Transcripts For CSPAN3 Hearing On Congressional Mailing Standards 20240713

Is brought to you by your local cable or satellite provider. Cspan is the unfiltered view of government. Next a look at the congressional mailing rules during a hearing of the House Modernization Committee and experts will talk about how social media is going to affect the way congresspeople communicate with their constituents. This is late yesterday and is about an hour. All right. The meeting is coming to order and without notice the chair is allowed to call this meeting to a conclusion at any time. I now recognize myself for five minutes for an opening statement. Happy halloween, everybody. I am dressed as americas most maligned super hero congress man and able to fly across the country in six hours on alaskan airlines. We were thinking about titling this hearing frankingstein, and how the houses ghoul ishmaeling standards have haunted the members for decades, but i suppose the unspooky title for record, and like most of issues that fall into this committees mandating and the work of the congressional mailing standards is very inside baseball. To most people frank is a name or a hot dog, but the reality is that for members of congress, the congressional frank is actually fundamental to how we communicate with our constituents and every time we respond to constituents or send newsletters about the upcoming town hall, we use the frank. It is no surprise with the rise of the social media, congress is seeing a decline of the use of the frank, and last year 58,000 was sent on the frank mail and now members spend 27,000, and obviously variation of the district and the member, but no getting around the fact that social media has had a terrific impact on how congress communicates with the constituents. Ten years ago, no Congress Member had a digital staff, and now almost every member does. So in ways of communicating, today is very important, and if history is any indicator, communication platforms will rapidly evolve and congress has to evolve so members can communicate as quickly as they can with the members they represent. I know that there are members who have put time into this to look at it and analyze the cost, and the frank is coming with geographic constraints that the social media doesnt. Some social media platforms comes with the advertising that frank doesnt, so communicating is easier today, but it is also more complicated. I am looking forward to what the witnesses have to say about this, and it is important for us to understand the frank and the modern trends and how members communicate with the constituents. And this committee is focused on making it better to better serve the american people, and this is wholly in that mission. So i would like to invite tom graves to offer opening remarks and any halloween jokes that hes ha. You stole them all, mr. Chairman. I can only go with the last name. And so, you know, as you said, mr. Chairman, there are more ways than ever to talk with our constituents back home, and with the click of a mouse, we can talk to the district to solve problems and hear ideas and opinions from those who we represent. The communication of those we represent is one of the most important part of our jobs as we are representatives for them, but the current franking process as you described is the one that most dont know about or understand feels light years behind the speed of communications and the opportunities that we have today. We all want to quickly and effectively communicate and get information back to our constituents. Throughout the year, we have heard from many of our colleagues in this committee who have ideas for reforming congress including this process of communication. So on this topic, many of the freshmen members have stepped up to voice their opinions, and they have questioned the way that we do things, and i am grateful because they have experienced the rules and the regulations and the procedures for the first time and thankfully very quick to highlight ways to improve or the suggestions they have for us to allow quickly and more effectively and so i look forward to the hearing, and what bet wear toy start out halloween than on a committee on franking. Mr. Chairman. And so today we will have five panels, and we have representative susan davis, the chair of the Congressional Commission of house mailing standards and rodney davis who before on this commission, he served on the congressional member of mailing standards in the 115th congress, and both are here to share their knowledge for reforming the franking process. Once they complete their five minutes of testimony, we will move on. Ms. Davis, you are recognized for five minutes. And mr. Chairman, and mr. Graves you understand that we get confused, and so thank you for pointing that out. And members of the select committee and this is a historic day of what is the houses first frankingstein hearing. I want to thank the Committee Ranking members rodney davis, and the new Ranking Member brian steel and all of whom play a key role in the future of Mass Communications. The houses current franking rules have certainly spooked the members, staff and constituents over the years. But the good news is that we can make the whole franking process both less scary and more effective. Contrary to what many staff believe, the house franking manual was not created to frighten people, but rather with the Good Intention of preventing the members to misusing taxpayer funds for personal, political or commercial use. And however, after nearly two decades of working with those rules, we have seen that the rule rules have the unintended side effect of slowing things down, and keep members from writing as they speak when they conduct the official business. Our commission took a fresh look at the rules and came up with a new approach. It has two main components that go hand in hand, Greater Transparency, and a simpler set of rules. Greater public transparency ensures greater member accountability, and we can achieve transparency easily by making the frank advisory opinions available online, and the houses website can link to ours as it currently does for the disclosure reports and the gift and the travel filings, and the Legal Defense and Fund Disclosures and statements of disbursements. And i would state again, because you all know this, the whole idea is to have members franking communications be available to their constituents and the public like other reports, which i have noted, which really does discourage undue advantage of the franking privilege. Combined with transparency, a clearer set of rules will prevent the misuse of taxpayer funds. I look forward to sharing the list of rules that we are developing with you and all of our colleagues soon, and staffs are pulling those together and actually have come up with quite a bit of consensus. As we are working on the new package at franking, we have some requests of the Modernization Committee relating to Digital Communications. My written testimony will go into greater detail, but i will highlight a few asks now. First, we