WASHINGTON - The Committee on House Administration Subcommittee on Modernization and Innovation held a hearing titled, "The Future of Constituent Engagement with Congress."

Witnesses:

• Dr. Michael Neblo, The Ohio State University Institute for Democratic Engagement and Accountability Director

• Ms. Aubrey Wilson, PopVox Foundation Director of Global Initiatives

• Dr. Beth Simone Noveck, Chief AI Strategist for the State of New Jersey

• Mr. Ken Ward, House Digital Services Director

In case you missed it, here are the top takeaways:

1. How can we use AI to Engage with Constituents?

Chair Stephanie Bice (OK-05): How do you build a platform that would be useful as an AI tool? For example, using a chatbot that could actually give responses that are going to be accurate and/or make sense. Are you looking at building some sort of customized LLM to actually interact with the House website? But secondly, how could you ensure that the responses that are being given are going to be customized to each office? Because, for example, Ms. Torres and I may have a different perspective on an issue. Can you talk a little bit about how you might do that?

Dr. Beth Simone Noveck: Thank you for the question. I think one of the things that we've done in New Jersey, first of all, and that we've done through our work building tools for other states as well, is to start with internal facing chat bots. So I think it's really important to recognize that these tools are extremely good for synthesizing information. And that's what's made it possible to do things like train an AI tool on a specific corpus of documents. So that would mean a member could. And it's something, by the way, that together with PopVox, the AI for impact program, built the first and tested the first chatbot for a Member, where we loaded it with all of that Member's position statements, bill drafts, etc. Then the tools are getting much better at restricting responses only to what is in that corpus of knowledge. So that's one way to avoid the hallucination problem number one. Number two, internal facing tools. So that what you're doing is giving staff a tool that they can use to quickly give answers to people. So in New Jersey, for example, we're not using chatbots to answer constituent calls. You're not getting a machine. What you're getting is a human who in turn has a good lookup tool on their end that's allowing them to synthesize a lot of information. So I think the best place to start is with those tools for the people answering the phone to make their jobs easier, but the tools are allowing us to get better, especially when you train them to restrict their answers to a specific corpus of knowledge. That's also what's allowed us in New Jersey to bring down the time it takes to answer a call from 40 minutes to now, three minutes, and modernize all of our call centers using some of these practices. 

Rep. Mike Carey (OH-15): We all know that the public trust in Congress is much lower than we would like it to be, and that continues to be a cause of concern. But I was struck by the survey finding that 70% of respondents are willing to engage more directly with elected officials on important issues. Now, to me, that's a positive sign. You mentioned deliberative town halls as an effective form of two way engagement. At this time, could you talk maybe a little bit more how those might work? 

Dr. Michael Neblo: Sure, thank you for the opportunity. The real difference, there are a few differences in deliberative town halls. One of them is that, as if we were doing a survey, we try to get a real random sample of the entire constituency in affirmatively and personally invite them. It turns out that it can seem like there's a contradiction. Citizens saying they don't think Members care what they think and yet, they want to engage. The distinction is that when the Member affirmatively reaches out and says, "No, really, I want to hear what you have to say. How does Tuesday at seven sound?", the citizen says, "Oh, okay, they're one of the good ones." It's very, very fragile, very, very easy to to get them to believe that you do care. And that's where the apathy, frustration difference is really important. So affirmatively inviting a very broad sample, and the broad sample also tremendously alters the dynamics. Your average constituent does not want to yell at you. Your average constituent hasn't even necessarily made up his or her mind on the issue. They're not there to necessarily give you a piece of their mind. They want to hear what you have to say before making up their mind, which is why this interactive dialogue is so valuable. You get to hear from them about their concerns, their values, their questions, but they actually want to hear from you too, right? So we do a survey beforehand, these are real field experiments, so there's also a control group that we survey people attend. And then there's a survey, usually about two weeks later, of everybody. Again, the forums are online, on a secure platform. We're building a bespoke platform that's very, very easy to use. We'll be linked to the 14 most spoken languages in the United States. My grandfather was illiterate. So, you know, we have oral versions. We have real time captioning for the hearing impaired. So we're very serious about trying to really - any, any enfranchised citizen should be able to talk to their Member of Congress. 

3. What Can We Learn from International Legislatures?

Chair Stephanie Bice (OK-15): Ms. Wilson, I want to direct this to you. You've worked with legislatures around the world. What lessons from global experiments with AI do you think that Congress is uniquely positioned to maybe adopt?

Ms. Aubrey Wilson: Thank you so much for these questions. I will start by saying that our work with international legislatures has actually been extremely eye-opening experience, especially as a Congressional staffer. I think that I took for granted the incredibly robust IT infrastructure and all of the benefits of that that this body has. And I think that that's in itself a lesson to learn from with a lot of the legislatures that we work with. The way that they're implementing AI is to rapidly modernize their internal processes in the practice of just digitizing documents, making data accessible, getting up-to-date websites, things that we really do take for granted, I think as a U.S. Congress. But that really, I think, showcases that the fact that the U.S. Congress already has such a strong IT foundation lets you kind of build on top of that. So while other countries are using AI to kind of build that foundation, we actually have the ability to experiment and to be the people who design the future of constituent engagement. So I would say that that's kind of the first element. The second element is one of the biggest kind of difference makers with international institutions that have been able to kind of move more agilely is having internal processes that allow them to test and experiment and adopt new tools. And a lot of that comes back down to kind of your internal authorization and security protocols. And with that having kind of a tiered system has really helped kind of expedite the ability for new tools to be tested that are low risk and be more quickly adopted so that then they can be implemented and staff and Members can start benefiting from them.