could correct this was to have four year terms for members of

congress, not dissimilar to what the senate does have four year terms and then stagger those terms so that there still would be an election cycle every two years, but only half of the 435 members would be up for election. why? so that you would have an opportunity, first and foremost to learn and a climate with regard to the practice to former presidents, president eisenhower and president johnson um both felt and were astounded at the enormous amount of pressure that's placed on a member in the house of representatives and as all of, you know, too, well, you know, sooner get here. and the first thing you're doing even before you're sworn in is down at your respect of uh, d triple c or the republican committee to re elect raising money. uh, and everyone that you meet in the first days that you're here, we'll all tell

you the same thing, what you gotta do is make sure that you go down and raise money. so the brief acclamation that people have most of it off campus, i remember the trip up to harvard where we had, you know, we spent maybe a day and a half. i just think it requires far more time than that and that people ought to be a lot of the time to make sure that they and their families get to adjust to the very rigorous schedule that, that congress has. most people do not understand that the day isn't done for a member of congress after voting is through uh, for a number of people when they're here, the fundraising continues and there's always your constituent work back in your district as well. it's a

24/7 job. and to have that election cycle every two years only compounds the problem. our colleagues in the senate as you all know, you know, have six year terms and they're staggered. so that only a third of the body is up. why shouldn't the house have a similar system keeping with the tradition of having an election every two years, but only half the body. and after the first election, it would work, you know, odd or even numbers. however, it will be determined by the house. people would then have that opportunity and i believe therefore able to focus more clearly on the task in front of them and to familiarize themselves with the process, including as kevin said, their staffs as well, having that

opportunity to fully appreciate understand both their colleagues the process uh, and fundamentally how a bill really becomes law appear. and with that mr chairman, i yield back and happy to answer any questions, especially from the person voted the handsomest man in congress. i don't know how many people know that, but i just wanted that for the record >> really bringing my a game. thank you chairman larson. i now want to recognize myself and vice chair timmons to begin a period of extended questioning of the witnesses. any member who wishes to speak should just signal their request. either me or vice chair timmons. i want to start actually with dr druckman. so i i just want to think through kind of what the pros

and cons of adding more members to the house are. so last last hearing we focused on constituent services and i think it is probably undeniably so that your capacity to do case work and to address constituent concerns is probably easier with a smaller district at the same time over the course of the hearings that we've had. it's striking how many witnesses that we've had, who've spoken about the importance of relationships within a legislative body. and i can see probably some downside. if you substantially increase the size, it's already hard to have relationships with 400 and you know, if you include the delegates 440 others other than yourself that you know, that that that's tricky. and so i'm just curious if you can talk a little bit about what's achieved by increasing the number of members and you know, if you've got a sense of the puts and takes. >> yeah, well, like everything, there's pros and cons. uh, so certainly it does bring members closer to their constituents. if the districts are smaller, i think it has the potential to

make congress more representative of the people as a whole, if there are more members, but you know, it does, it is more members for you all to, to interact with. i guess the question is at, you know, if you go the proposal that we've put forward in this report is to add 150 members. so to go from 435 to 585. so that's, you know, more people to get to know. but you know, i think, i mean, i think the house has gotten to a point where it is just hard to get to know everybody, especially if you're only here for, you know, for two years, potentially. and then your, although most people are here for longer, but constantly running for reelection, you know, so in terms of of members getting to know each other, i think if, you know, to your point, congressman larson people spend less time having to go

into their fundraising dens and and more time just hanging out if folks were here more and not just flying out on, flying in on tuesday and flying out on thursday and you know, folks actually brought their families here and spent more time here, that would help. but you know, i mean, there is there is certainly a trade off with, with size, it's harder to, you know, get to know everybody, but on the other hand, you know, when when was the last time the house celebrated as a whole? >> uh yeah, so i was even just thinking about like in committees right already, it's a little bit tricky in committees and we're lucky we have 12 people on this committee. so our capacity to actually have dialogue is all right. you know, if you look behind you, the armed services committee really big. right? >> so, i mean, 11 thing to think about it is also the committee

structure, right? i mean, kevin is talking about the complexity and you know, there's some things that can be done with simplification, but the there's a lot of things that congress has called on to legislate on and think about and oversee and i think if you had larger, larger congress, you might have the potential for more committees and subcommittees to that. there just has to be a level of specialization among members of congress. you know that it's really hard to be a generalist given all of the things that you need to be thinking about. so having a larger member having having more members might allow for more potential for people to really focus on particular subcommittees which you know where you could develop some real expertise. like there's a certain amount, you've just got to trust each other and delegate to each other to to really solve some very hard and tricky problems >> dr allen did you want to