recommend consolidat consolidating Digital Communications and putting it under our district. Right now we are only charged with reviewing the postal mail, but in practice, we review all communications, and second, the Modernization Committee should evaluate the appropriateness, and again, i think that this is for you all to look at of allowing the members the option to transfer their social media followers from Campaign Accounts to their official accounts from time to time or perhaps just one time and also consider allowing the campaign web sites to link to official sites, and this is going eliminate the confusion from the constituents while maintaining appropriate separation. And third, we need to use the technology to upgrade the district mail reports which are selfreported and done by hand. Perhaps we could fix it with a unique bar code. I will wrap up now, because i know that the votes and the pumpkins are fast approaching. Thank you, again. It is a pleasure to work with all of you and your staff as well. We look forward to next set of recommendations. Thank you. Thank you, chair davis. And now, representative rodney davis, you are now recognized for five minutes. Thank you, mr. Chairman, and thank you to the vice chair and also to the chair of the Franking Commission, my good friend ms. Davis. I will tell you that it is an honor to speak from this side of the dias, and i know that i will go back around to that side as soon as i am done, be tow but able to talk about something that folks in and around washington dont want to take the time to delve into, but it is important to communicating with the constituents. Last congress, i was the chair of the Franking Commission, and i have to commend my colleague ms. Davis, because we were able to Work Together to implement some new processes that have made the frank easier, but we are not done yet. I do want to say that the folks at work at the House Administration and taking the franking requests, and my staffers tim and elizabeth do a great job in making sure that they work with the member offices to implement many of the arcane standards that we put in place, but susan and i and the teams were able to make the process easier, and we required 100 online submission, and no more paper. We are in the 21st century, and this the thing that we should do. We digitized everything which makes the process for turning that approval or the disapproval around faster, and it is something that i know was a goal of both of us on the commission. We have to do more. Theres finally, i believe an appetite on both sides to roll up our sleeves as chair davis said and get our teams together and come up with some solutions, and i believe we are doing that. I am happy that leader mccarthy appointed our colleague congressman brian style a freshman and former staffer like many of us, who has had to use the frank. He is doing the a great job of getting involved and finding out how we can even expend on what susan and i did with our teams last year. We have recent bipartisan negotiation, and as she said, opportunities for substantial changes to the franking rules. And we have three main buckets that we are focusing on making improvements on. The speed of approval. We want to get the approvals turned around faster. Transparency. And also developing regulations that work for the 21st century. Let me outline a few of the reasons that the reforms are in such need. First, the existing regulations are burdensome and very bureaucratic. We are looking at pictures and counting the number of times that the letter i has been used. And staff precedents have not been updated. So many of the rules that we follow and the approval that our teams follow have been set by precedent between the staff for decades. We, as members, we ought to codify the precedents into rules and regulations so that we dont have any changes when we have changes on the committee and leadership. That is something that i am looking forward to looking to in this committee and also with brian and susan on. It is hard to follow the rules when they are not written down and not transparent, and i think that we should also revisit when franking is needed. And there are many times that you should have an automatic approval process and what are the consequences if the members and the staff dont follow the rules . For example, does it make sense that a facebook ad going to 500 people at the cost of 20 is subject to the same review as a physical mailer going to 100,000 people at the cost of 50,000 taxpayer dollars . Furthermore, the expectation of privacy is not the same as it was ten years ago and as a result we support increased transparency for franking. I believe with Greater Transparency is a check and balance with the constituents and the american taxpayer to replace the role of the staff here in d. C. Measuring pictures and is. Also, remember that members need to send the communications to their constituents, and reasonable regulations are necessary to prevent abuse, and finally that the regulations and the guidance need to be transparent, accessible and easy to understand. Beyond the basic premises, i encourage the members to think bold, and also, new ideas are always welcomed. I will take this opportunity to yield 29 seconds back to you, mr. Chairman. Thank you. Thank you, both. You both stuck the landing and thank you for the testimony, and chairwoman davis, it is a busy morning for you, and thank you for taking time to come. We invite up the next panel of witnesses to take their seats. Perhaps as they do, i will start providing introductions just in the interest of time. Our first witness is dr. Matthew glassman a senior fellow at the Government Affairs at georgetown university. And prior he worked at the Congressional Service for ten years and the portfolio includes congressional operations and franking, and Judicial Administration Agency Design and congressional history. And he was detailed to the House Appropriations for the staff, and the legislative Branch Subcommittee for 2010 to 2011. And next is professor josh tucker who is a professor of the nyu social media and Political Participation Laboratory and codirector of the nyu social center for political and social behavior, and he emphasizes public voting and the use of social media in facilitating all forms of political participation. And he is a coeditor of the monkey cage which is a blog that appears in the washington post. Our final host is josh billigire who for the past 15 years has worked with the Congressional Offices to streamline operations and develop new technologies. And before he worked fulltime with the operational offices, he worked with startups and he was ceo of fireside that he cofounded. The witnesses are reminded that the oral testimony is limited to five minutes and without objection, the written statements will be part of the record. Dr. Glassman, you are recognized for five minutes to give a oral presentation of your testimony. Chairman, and members of the select committee, thank you for allowing know testify. Im Matt Glassman and senior fellow at georgetown