Washington, D.C. - It’s a brisk late November afternoon in an 8th-floor office overlooking downtown Washington’s Thomas Circle. The White House is an easy five block walk; the Hart Senate Office Building, a 15-minute cab ride. Outside, the streets are filled with people bustling about, protected against the chill in dark suits and authoritative shoes, moving between power centers with the confidence of essential players in the workings of the American government. Here, in his office, Tim Hwang is walking me through a piece of software that is already shaking the ground beneath their feet, even if they’ve yet to feel the rumbling.
Hwang is the CEO of a four-year-old firm called FiscalNote, which makes a kind of technology that is quickly raising questions about who—or what—is still an essential player in Washington. Hwang, in sharp-edged glasses and a blue blazer, taps on his MacBook Air, and what appears on the screen is a full assessment of the legislative record of Senator Orrin Hatch, the 83-year-old Utah Republican.
Hatch’s varied career is the longest ever for a Senate Republican; he’s been a video-game critic and an advocate for the “Ground Zero Mosque,” and in his four decades on Capitol Hill he has championed hundreds of bills and taken thousands of votes both obscure and important. Figuring out Orrin Hatch isn’t a trivial job, even for a seasoned D.C. hand. But FiscalNote has all that data distilled, analyzed and weaponized. The display tells us that Hatch is formidable not just for his seniority, but because he’s in the top 3 percent of all legislators when it comes to effectiveness—or at least he was, before he announced his impending retirement. When he throws his weight behind a bill, it’s likely to become law. What’s more, his effectiveness varies: It’s high when the topic is health, but drops some on tech issues.
The software drills deeper. One immediate surprise it delivers is that the lawmaker most similar to Hatch’s interests and patterns is Louisiana’s John Kennedy, a 66-year-old Republican who’s been on Capitol Hill all of 11 months. Then, with a few more clicks, it’s crunching the woeful record of a shall-remain-nameless member of Congress who occupies the bottom third of legislators in the house, and who, the software dryly notes, is “fairly ineffective as a primary co-sponsor.”
There’s more. Much more. Hwang’s system analyzes interests, not just people, and quickly summarizes everything knowable about who is trying to pass what kind of rules about the most obscure topic I can come up with on the spot: “dairy.” A couple more clicks after that, and we’re looking at a summarized version of a bill tackling cybersecurity that the software has considered and rendered a judgment on, when it comes to the probability that it will become law. We’re not talking a rough estimate. There’s a decimal: 78.1 percent.
This kind of data-crunching might sound hopelessly wonky, a kind of baseball-stats-geek approach to Washington. But if you’ve spent years attempting to make sense of the Washington information ecosystem—which can often feel like a swirling mass of partially baked ideas, misunderstandings and half-truths—the effect is mesmerizing. FiscalNote takes a morass of documents and history and conventional wisdom and distills it into a precise serving of understanding, the kind on which decisions are made. Here, the software is telling us that if we’re looking for an up-and-coming Republican to get on board a health bill Hatch is pushing, Kennedy’s a good bet. Want it bipartisan? The system will suggest likely Democratic backers, too.
If you’re an aide, one of the people walking on the street outside from a power breakfast to a meeting on the Hill, there’s another way to think about what FiscalNote is doing: It’s doing your job. Washington, D.C., is a notoriously imprecise place, trading on memory and relationships and gut. And a huge amount of what people do in the city, the way they make their living, is guiding others through the morass. The things FiscalNote is doing—sifting through murky bills and votes and patterns of behavior—is precisely why you hire an experienced staffer. Without much in the way of human involvement, says Hwang, the system can “enable the top attorney at McDonald’s to immediately understand every single law and regulation pertaining to their industry.”
That’s tremendous power, the kind that threatens to rattle the bedrock of the capital. If there’s one central cog in the modern city of Washington, with its bustle of influence and steakhouses and exorbitant home prices, it’s the in-the-know lobbyist or staffer or government-affairs liaison. There are thousands of them here, paid, often quite well, for that know-how. This machine handily replaces much of that, and without running up huge bills at Brasserie Beck.
Could the swamp really be automated? The question feels almost alien. At the moment, if “automation” and “Washington” are used in the same sentence, it’s usually to decry how behind the curve policymakers are on a transformative economic issue like industrial robots or self-driving cars. In its own workings, Washington seems almost a uniquely un-automatable place, a constitutionally erected edifice of institutions and people driven by irreplaceable experience and relationships.
Hwang is demonstrating that’s not true. FiscalNote isn’t some pie-in-the-sky, grad-school project. The firm employs 160 people today, with 1,300 clients and upward of $28 million in backing from hugely prominent tech industry investors (Mark Cuban, Jerry Yang, Steve Case). Toyota and the National Institutes of Health use FiscalNote to keep tabs on the political realm. Hwang’s also got a healthy client roster among world governments, which need to understand D.C. for their own reasons: FiscalNote is used by the foreign ministries of Canada, Mexico and South Korea. He has a competitor, a bootstrapped firm called Quorum in nearby Dupont Circle, that specializes in giving clients the ability to respond instantaneously to what the political world’s talking about right now.