weigh in on this? >> a small footnote? my understanding is that both the u. k. parliament and the german bundestag are larger than our congress. their populations are smaller of course. so i think it would be very productive if your committee were to reach out to them and ask that question about what it means to operate in a body of that scale. >> you're going doctor, they're both about 700 members just to riff off lease point with respect to oversight. 435 members who have to oversee, you know, a $6 trillion 180 executive agencies. um you know, as the executive branch has grown in size and complexity. the number of members of congress has not and the size of staff has actually declined since the 1980s in the house. and so you just think about the information of symmetries there, you know, obviously adding more members, i'm dr drummond, then i want to bring vice chair timmons in the conversation. can you speak a little bit about how this would work? you know, how

would adding seats to the chamber and reapportionment work? and you made a passing reference to maybe not using single member districts but having a different approach? i was hoping you could say a little bit more about that. >> yeah, so, you know, i think in addition to increasing the size of the house, we ought to think about increasing the size of districts to go from single member to proportional multi member districts, 3-5 members per district. and the i think i think one of the challenges in this moment of our politics is things have become so deeply divided. hyper partisan polarization is real, it's a tremendous problem and there's just a tremendous amount of gamesmanship that that is going on uh and you know, trying to trying to crush the other side. i mean, i'm watching in horror as as i see the d triple c. putting money to elect the most

extreme republicans, but but within the single member district with a zero sum winner, take all election, you win by disqualifying the other side. and one way to disqualify the other side is to have their side be the most extreme. uh now that's i think an incredibly dangerous and dumb game, but it is the logic of our single member system and the binary choice that it forces. now imagine, you know, if you three or five member districts, you know, you it's not zero sum, it's not winner take all anymore. you have a diversity of representatives who represent the larger diversity of that district. i mean, you all represent very diverse districts and, you know, i mean, i know you worked very hard to try to represent all of your constituents, but ideologically values wise, you know, demographically, there's some constituents who it's hard for you all to represent, even even if we did increase the size of

the house and thus reduce the size of the district. so i think if we had proportional multi member districts where three or five members represented the district and split up the district and represented different constituents in different perspectives, we would have less of this binary zero sum. that is really destroying the ability of congress and our government to work, see more conservative democrats, more liberal republicans, maybe some, some, you know, new new parties, new new perspectives represented. um, and you combine that with increasing the size of the house. i think you you come you create a congress that is just much more representative of the diversity and pluralism in this country and i think much better able to work out some complex compromises because everything is not, you know, we've got to crush the other side because they're evil. and that's that's the mindset that i think is really overwhelming the

ability of this congress to function. and it's terrifying where this is leading. >> vice chair timothy. did you wanna weigh in? >> well, i just wanted to make a comment about that. i think the biggest threat that we face in our democratic republic and i apologize for not catching all the testimony. but when mr cosby was talking about rules, ah the house has already passed over 400 plus bills that sit in the senate and they haven't voted on one of them. and that was a practice both under harry reid and it's still a practice, i'd say mitch is far more successful about it, but for a member of the house, uh, and whether you're a democrat or republican,

the committee chairs and that whole process has been neutered or by a senate rule, nothing in the constitution that says that you need 60 votes to pass a bill, nothing in the constitution that says a filibuster is a constitutionally authorized. it may be somewhat argue a tradition, but this isn't. mr smith goes to washington. this is simply people in their room saying calling a closer vote and no house bill moves in the united states senate and you can argue that even the last two bills that the house has voted on from the senate, major bills, the infrastructure bill, and most recently, the so called gun violence bill never went through a public hearing in the house. never was vetted and came from the other body and it's alarming how much this has happened and

becoming part of the norm instead of what is called regular order. these things used to be sorted out in what's called a conference committee. there are very few people in congress today that can even recall what a conference committee is, but that's where the so called issue of hyper bipartisanship got resolved within those committees of conference when there was disagreement. but the house is now at an enormous disadvantage because of a senate rule. and frankly, the media pays no attention to it. 70% of the bills that passed the house that sit over in the senate are bipartisanly passed. so this notion that we are bipartisanly always have one another's throats simply isn't true on the major issues where there are philosophical, ideological and regional differences. that has

always been the way it's been throughout history and rightfully so. but a democratic majority, whether it's republican or democrat, it needs to govern and it can't be govern, and it can't be minority rule and ruled by culture vote, or what they call rule 22. something i would like to submit to the record, the new catch-22 is rule 22. >> thank you. i actually like your idea about the four-year term, and i want to give you something to think about. how would you deal with redistricting? >> that is a great question. >> it gets really tricky. >> it depends, redistricting is up to the states. cracks but if half of the