university. My portfolio includes congressional committees including the franking, and in my written testimony, i provide a historical and contextual overview of the franking system, and the rational, and the longstanding criticisms of it, and the way congress utilizes franking. Communication is a Building Block of democracy and information about the legislative activity cannot flow from members to the constituents, and member would be less able to make judgments about the members. Likewise, if the constituents can not communicate the preferences to members, congressional action is less likely to reflect public opinion. Indeed, for most of the 19th century, the frank mail could not only be sent by the members, but also to congress by constituents. The legislative franking privilege is dating to 18th century england and existed in the United States continuously since the First Congress except for in the 1870s when it was temporarily abolished. This has reforms made in the late 1980 and including the familiar restrictions a ban on using private money to produce frank mail material, and limits on the overall frank expenditures, and prelek shun bans on the mass mailing. In the last 20 years the house regulation of email and other Electronic Communications have been built on top of the existing franking regulations. Two longstanding criticisms have been lodged against it. First it is wasteful, and second, unfair advantage to incumbents in the congressional election. The department sent a mass mailing at a total cost of 2. 6 million at a average cost of 35 cents apiece. These are quite small with historical standards. The postage costs have dropped by over 80 , and the contemporary costs are driven by an increasingly smaller number of offices offices. In 2004, 85 sense, but by 2018, only 16 did. So the overall cost of mass mailings were accrued by five high spending offices who amass ed almost one quart of their budget on the mailings. So members spend much more on mass mailings than others in the districts. And overall, the cost of mailings are higher in election years than nonelection years. Throughout history, technology has altered the communications and triggered regulatory changes. For example, the rise of the computergenerated mailing le lists, expanded the capability of exposure to reach constituents. The ritz of the Electronic Communications in the 21st century is once again changing the way that members communicate. Email is the most popular, and other accounts will have account for minimal or no cost for the member or the constituent, so this is calling into question the Cost Effective of the mailing system. While members send almost 78 million pieces of mass mail in 2018, they sent over 1. 2 billion pieces of mass communication. These Mass Communications cost on average less than one half of one cent per piece, making them 70 times less expensive than traditional postal mass mailings. As a public policy, the privilege has five dimensions. Whos entitled to frank, what can be franked, how much can be sent, where it can be sent, and when it can be sent. In addition, policy choices exist regarding transparency and how costs will be accounted and paid for. Congress has used a variety of Regulatory Frameworks to answer these questions in the past. The contemporary system is a product of the late 20th century. Quite different from regulatory structures that preceded it and increasingly out of sync with the rapidly changing constituent communication environment of the 21st century. Thank you for having me here today, and i look forward to your questions. Thank you for your testimony, and dr. Tucker, youre now recognized for five minutes. Chairman, vice chairman, and members of the select committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today. My name is joshua tucker, and im a professor of politics at New York University and a codirector for social media and politics. In my testimony today, id like to highlight the following four points. First, despite recent controversies around various social media platforms, there appears to have been no appreciable drop in social media usage among u. S. Adults. Therefore, social media remain viable platforms for reaching large portions of the u. S. Population. Second, theres a great deal of variation in how social media tools can be used to communicate with the public, both due to platform afordances or the setup of the platforms themselves, as well as to the preferences of different members of congress. Third, there are crucial distinctions between communicating with constituents through the Postal Service and social media platforms. In particular, members have much less control over how their messages are delivered and to whom as well as less of an ability to monitor in retrospect how well these processes are working. Fourth, ongoing efforts to make social media Data Available for outside research and analysis should therefore be an important concern for members of congress as access to social media data will be necessary to assess the functioning and impact of congressional communication efforts. It is to these third and fourth points i will address my remaining remarks. I begin with the consequences of the platforms business models. First, social media platforms generate rchb by selling advertisements, which means messages from members of congress viewed by the public may appear alongside ads over which members have no control. Consider this equivalent to a franking policy that allows companies to insert advertisements into mail sent by congress. Second, as the chair mentioned, posts on social media are not geographically constrained. It is practically impossible to ensure that messages posted on social media platforms will only be seen by ones constituents. This has two important implications. One is that Congressional Communications will no longer be written only with ones constituents in mind. This means that all members will have more of an incentive to think about national as opposed to local audiences. The other is that it will be impossible to ensure equality in terms of exposure to messages when the medium is social media. Its always going to be the case that members with larger numbers of followers will enjoy greater reach for their messages than those with fewer followers. Third, most social media platforms deliver content through proprietary algorithms. This is the secret sauce of social media. This means that for platforms that display content in any manner other than a simple chronological approach, no one outside of the Company Knows how the company determines what viewers will actually see. This in turn means that members of congress are unable to control how or even if their content is seen and that they will be at the mercy of any algorithmic changes the platforms decide to make in the future. While individual users can receive information about exposures to their posts, the ability of outside observers to assess these patterns at scale is often severely constrained, thus making it difficult for congress to retrospectively member its Communication Strategies. It is