members have four-year terms, and they are alternating, someone would be in the middle of their term. they can do state-by-state, certain get reelected. something to think about. >> in terms of what that would mean with odd and even districts, how it would break down in terms of who is up for election in the two-year cycle. >> when you redraw the line, it would get tricky. i will talk about the calendar and schedule. welcome to the party. the variables are this. 435 members of congress --

so we have to be here more. we need more time. the best schedule i can come up with is 104 days. which is not going to happen. if we get 80, we will be lucky. can ai fix to where we just d conflict a little bit? >> i won't promise it. you are describing basically just an optimization problem. there is a ton of data, and within these defined parameters, we need to find the optimal solution. that is exactly the type of thing ai is really good at. we talk about human machine teaming, because their strengths

are what humans are weak at, and human strengths are what ai is weak at. we have so much data and so many variables, and we can't crunch all of those numbers. that is where ai can help. we talk about contextual variability and emotion, value judgment, that is where humans are significantly better. but scheduling, ai can help. >> the biggest challenge, submit he and subcommittee meetings left to the chair and they don't want to be told what to do. and floor votes are left to the majority leader, and he's not going to listen to anybody. that is what he gets to do. factor that in. how do you factor in -- can we get optimization without being directive? can we make suggested optimization? >> absolutely. the other way to do it is the second model we talked about.

you can sort of set the parameters of a system, here's all of the rules in play, what we want to accomplish and allow people to play around with it. different players in that model, committee chairs, folks who need your time to play around with it . from that, you can create 1, 2, 3, then human judgment can choose between we don't want to work on christmas eve or something like that. >> what business would we hire to help? we have been trying to create a committee calendar, a unified committee calendar so people could see. we are not trying to use ai to fix anything, just make it so you can tell what you're doing when you are doing it, as opposed to picking time out of thin air and saying interesting, 90% of the subcommittee has another committee meeting at the same time. that is not great. maybe do it now -- an hour later, or earlier. we can figure out how to get a

unified committee calendar, nonetheless optimize it. do you know anybody that does this? >> the good thing is, these types of optimization problems, they can be found across government and industries. a lot of folks have expertise applying these and seeing them to the context. the challenge is everyone has experience adopting ai models and using them potentially at scale. how do you cross it with the unique context of having those technological tools work in congress? i think what we are starting to see, as we heard from other examples, other legislatures, other parliaments starting to take those first tentative steps in using ai at small-scale processes. south africa has an ai personal assistant that gets what you're talking about. members can ask questions and it will automatically respond about the content in a bill, or the time and conference room you

need to get to in the next two minutes. those are the things that are out there. they're discovering the unique challenges of using ai and legislative context. i think your question, the challenge is learning both. learning from those examples and industry where they are doing this. how do you do it at scale, and learning from the small-scale content out there in south africa, the netherlands, brazil, about the unique requirements to do this in a legislative content. >> thank you. >> small footnote. every college and university has this problem and we have methods for solving it. so i would recommend calling a major public university and asking them -- middle schools -- true, but this relevant scale, the relevant scale that you need, you know, and yes, there are optimization tools. so i think you'd easily find something usable. >> one real quick follow up dr brightman, ignoring the policy considerations around having another 150 members of congress and the staff and all that stuff. my biggest question is just space. where do they go? we can't put another 150 people

on the floor. we, i mean i guess we could build another house office building. >> right. i mean you got that parking lot south of -- and some beautiful parks. >> it's overwhelming to think about adding another 150 members. >> right. i mean, you know, but also also people work from home more now. i mean it's a post pandemic. we've sort of figured out remote work a little bit. i mean not not that it can all be remote but yeah, but i think, i mean you can build another office. there's space south of of the three existing office buildings. i mean i hate to lose this beautiful parks but you know, it's interesting. >> our first year, one of our early hearings, somebody suggested moving the capital to nebraska. >> -- so we could maybe couple moving the capital to nebraska with that. i'm just kidding plenty of land there. -- >> i'm just kidding. >> plenty of land there. i mean it would be in the middle of the country.