against this backdrop that i turn to the importance of data access for assessing the impact of social media on politics. A disturbingly large portion of the data necessary to investigate the internets effect on politics and democracy are locked inside social media companies. And these firms are generally reluctant to share that data for outside analysis. One reason for this reluctance is the costs, legal, financial, and reputational, of unauthorized disclosure that are so high. Another reason is an emerging Digital Privacy movement, which is both necessary and salutary given the real dangers to privacy in the new digital environment, but unfortunately, outside research has become Collateral Damage in this battle between government regulators, privacy advocates, and the platforms. As we think through this set of issues, its important to realize that a prohibition on making social media Data Available for outside analysis does not mean that these data will be not mined for insights. Rather, it means that only employees of the platforms will be mining the data and learning the answer to the most pressing questions as to social medias impact on democracy and other social phenomenon. We therefore need to move beyond the normatively pleasing paradigm of should the platforms respect the privacy of their users, with which of course we all agree in the abstract to one that fully embraces the tradeoffs inherent between legitimate privacy concerns on the one hand and the social good that can come from making data accessible to outside researchers on the other hand. Whether they are academics trying to study the impact of social media on democracy or Congressional Offices trying to reach their constituents. It is into this debate that any sort of attempt to monitor the existence and impact of congressional communication through social media will undoubtedly fall. Thank you for your time, and i look forward to your questions. Thank you for your testimony. And youre now recognized for five minutes. Thank you, chairman and members of the committee for the opportunity to speak today. Im the ceo of fire side, one of the leading providers of crm technologies in congress. Our Company Provides the software that allows over 150 members to manage all of the incoming letters and emails from constituents and quickly turn around thoughtful, relevant responses. As ceo of this company, ive had a front row seat to understand how Congressional Offices operate, how they manage their mail, and how they decide when and how to communicate with their constituents. Ive had countless conversations with members, chiefs of staff, legislative directors, and correspondents and have gained a thorough understanding of the practical challenges related to franking. Theres no doubt that weve seen an explosion of communications sent to members of congress over the last 10 to 15 years. Our software has allowed Congressional Offices to take these messages in, categorize, understand, and more efficiently respond to constituents, but the rules that govern outbound communication with constituents have not fundamentally changed over the last few decades. Based on my experience, i recommend three overarching rule changes for franking. Recommendation number one, streamline the franking approval process. Mr. Chairman, imagine that you have just finished watching the state of the address and want to send an email highlighting some of the policies. Your staff drafts up an email and send it to the Franking Commission for approval. The staff may have to wait for days, if not weeks for approval. The franking approval process often takes far too long. Congress should not have an approval process that makes something no longer newsworthy by the time theyre able to send it out. My strong recommendation is that congress find an approval process that takes less than 24 hours for content to be sent out by email. I dont have all the solutions, but im confident that with some changes to the approval process and the Technology Used to facilitate the approval process, congress can meet this challenge. My second recommendation is allow offices to send multiple followup responses to a constituent without franking approval. If 500 people in a Congressional District contact their member of congress urging them to cosponsor legislation, the office can respond to those 500 people without needing franking approval. However, after those responses are sent, if the member then decides to cosponsor that piece of legislation, their staff will have to get approval from franking to send an update to those 500 people, letting them know they cosponsored the bill. And if that piece of legislation passes the house of representatives, the office will again have to get approval from the Franking Commission to send out an email letting those 500 people know that the legislation has passed. Its my strong recommendation that regardless of how many people contact a Congressional Office on a policy issue or a piece of legislation, the office should have the ability to send multiple followup emails to the interested constituents without needing franking approval. Finally, my third recommendation is create a task force to study how franking rules should be updated in light of emerging technologies. I predict within the next three years, members of congress will have access to two new Technology Innovations that will dramatically improve their ability to communicate with constituents. My company has been experimenting with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to help offices manage the onslaught of Inbound Communications from constituents. And we are also introducing technology that will be available to members of Congress Next year to allow staff to automate the process of writing responses to constituents. This automatic letter writing technology can be programmed to follow all the franking rules. So when a member uses these automatic letter writing tools, we can ensure the content of the letter is kept within the boundaries of the franking guidelines and therefore we wont need any of these letters to get prior franking approval. The point is this. The franking rules that were created decades ago need to be updated to account for the way congress operates now. But congress should also be creating policies that not only apply today but will work for emerging technologies in the future. Thank you again for the opportunity to testify in my ideas to change congressional mailing standards. Thank you for your testimony, each of you. Well now go to members of the committee to ask questions. Ill start and recognize myself for five minutes to ask questions. Im not sure who to direct this to. Im curious what we can learn from how the senate does this, both with regard to social media. My understanding, i may be wrong about this, but i know on the house side, we have multiple versions of ourself. We have official derek and unofficial derek. My understanding is they may do things differently in the senate. I wanted to get your reaction to that. I also know they have a hard cap on the amount members can spend on franking. Curious if you have a reaction to whether thats a good thing, bad thing. I can certainly speak to the hard cap. The hard cap in the senate is on the amount of postal mass mail that members can send. Its 50,000 in postage per year. Its probably the driving reason that the senate dramatically decreased its franking postal costs since it was instituted in 1994. Very few senators send mass postal mailings. I think in 2018, 11 senators sent one or more mass mailings. A similar cap might reduce costs in the house quite significantly without affecting too many members. You can imagine a cap of say, 100,000 on total costs of mass mailing. That would save 8. 5 million off of last year, reducing costs by 30 and threequarters of members wouldnt even be affected by it. I cant say im familiar with the senates rules on what they do regarding social media accounts, so i cant answer the question directly. What i can state is ive been sending students in to interview members of congress, both on the house side and senate side for the last six years to ask the people in their office who are responsible for drafting the social media posts and responsible for overseeing the process, and what has continually amazed me is the variation we see across offices and the ways in which there are so many different approaches to get across different offices. So it surprised me. I havent sort of seen best practices emerging where people are converging around one set of practices. One question that always comes up is finding different accounts of the members of congress. Theres the official count. There can be the Campaign Account. There can also be the personal account. So this actually also causes difficulties on the back end if youre trying to monitor how members of congress are communicating with constituents. You have to try to track down all these different accounts. It also causes, as was mentioned by representative davis, this causes a problem if you have a lot of followers who are on one of your social media accounts, trying to figure out how to get them to the other social media account. And given the fact there are different Monitoring Systems set up for official counts versus nonofficial accounts, it seems like a fairly inefficient way from the members perspective and those of us trying to understand how members are using these communication tools. I wanted to get a sense from you whether there are things being done, technology being used, Communication Strategies being used in the private sector that you think congress ought to take a crack at. Thank you for the question, mr. Chairman. I think probably like everyone else, im signed up for axios news alerts. When you go to axios, you can select the topics youre interested in and get emails based on that. I subscribe to political and technology. I dont care quite as much about health care or china. Those kind of practices can be utilized by members of congress as well. Allowing them to choose maybe Veterans Affairs or other topics theyre interested in and tailoring the content to that to keep them more engaged it a good practice. Do you know, is that allowed right now under our rules . Yes, in fact, i did a quit audit of all the members email signup forms. Only one member asks for those interests, but yes, youre allowed to ask constituents which items theyre interested in. The challenge is that, you know, when you tailor content for constituents, you wind up sending out a lot more content thats different and thats where the franking process becomes kind of a bottleneck for that. You spoke in your testimony to things that you thought ought to be changed. Which franking rules, in your view, continue to have some value, should be kept, should be updated . Yeah, i think speaking as a constituent, i would say i like all the common sense ones about not allowing members to endorse things or have a highly political speech. Those seem like common sense things. Again, the blackouts. I dont know what the pros and cons necessarily are of those. But i think those are all valuable things to keep in there. Terrific. Okay. With that, let me invite ms. Brooks. You have five minutes. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Thank you to those on the panel for coming today. When i first came to congress in 2013, it did baffle me that we could not migrate our campaign. It was the first time i had run for office, first time it created a Campaign Account. Those people that were following us that we had to educate them in very difficult ways. If my memory serves me correct, only at one time could we even inform them, you know, to go to the official account. Id like to talk about that a little bit more, dr. Tucker. What do you think are the pros and cons, quite frankly, of us migrating our campaign followers to the official count and vice versa . So i really dont see any cons. Essentially what youre solving is a friction problem. You have people who signed up who want to follow you and get information. Now you have another vehicle where youre going to be providing that information. This is a costly problem for the constituents in that theyre signed up to get information one way. Now the information is coming through another channel. So we know that the way people say youre talking about a twitter account, right. You could tweet to your followers, right, that you are switching accounts and they should sign up for this other account. But one of the things we know about twitter is that people dont see every single tweet that shows up in their feed. Theres a lot of different factors that focus into this, depending on how many people theyre following, depending on how often they log online. Its very, very easy for them to miss this. The way most people interact with twitter is not by going to peoples pages who theyre following and seeing what those people have tweeted recently, its by this news feed function, which is exactly what i was talking about with not knowing how the algorithm serves up this information. So it seems like if you had a process in place where people could migrate followers across these different lists, it would be only beneficial to constituents. Theres a larger question, right, which is the large herb issue of when we talk about people following you, if you want to try to have a situation where you have a way to communicate with constituents, social media is never going to be information thats limited to constituents. So you may have other people who choose to follow you who arent constituents, but of course your constituent, one of the key hallmarks of social media, is they can reshare your information and their followers can reshare the information as well. So if you pushed me for a pro to why you might want to keep these accounts separate, the only thing i would say is potentially for the members, you might have a Greater National following on your Campaign Account because you are trying to raise money outside of your district. Then youre trying to develop this kind of separate list of people who are in your district who might actually follow your official account. In practice, this