>> i think the chairman, the chairman would appreciate that. but thank you. i yield back. >> thanks for mr. chairman and mr. vice chairman for today's hearing and to our witnesses. and this is kind of is an interesting hearing that we're having today. first of all, people are agreeing with me. first of all, i can make this very simple, you know, we always talk about schedules. we didn't know how legislature. it's not this is not rocket science. on tuesday, wednesday, thursday when we had session? we started at a certain time in the senate. if they said we're starting at 11:30, we started 11:30 next -- the next day, on the floor at 1:00, we are on the floor. the other thing is, you weren't allowed to run committee hearings during session. very simple. i've advocated these things, so it's good to hear these things come up. the other thing is also good to hear, come up, i advocated this.

our committee sizes are too large. and the other thing is if you go back 50, 60 years ago, members didn't serve on 234 committees. they served on one and they became experts on that committee. so, you know, we can simplify things for people having always been broken up into where they need to be at a certain time by simplifying the process. and so i'll just throw my two cents in there real quick. but one of the things that i think you mentioned, you know about the -- were talking about the executive branch and how large it has gotten, and congress hasn't kept up. i think part of the problem is congress just advocated its power to the executive, so you don't have to take the blame. you know, it's just like we've done it. you guys take care of it and it's out of our hands now. so how do we pull that back in to start saying we're gonna start bringing that power back to the house, back to the senate so that the executive doesn't

have it? because again, you know, i can remember as a kid, my dad was here from 59 to 89, but i can remember driving down independence avenue where these office buildings are today. they are quonset huts left over from world war ii. look at photographs, that's what we had. it's amazing that this government operated much smaller scale than we have today. but how do we bring that back? >> well, as as a person on the right, certainly, i would suggest that congress consider doing something to pare back the size of the executive branch. do we really need all 180 agencies? it's been a long time since i think i've seen any sort of concerted effort to do some sort of like, let's let's put together a bipartisan list and let's start zeroing things out. maybe hold a vote at the start of each congress and hold hands and jump together. it can be done through a legislative procedure, an expedited one or something like that. that would put incentives in the right direction and, you know, make the job a little more manageable. i think that there also is, you

know, the information to symmetries are so immense. i don't think the house did itself any favors in growing government, but then reducing the number of staff over the past 40 years. i think technology can help make up for it. i think this is where ai is very interesting. when committees get together and study a problem, yep, 3, 4 years later, very few people on the committee are still there, many of the staff have left and what you have is a bunch of printed hearing volumes and that's just that knowledge is just fading from memory because you guys are all working on new stuff and being able to manage that knowledge especially so new members can come in, get up to speed fast and get a sense of what really, you know, are the options of what should be done one of the problems. i think that that is that is part of the mix. the basic incentive, like, you know, james madison thought that the legislature would be the most powerful entity of all in the three branches. the ability to exercise power over the first, power over the

law. he thought that be absolutely irresistible to members. i think he would be baffled by the fact that members, as you do note frequently, just delegate authority. they delegate authority up towards leadership and they delegate authority over towards the executive branch and therefore have grown this massive administrative state. so some of this is going to be an attitudinal change, but i think also the kind of difficulty that the individual member has an exerting his or her will. like why put in the work to try to reign in an agency or change policy if your bill is not gonna get out of committee, if it's not going to get called for a vote and if the senate is going to sit on it? empowering members to get stuff done has to be part of the equation. >> just real quick follow up for you. you know, you're also talking about, you know, our rules and procedures. it's it's gotten pretty well out of hand. do we just go back to jeff's emanuel? >> no, i think we have to go a little bit beyond that. i think there are some, you

know, some of these specializations i think are valuable. i think perhaps, you know, when you're talking about a trade treaty or certain other specified areas, having an expedited procedure can be valuable. but certainly the whole corpus needs to be paired back. i mean, you got rules that are on the books, but not even used. calendar wednesday has been around for how long when's the last time it's been invoked 50 years ago, but it's in the book theoretically can be invoked. congress even, you know, don wolfsburger told me that the congress had picked up a new rule at the start of last last january and regularly waves the rule. >> quick question. i am a rinker on communications technology right across the hero at the energy and commerce. and we're talking about all the ai. one of the things of course we've had a lot of questions about in the past about how

algorithms are set, especially when we're talking about ai how would you make sure that those algorithms are correct, that they're not biased to one side or the other? >> sure, absolutely. and the short answer is i think everyone involved at every step of the process has a role in ensuring that those ai models are accurate and equitable. and that starts even before the models are made. it starts with selecting and collating the data to make sure it's accurate and clean and kind of most important for equity to -- kind of fit for purpose. because you can gather one data set in one context and it can be representative and you know, not biased one way or the other. but you use it to answer a different question in different contexts. and all of a sudden accidentally introduced bias. and those types of controls and governance processes then need to extend into the next phase where you're making the model and using it and focusing on transparency and those steps is probably the most important. you can identify kind of what are the model weights? what are the variables, what are the assumptions that we're using. and then even into two members yourself to make sure that when