is a time consuming effort that imposes costs on the members and imposes costs on the constituents and followers as well. Thank you very much. The task force, you recommended setting up a task force so we can continue to explore emerging technologies. Who would you have on the task force . There is qui there is quite a variety of expertise, particularly with respect to members of congress. Id probably echo a previous testimony from brad fitch of the Congressional Management Foundation who suggested having Communications Directors and press secretaries as people who are on the ground and using all of those technologies and have a firm grasp on the tasks and work flows theyre doing. Thats a great group of people to start with. Thank you. Ill yield back time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, mr. Chairman. Thank you to the panel. Let me just pose a question for all of you around social Media Advertising because i dont do the franking in our office, but i was just talking to rodney about it. It sounds like if you have an ad on social media, were going to review what youre saying and if the quantity is over a certain quantity is when we review it. Yet the real value to social media is who you can target. Which is what i do with my business on a daily basis. You can get an ad as specific as your spouse to say happy birthday, right. We know that because you can get that specific. I can pick suburban women who belong to unions and send a message that i could never do via mail. But thats a lot of value to being able to use that, yet no one is ever going to look at that. Can you address that issue, the difference . Thats where my bigger concern is. You can really start to use it in an official capacity thats awful campaignlike. So its important to understand that, again, this all varies across platforms. Im going to speak in a general level here. Whats important to understand, and i address this in the written testimony, is when members have access to social media for communications purposes, there are sort of two distinct ways you can do this. One is you can have whats called organic reach, which is you are posting things on social media and hopefully a lot of people have signed up to follow you and will share that information or will see that information. Then theres targeted advertising, which involves paying for ads. Again, some platforms you can do this, some you cant. What youre talking about is this kind of hyper ability thats now generating what people are calling excessive microtargeting here. You have companies, especially google and facebook, which now can give you these incredible, incredible sort of precision in where youre targeting the ads. These are two very different things. This is one of the advice that i give in the written testimony that i had. Anything that you do in terms of thinking about social media usage by members of congress, please be clear to sort of specify whether it is intended to apply to advertising, and we have all sorts of regulations around advertising by members of congress. Or whether its intended to apply to organic reach. And the interesting thing is, right, organic reach, and this is what i said in my remarks about it not being equal, different members of congress have different numbers of followers for lots of different reasons. Theres no way you can ensure that thats equal. Advertising you can put limits on how much members of congress can spend on these different types of advertising, if thats in the realm of what youre doing with advertising. But these are again, so these are very different types of approaches here. And with the organic, you cant necessarily target it the same way you can target ads. And i guess im trying to get to the specifics of the abuse via that advertising part. I agree on the post. Some people get it, some people dont. But you can be very, very specific to a point of really what we do in campaigns and no one is ever going to look at it under the current set of rules. So thats like the concern im trying to put out there. Right. So again, that goes back to the latter part of my testimony about the importance of ensuring data access to outside analysts. So this is the only way that were going to understand the political impact of social media, if outside analysts, people not working for the platforms themselves who are under ndas and have prepublication review with their companies, have access to this data to understand whats in that. I think there are efforts under way. Facebook has made an ads archive available that theyre trying to, you know, take steps forward on this. In terms of as youre thinking about reforming and thinking about congressional communication in the 21st century, i would, on both of these dimensions, its very important that you do what you can to make sure this data is made available for analysis, both by the government, so you can make correct policy, but also to people like myself, so that we can help you make correct policy by providing factual information and thorough information about whats happening in these regards. I have one comment as well. This goes back to, you know, kind of obsolete rules. The original rules say youre not allowed to collect data on constituents that identify whether theyre a republican or a democrat based on party affiliation, but its based on the communications you get from constituents and maybe surveys you send. You can very easily you can make a onequestion survey today to your constituents that says something like, do you support impeachment, and youre probably going to know exactly which Political Party is in that or with a few things. So, you know, the original intent of franking, i believe, was to not allow offices to overuse that information, but with all of the streams of Public Information now, its very easy for you to know that information about con stitstitu. The current framework as set up, the idea is that anything youre sending on the frank side or through official content is official representational content. Thats how they separate campaign items. I wouldnt shortchange how much you can target using the frank. Anyone who has a constituent relations Management Platform knows you can get someone who is this age, this gender who is sent two letters on gun control and can pretty easily do a 499 to them or something bigger. Thank you. Thank you, mr. Chair. Very interesting panel. Thank you, all, for your comments. What youre discussing with us is what i consider delving into the weeds. Really, thats what this select committee is here to do. My first question, we do share the goal of providing better experiences for members and making Member Communications with constituents even more effective and easier. The house isnt the easiest environment to operate in, right . So can you tell us about any roadblocks or difficulties you or other vendors run into that have prevented you from introducing some of the new features you introduced in your testimony . Absolutely. I would say that one of the unique aspects of congress, as im sure youve heard, is there are state actors, security trying to