you're using the outputs that you have kind of the literacy of how those models work. so you can understand kind of their left and right lateral limits. because ai is a powerful tool, but it is not an infallible oracle, more of a decision aid for yourself. probably also unique to the legislative context, having enough knowledge to be able to communicate to constituents how the models are being used. so you can build their trust and confidence in how ai is being used as well. >> just two more questions. thank you very much. dr. ellen, in your testimony, you talked about how we are trying to you're out at home across the whole country how to get people back engaged. a lot of people are pulling themselves in, stay home, just like years ago. i'm not going to date myself and i'm gonna say this but when you could go to the corner store and pick up a a cassette tape and you're gonna take it home and listen and watch a movie in the

theaters. nobody's ever gonna do that, nobody's ever gonna stay home to watch, watch it on their own tv this movie. well they're all proven wrong and we've seen more and more with people now. it's always back, you know, they just keep pulling things back that they're not out there communicating with one another. a lot of neighborhoods, you never see your neighbors until spring. you know, everybody just kind of disappears for six months. so i guess my question is that we want to get people actively involved again in there in the political process which our founders wanted us all to be. how do we get these people re engage, you know, it's just like disengaging themselves from, you know, their, their phones, you know, like 95 a different piece of legislation, 94% of all accidents that appear on the road today are driver error. and most of it i wrote with the highway patrol not too long ago in ohio and it's because of people playing with or what their phones. so how do, how do we get people? re engaged in us? >> i really appreciate the

question. i think we all have direct experiences of the sort of disconnection that people are living with and then the negative psychological and behavioral consequences that flow from that. the good news is that there really are people in communities across the country who know how to pull people back at the end of the day, social connection is rewarding. it is empowering. it supports mental health and well being and so when people have an opportunity to participate again, they tend to come back. so they don't just participate once, but in order for that to work, you need those in effect civic entrepreneurs who are going to put in the time and energy to build the context to issue the invitation to follow up with people and so forth. and that's what we have historically had a habit of investing in, and that habit has fallen away. so if you look at the earliest history of the country, take massachusetts in the colonial period, 16 hundreds, even, you know, the state government, such as it was sort of colonial

assembly insisted that every town put resources into a school and that's really the beginning of public school. and you could think of that as the first example of civic infrastructure and the purposes were civic, they, you know, were economic too. but actually civic first, and then throughout the late 19th century, early 20th century, we had these extraordinary philanthropist andrew carnegie and so forth, who built libraries all over the country and he was not alone. our contemporary billionaires do not invest in civic infrastructure in the same kind of way, and that's something that we should all recognize, and even the question of what can congress do to incentivize private philanthropy back into supporting these local level. civic entrepreneurs is really important. so the short messages that people are out there, who know how to pull people back into connection, but they're not getting support in the way that they have historically gotten in this country. >> thank you mr chairman, i know i've gone over my time, but i have so many other questions,

but thank you very much for your indulgence. >> i wanted to follow-up with mr. larson. i don't think there's anything magic about two years. i think there's a sense though, that the maybe the intent of the founders was to make sure that we were closer to our constituents, more accountable to our constituents. i imagine that might be a pushback against extending the length of the term. i just want to get your sense of how would you respond to that? >> you're absolutely right. the founding fathers had a major debate over this because they, but it should be one year. and the idea was that in a democthey wanted to make sure you had one chamber that was close to the people and that the people elected every year. and that's the concept. i think eisenhower and johnson used almost the exact same phrase that you did.

there's nothing magic about two years. but the idea of staggering them would, i think, also helped create competition upstream for those that are in the house, but don't have to necessarily give up a seat in order to run for a governorship or run for the united states senate, but the primary goal here as i think both johnson and eisenhower recognized people really need to understand the responsibility and role and to do that in a two year period, obviously it's it's been done, but when you complicate that with both the need to raise money and the family concerns that has on spouses and children, it just seems to me to be a far more humane way to go about this

business that we're in and allow both for greater understanding , camaraderie, and i think better legislation in the final run. >> i wanted to get your sense. so what i've been struck over the course of this committee's existence that i guess by two dynamics related to the rules. we have a bunch of rules that we don't actually follow, right? there's just a ton of underbrush, right? i've been here nearly 10 years. i don't think we've done calendar wednesday. right? but it's in the rules, right? there's all of these rules that we consistently wave and lord knows that the budget and appropriations process, we have those are in that instance, there's laws that govern that process that by and large, we don't follow either. i'm just curious your sense of has there, can you point to an example of either another parliament or a state legislature that has done this process that you're suggesting