compromise our political process. So i believe for a long time, the house information resources has certainly had very restrictive guidelines around where data can be hosted, specifically constituent data, and you know, up until recently was very restrictive in terms of keeping that inside the house network, which restricts vendors from using things Like Cloud Services a lot of times to do analysis on data. From what i understand, theyve been doing a lot of work on that. Their number one priority has been enabling vendors like myself to access those types of resources. Im confident within the next year or two, well have the paths we need to leverage that, trying to give you a little example of where that winds up practically. When we did our research on Machine Learning, we partnered with a Machine Learning Consulting Group and took all the constituent mail from four offices and processed all that using modern Machine Learning, which is very cpu intensive. They asked us how many servers we had on the house. They said its probably going to take ten years to process all of that information. So we had to move all that to amazon, where theres specialized hardware to do that. And my understanding is that house information resources, the group that oversees all that, is making policies to allow us to do that eventually. How do you think some of the new technologies will be able to kind of move our communications into the 21st century . And were here to talk about franking rules and regulations. What franking rules and regs do you think could still hold up that new technology from being as effective as it could be . I believe its a great question, and i appreciate number one, ive met with a lot of the staff to kind of talk a lot about, you know, the challenges and hear their perspective on it. What ive heard is theres ambiguity on how these rules apply. Heres a couple instances. A lot of people have talked about having one of the franking rules is you cant send the same message to more than 500 people. Lets say you wanted to deploy a modern chat bot to your website, right. Constituents come a lot of times asking questions. A lot of times theyll send you a paper mail. A more efficient way to process that is have a little chat bot like a lot of companies have on your home page that says, what can i help you with . Well, im interested in case work. Great, heres the form to fill that out. But, you know, is that sl solicited . Is it unsolicited . If you send more than 500 of those same responses to people on the chat bot, does that fall into the franking guidelines . Thats why i recommend a task force to look at a lot of these things that offices have questions about and arent quite sure where that goes. Another area, if i can elaborate a little more, is that in the private sector, almost all of the communications are not big, monolithic emails you get from vendors. Theyre small reminders, notifications. Theyre looking at your interests and making small predictions and then saying, you know, you bought these certain products. Would you be interested in buying this other product . Or you watched these movies on netflix. Ma they make a prediction. Are you interested in seeing these other movies . As a member of congress, you could do the same thing for constituents. If somebody writes in about, you know, a military base in your district, you could also notify them, hey, did you know i voted on legislation that affects veterans as well, making a prediction that theyve been interested in some topics and they might be interested in other topics. When the franking model is people draft con tent, people approve content, then it gets sent out. In the private sector, that doesnt really exist. You have computers analyzing, deciding when to send messages, drafting the messages, and sending the messages. Those two are incompatible. Thats why there needs to be a big reevaluation of the process. I appreciate the panel. I appreciate your responses. Its interesting you mentioned kind of upselling new ideas and communications. I remember when i first started my first job. My upsell was, do you want fries with that . Clearly it works. I yield back. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks to all of you for being here with us today. I want to follow up a little bit on the same theme. Talk about other technologies and you talked about kind of some of the automated response or at least help to create responses. Talk a little bit about kind of concerns you might have with the personalization of those responses, and do we get to a place where its automatic responses versus really having a true conversation with our constituents. The personal side of it. I worry about how that could be lost. Thats an excellent question. I would say what technology can help you with is filter out so as a member of congress, kind of at your level, my understanding of members and what theyre looking for is when they look at all the information theyre getting from their constituents, they would like to do two things. Number one, they kind of want to know a global picture of how does all of their constituency feel . What percent of them support a particular bill . What percentage of them dont support it . And then after that, theyre also looking for personal stories for how people are affected. When members of Congress Make speeches before congress, they ur usual usually dont show a graphic. They say sally in my district was affected by this policy in this way. We try and make sure were using Machine Learning in a lot of ways to try and process that overall view and give you a good view of what constituents feel in your district but also giving your staff the ability to identify those important stories. As you know, probably a lot half of the communications that come to congress are all templated, and their constituent clicks on, yes, i support this measure, somewhere and you get a templated message. You dont need your staff to eyeball those. Thats where a machine can look at that and say, yes, well put that into the overall sentimentally. When somebody writes in saying, im having trouble with getting case work, im a vet, im not getting the support that i need, and that needs to be handed off to caseworkers, thats where you dont want that to get lost in the mix and you want to make those personal connections. So youre talking about kind of taking incoming information and being able to parse it out so its getting the right response or to the right person more quickly. Yes. If i may, ill give you a quick example. One, i recently visited one office, and they i was looking at their practices. I noticed they had turned off every single automation and every single efficiency measure within the system. I said, im very curious about why you did this. They said, well, we had on everybodys contact form, you usually have an option that says, yes, i would like a response from you, or no, i just want you to know my opinion. Its a common practice. If a constituent isnt expecting a response, you kind of skim that and close it out because theyre not really expecting a response. A