that has successfully kind of cleared that underbrush and kind of delete on the rules and and refreshed it. it's >> unfortunately. no. and i think, you know, in part, when you look at state legislatures, i don't think they've had the kind of problem that the house has had where things have gotten so out of control so rapidly. their pairings i think are more modest, incremental changes, but things didn't get out of control. things got out of control here and now we have, you know, each congress, it's little tweaks of the rules but no fundamental revisiting because it's just not part of the process. >> i certainly would love to see -- and again, this is me, we're friends at congressional research service or ncsl, can work together to lay the house rules next to the rules of four states where we have well

functioning legislatures and just compare. >> well, i also, i guess i find myself thinking your recommendation of whether it be another select committee or continuing the work of this select committee to do a deeper dive into this. i'm just curious how much you think that actually fixes stuff. we had a year of people testifying in front of this committee where we should get back to regular order and you know, i came out of a state legislature where every bill was taken up under an open rule where if you had an amendment that was at all germane to the bill, you could offer it, it would be debated and voted on. in my experience in state legislature, that was abused probably five maybe six times for gotcha politics. you know, the notion of doing that here is laughable, right? like that would be used for gotcha politics at every angle. and that's not a rules problem. that's a cultural problem. right? so i'm just curious how much you think we should invest in a deep dive into rules change in light of that dynamic?

>> well, you know, there's a sick kind of relationship between the rules and the behavior. there's been this process where when it comes to the floor, you know, some bad behavior crops up. so the rules get tightened, more bad behavior springs up elsewhere. i mean, it's almost like dealing with a rebellious child or something like that. i'm going to put more rules on you to stop you from doing it. and then they figure out a way to get around it. they're extremely inventive. and so you just keep ratcheting and ratcheting and that's the dynamic. and i think, no, it's gonna require larger conversation amongst members to get people to say like, do we want to keep living this way? is this how we want to be legislators? or do we want to change the rules in a way. and we had a bit of that in the class of 74 when they came over and took over congress. they said we're not playing by these rules and they just had, you had enough of them making a cultural demand change. and the rules were changed, that they could do what they could do.

>> one of the values of my long commute mr. larson mentioned is a lot of time to read. i read our purpose report, i thought it was thoughtful. chapter four was specific bridge building, it's you spoke to this dynamic part of the division you see in congress not driven by division in the communities. had this crazy experience this last fall, two things happening with a series of attacks on religious institutions. the islamic to the ground. the church got vandalized all within the span of three weeks. in the spirit of something good coming out, we saw an interface alliance spring up. everyone can say it was a great

event. someone came up to me and said it was powerful. but if we would do it right, it would not be a 90 minute exercise, it would be an ongoing basis. out of curiosity, -- a month later, i visited a ymca in my district thinking they would talk to me about my bill because gymnasiums are losing money. that is not what they wanted to talk about. it's what you see in washington, d.c. is showing up. so we have arguments of fights breaking out over picking red or blue. we've hired a consultant training our staff and we will host its bridge building discussions to get people to talk to each other and listen to each other rather than have the jerry springer show show up in our ymca. any federal support for that? i said not really. at least not currently.

it's the report acknowledges we do support this sort of civic infrastructure investment through the national endowment for democracy, but that support is to other countries to strengthen democracy in other countries. and so i see absolutely see value in in this. in fact vice chair timmons and i, we have 10 democrats and 10 republicans on a bill to maybe not create a trust, but set up a pilot program that could accept private philanthropy. and so do this grant making to local organizations. i think the question that most commonly comes up is to how do you measure one? how do you measure success and why is this a innately federal obligation? right. you know, you mentioned that there's philanthropists that are supporting this endeavor already. as i've spoken with colleagues on the floor and said, hey, do you want to sign on to this? probably the most common question i get is why is this something the federal government ought to do?

so, can you respond to both of those? sorry for the long wind up, but i wanted to give you a sense of like i actually do think you're really on to something because we're seeing it in our communities. >> no, absolutely. we are seeing it all over and i want to lift up your bill. i think it is the civics bridges civic bridges act. i think it's very important, so happy to lend my voice in support of it whatever appropriate points. but in brief, three really important points. i will admit as our commission conversations started, i was a skeptic about the trust for civic infrastructure for the reason you just articulated, should the federal government do this, should it be what we do at a local level? i changed my view basically for a number of reasons. the first is recognizing our practice of the infrastructure democracy of other countries came at a time historically when we were really building a strong

defense against the challenge of communism. we have to be honest that at this point in time, the greatest challenge for democracy on the globe's right now is our weakening democracy. we need civic strength here at home. we need it as a matter of defending democracy for the globe. in that regard, same motivation leading to the national investments in the past pertain here at home. the challenge is the question of if you think the federal government should be involved, you worry if it will become partisan, in terms of the investments. in that regard, a way to avoid that problem is to focus on a project of seeking to match other investments local communities are defining. it's there should be a broad set of principles for the kinds of investments, not a kind of the

print of hears everything everybody must do, because local communities need to provide definition to give the diversity and flexibility defining precisely what the infrastructure should look like. there might be some of the broad design principles congress might be interested in and matching grant program. one is the idea of civic infrastructure ensuring self-government is operational. what does it mean exactly? we expect with more investment in civic infrastructure, we see higher trust, higher volunteerism, and more effective community problem-solving. those are measurable things. we have existing data approaches to measure them. one of the things the trust should do is improve the set of indicators being used to measure whether or not self-government is operational at the local level. the second design principle is for all. self-government for all. another challenge is insofar as

the civic infrastructure, investment has historically been -- referring to the colonial period, massachusetts required investment in school. philanthropists and so forth. we have a situation where well resourced communities are able to invest in lower tax bases are not in the same sort of way. so there is a need for congress investment to elicit investment in those communities where the issue of support is more challenged. it is important it be about drawing out philanthropic dollars and ensuring community foundations are fully activated across the whole of their community. and what congress can also assist in is helping building bridges across regional lines, a major challenge for people trying to support investments in this space. the last design principle is connectedness. another version of bridge building.

for decades, we have measured increases in residential ideological polarization, worsening dynamics of hyper segregation for low income communities of color, and decreasing experiences of loneliness and across those groups. we see data points showing up and also things like mass shootings and so forth. it is connected to a lot of big stuff in our society. just as we can measure the way those things have been worsened, reversing those dynamics would be indicators of success for investment of civic infrastructure around that design principle. >> that is great. >> i will throw out another big idea and get your feedback. one of the biggest challenges is right here. technology, interconnectedness, our inability to interact with one another.

we often talk about whether the hyper partisanship in congress is a congress problem or society problem. probably a little bit of both. one of the biggest challenges is our inability to i guess digest information. you get a lot of information that previously humans would not get because it was weeded out before it got that far. now you have things posted on social media anonymously just by crazy people. how do we grow past the challenges technology interconnectedness are creating? >> i'm happy to speak to that. i think your question gets to the deepest issues we are all facing. the question all of these

suggestions relate to, we are facing a crisis of representation of the activity and practice of representation. it is not a crisis of any particular individual making. it is a crisis that at the end of the day has been finally driven all the way home i the invention of social media. i just want to be clear about why and how, and why your committee is so important. we all know the federalist papers, the federalist 10. the argument was the design of the constitution among other things, it's job was to mitigate the problem of factions. it is supposed to mitigate by being delivered in the federalist 10. we only teach one part of the answer. we teach the part of the answer that it is about representative government, the notion you don't have direct moxie, you have representatives who are going to filter and synthesize opinion

from around the country. but there was a second part to madison's answer and it was literally that the breadth of the country being a broad republic would make it hard for people with extreme views to find each other and coordinate. okay, so geographic dispersal was literally a pillar of the original design. so facebook knocked that pillar out from under us and so all the work we are trying to do in terms of thinking about the future of congress is answering the question of how to have effective representation when we no longer have the pillar of geographic dispersal supporting the information ecosystem that supports healthy deliberation. so yes, you need rules, changes. okay, in order to improve the process of deliberation, recognizing that circumstantial chains. yes, we need a bigger house to be connected to the whole of the country and yes, we need investment in civic infrastructure that helps people navigate a completely changed

information ecosystem. we need all of these things in order to have a healthy congress. >> yeah, i mean, i guess the quick tip would be just members should get off twitter. but no, it's it's a long standing problem that, you know, elites in the country have always had a greater voice in the years of congress. i mean this is political science in the 40s that complaints that -- complains the problem of pluralism is that it always, this chorus always sings with an upper class tone. it's embedded in the system, some people are better connected, some people are gonna have the means to get here and communicate, etc. but certainly technology has exasperated it. since the 70's, we have seen a massive uptick in the number of interest groups, not-for-profit

trade in washington, d.c. see you guys are getting hit from a million directions with a lot of voices. interestingly enough, most of them are very self-interested voices that their views don't necessarily jive with those of the public. but hearing that stuff, you will pull your brain toads those issues and solutions, so how do you counteract it? it is not easy. you will still have people beating their way to your front doors and trying to do fundraisers and stuff like that. so we have to think about new tools for helping you guys better get a sense of the communities and what their views are. one of the interesting experiments being done was a social scientist was working on something called voice of the people, where he put together deep focus groups, postal reform and other stuff, of regular americans, and they would come