veteran wrote in with suicidal notes, but click the i dont need a response and that kind of got lost in the process. So i think thats a unique aspect of congress. Every message has a lot of weight, and you need a process that can find all of those things, but the tension is that your staff cant continue to eyeball every single message. So thats why were looking at Machine Learning to try and find those very relevant messages in this sea of noise. You see that a lot on social media where, you know, if you go and post something, youre going to get a lot of very interesting responses and comments on that. Not a lot of them helpful. Then one of them that may reference, again, somebody seeking case work or somebody having some trouble in the district that you still want to get without having to look at every you know, its impossible to look at every single comment, every single retweet. But thats a good case for computers. Thanks. Dr. Tucker, i think you had some response too. Yeah, i just wanted to inject one word of caution in this, which is that we know that the users of any media, medium of communicating are going to be a biased sample of your constituents. So the people who have time to write hand letters to you, the people who have the means to get on the internet and send emails versus the people who sign up for social media platforms. And so i just think its very important for the members to keep that in mind, that as they go you know, many, many years, the only way you got communication was from letters. You have a good sense of which of your constituents are the kinds who are going to write letters, which are the ones that and that will allow you to interpret that through the lens of how representative is this sentiment that were getting off handwritten letters or typewritten letters. Now youre going to have members receiving communications from tons of different means. Youre going to have mail. Youre going to have phones. Youre going to have emails. Youre going to have automated emails. Then we saw that the average member of congress has six Different Social Media accounts. So thats six different types of platforms. I have some data about this in the report, but different people use these platforms at different rates. So this is like all the sudden now, theres lots of different biases. Okay, were hearing about this from comments on youtube. Is that representative of my constituents . I think that theres a danger that with these types of tools that will automate across lots of different platforms, youll get a sort of sense of false precision. Oh, it says 72 of the communications are in favor of this particular issue, but you dont know what that 72 is representing. So i just think thats a word of caution to think about that as we go forward. Also in a district like mine where theres a lot of rural areas and not necessarily good broadband access, those arent folks who can participate online as much. Their voices will be lost, more likely to send letters or may not be able to participate day to day on the social media side. Thank you very much. And i yield back, mr. Chairman. Ive just got one other thing i wanted to raise before we call it a day. I think one of the challenges members face is based on how we currently do things. You find yourself having to choose between doing more Proactive Communications with your constituents or paying your staff, right. I think about my first term as a freshman member. You know, when everyone was a new hire, i had more capacity in my budget so that i was able to do that sort of proactive outreach and keep even the most remote, rural parts of my district, keep folks up to date on what we were working on. As ive tried to retain these terrifically talented people, you know, that slice of our Office Budget has, you know, shrunk stupendously. Any thoughts on, as this committee deals with these issues, potential solutions to that . Should we look at taking that franking out of the mra, the members resource, the Office Budget, or do you have other ideas . Go ahead. So i have mixed feelings about a change like moving franking out of the mra. Im a big believer that we need to increase the resource available to members, particularly for staff, to pay them better and have more of them. Its vitally important for the legislative branch as a whole. Traditionally, franking costs werent in the mra. In the old days, the post office just ate the cost. And we never accounted for it. Then starting in the 50s, congress started reimbursing them just with a general pool of funds in the leg blanch appropriation bill. The reason it was changed was to try to reduce costs. Personally attaching these costs to members, making them choose, put a market value on franking. All the sudden if you had to choose between staff and franking, you might frank a lot less. If it was a common pool, you could draw with no repercussions. So consequently, moving the franking itself out of the mra would probably, if you just did that period, would lead to an explosion in frank mail. So i would probably suggest doing that in coupling it with a cap of some sort. I would encourage members to spend nothing on franking. That said, theres other costs to franking. One of the things about the mra, and we give it to members because we like the idea, believe in the idea that members should be able to represent their constituents as they see fit and arrange their offices as they see fit. On the other hand, theres certain things that every member spends money on. Everybody has an office. We dont charge you rent to be here. Then you just give it back. So things that are common costs, crm software, which runs tens of thousands of dollars a year, could easily be offboarded to a central fund. You wouldnt see people increases costs much. We could think of that as something that comes with the office. Freeing up money for almost another half a staffer at that point. I would just note that when you think about social media as a form of communications, those two conflicting goals actually staff or communications overlap. The cost of using social media to communicate with constituents is having the staff member who knows what theyre doing and who can oversee this, deal with the multiple platforms, craft strategy. So clearly thats one of, you know ive given you a lot of caveats about using social media as a communication strategy, but those are all caveats in terms of understanding the consequences of whats going to happen with it. It also offers tremendous promise for exactly this reason that youre talking about. So this organic content you can put out there on social media, these are things that have very low budget implications. In the sense of dealing with staff or not, what youre really looking for there is spending on staff who can help people manage that. One example, when i started working, interacting with offices a lot, say about ten years ago, the mail process was pretty specific. You had lcs who sorted the mail and las who drafted all the letters and stuff. Now it gradually migrated over time to lcs now drafting mail, and theres offices who now