up with solutions about how to get something done. they were coming up with solutions that never got a voice on the hill. you have been stuck in the position of going back to districts, doing a town hall, but it will hijack those. interest groups will send people's to create a twitter moment or youtube moment. it is a tough position. i don't know if there are technological to separate the elite noise and get a sense of the average community other than the shoe leather you put in. >> addressing your question, as well. it is a crucially important question. social media has done a lot of good things in connecting a lot of people, and a lot of bad things in connecting other people. the business incentives of social media of course are to drive what gets the most clicks, what's the most emotional and

that's the stuff that people want to read, which is how terrible the other side is. there's a lot of confirmation bias. when you look at studies like why do people share stuff on social media? it's because it makes them feel good. it makes them feel like they're right. they've got it all figured out and it reinforces the kind of emotional charge that they get by hating on the people that they like to hate on essentially and that is a real problem. but a lot of these trends of division started before social media. they started with cable news, talk radio before social media took over. i looked at some studies, it is really older americans who are most victimized by fake news, because they have not grown up

in this environment of social media. facebook and all of that, where they can more easily distinguish it. and they are most set in their views and likely to believe the worst things about the other side. a lot of it is really coming from political leadership. it is a reinforcing dynamic, because political leaders say what my angry followers are saying, i should amplify it. as the expression goes, twitter is not the real world. it is a sample of people who are the most engaged in politics. one thing that gives me some hope is social media is everywhere throughout western democracies in the world. not every country that has social media is as polarized and divided as the u.s. it make me think there is something distinct about the

united states. i think the same thing is the endless demonization of the other side coming from leadership. and political elites and media elites. it filters down, most people get their opinions from them. also, the geographical sorting a lot of the polarization is people live in communities that are very solidly are or d. when you are surrounded by like-minded people, you become more extreme. when people on the others are faraway and distant, they become scarier and easier to demagogue and fear monger about who they really are. some of the bridge building is important. people are more polarized in real life than they are on social media, which is something i don't think we appreciate.

i think social media amplifies a lot of what is happening. it is an amplifier, not a root cause of a lot of the division. and it's true, people's attention spans are shorter, but the belief in conspiracy, an interesting paper recently said conspiracy theories haven't increased over time, it has just consolidated more on a few that become more amplified. so the lack of people's understanding of policy, political scientists always said americans don't know anything about politics, american people are so dumb, right? you know, but like, you know, that's not really fair because most people know what they need to know from shortcuts, and they depend on political leaders to represent them and help them figure out what they know and when political leaders don't do

that responsibly, it is very hard for people who really depend on leadership. leadership matters. >> go ahead. >> these are all good questions, and i'm enjoying listening. representative cole and representative duval have a bill history and civics. it is not being taught the way it should be within our school systems. some do it better than others. across this nation. the lack of civic understanding and responsibility, which is critical for a republic, is not taught. between that and financial literacy, congress has loathed to mandate educational instruction on the states, that is a responsibility on the state. especially in this day and age,

bombarded with information, it is hard to distinguish the difference between the two. frankly, anyone can produce a scientist or economist, or something that supports their point of view, and there really isn't a nation that has been grounded in its civic responsibility. there is another notion and idea to go along with it what australia does for the 100% voting. having voting as a requirement. making sure civic instruction to get out of high school you understand how that works and how we apply that. >> i will strike an optimistic note on the technological side. technology has definitely

created some of these challenges. but ultimately is a tool. kind of does what we tell it. there are some technology platforms that by tweaking the rules, you can strive towards consensus. i think taiwan is a social platform the taiwanese government uses to drive towards some of these things. consensus on even fraud issues. but the point about trust in government, one of the things we have been looking at, one factor that can drive it, psychic distance, how close you feel to it is how close you trust it. the public trust local government within states, more than federal and so on. by creating distance technology, you don't have to go to your county clerk, or meet in person with a representative. you can feed that distrust, but we see the opposite taking place. to create a good customer experience for the public, that goes a long way.

even a digital customer experience. so we have seen this high correlation between the customer experience of government services and public trust in government. if we have the mindset shift everyone is describing, we can use the technological tools to build the trust we are looking for. >> i feel like this was well worth waiting three years for the hearing. i want to thank our witnesses for their testimony and our committee members who were able to attend. i want to thank our staff for pulling together another hearing with outstanding witnesses and acknowledge the armed services committee for letting us go out in their room. all members will have five legislative days to submit additional written questions to the chair, which we forwarded to the witnesses for the response. please respond as promptly as you are able. all members will have five legislative days to submit a

strenuous materials to the record. with that, the hearing is adjourned.

>> thank you again, appreciate you guys.

to pass climate legislation.