For all the anxiety about modern robots, Washington has been automating itself for generations. Harry Truman is believed to have been the first president to regularly use the autopen, a machine that reproduces a human signature on documents. Since then, it has become routine for government officials to use the autopen on everyday transactions and promotional materials, and Barack Obama made history in 2011 when he signed a bill into law with it for the first time.
FiscalNote sits at the front edge of a change that goes far beyond the lobbying world. “Washington” writ large is a dense entanglement of politics, rulemaking, legal work, journalism and jurisprudence—all fields that have seen significant, if often quiet, incursions from machines. Washington’s law firms, a linchpin of the local economy, have already automated much of their paralegal work. Journalism, another mainstay here, is more of a challenge to automate, but that’s happening too: The Washington Post experimented with machine-written coverage during the 2016 Rio Olympics, and is now trying to do the same thing with House, Senate and gubernatorial races in every state in the Union. Stranger still are attempts to inject automation into the judicial branch, inspired by those who argue that computers are better and fairer at some kinds of decision-making jobs than human beings in black robes.
As quickly as technological change is coming to Washington, the profound questions it raises about both ethics and economics—what is “democracy” if it has machines at its core? whither the United States’ capital city if there are far fewer people left?—are lagging behind. It might be time for us to take them seriously. “We’re still going to need a lot of them,” Hwang says of those professionals hustling down the streets outside, “but I don’t think we’re going to need them at the scale at which Washington operates today.” When it comes to the nation’s capital, he says, “People vastly, vastly underestimate what automation is going to do.”
Hwang is the CEO of a four-year-old firm called FiscalNote, which makes a kind of technology that is quickly raising questions about who—or what—is still an essential player in Washington. Hwang, in sharp-edged glasses and a blue blazer, taps on his MacBook Air, and what appears on the screen is a full assessment of the legislative record of Senator Orrin Hatch, the 83-year-old Utah Republican.
Hatch’s varied career is the longest ever for a Senate Republican; he’s been a video-game critic and an advocate for the “Ground Zero Mosque,” and in his four decades on Capitol Hill he has championed hundreds of bills and taken thousands of votes both obscure and important. Figuring out Orrin Hatch isn’t a trivial job, even for a seasoned D.C. hand. But FiscalNote has all that data distilled, analyzed and weaponized. The display tells us that Hatch is formidable not just for his seniority, but because he’s in the top 3 percent of all legislators when it comes to effectiveness—or at least he was, before he announced his impending retirement. When he throws his weight behind a bill, it’s likely to become law. What’s more, his effectiveness varies: It’s high when the topic is health, but drops some on tech issues.The software drills deeper. One immediate surprise it delivers is that the lawmaker most similar to Hatch’s interests and patterns is Louisiana’s John Kennedy, a 66-year-old Republican who’s been on Capitol Hill all of 11 months. Then, with a few more clicks, it’s crunching the woeful record of a shall-remain-nameless member of Congress who occupies the bottom third of legislators in the house, and who, the software dryly notes, is “fairly ineffective as a primary co-sponsor.”
There’s more. Much more. Hwang’s system analyzes interests, not just people, and quickly summarizes everything knowable about who is trying to pass what kind of rules about the most obscure topic I can come up with on the spot: “dairy.” A couple more clicks after that, and we’re looking at a summarized version of a bill tackling cybersecurity that the software has considered and rendered a judgment on, when it comes to the probability that it will become law. We’re not talking a rough estimate. There’s a decimal: 78.1 percent.
This kind of data-crunching might sound hopelessly wonky, a kind of baseball-stats-geek approach to Washington. But if you’ve spent years attempting to make sense of the Washington information ecosystem—which can often feel like a swirling mass of partially baked ideas, misunderstandings and half-truths—the effect is mesmerizing. FiscalNote takes a morass of documents and history and conventional wisdom and distills it into a precise serving of understanding, the kind on which decisions are made. Here, the software is telling us that if we’re looking for an up-and-coming Republican to get on board a health bill Hatch is pushing, Kennedy’s a good bet. Want it bipartisan? The system will suggest likely Democratic backers, too.
If you’re an aide, one of the people walking on the street outside from a power breakfast to a meeting on the Hill, there’s another way to think about what FiscalNote is doing: It’s doing your job. Washington, D.C., is a notoriously imprecise place, trading on memory and relationships and gut. And a huge amount of what people do in the city, the way they make their living, is guiding others through the morass. The things FiscalNote is doing—sifting through murky bills and votes and patterns of behavior—is precisely why you hire an experienced staffer. Without much in the way of human involvement, says Hwang, the system can “enable the top attorney at McDonald’s to immediately understand every single law and regulation pertaining to their industry.”
That’s tremendous power, the kind that threatens to rattle the bedrock of the capital. If there’s one central cog in the modern city of Washington, with its bustle of influence and steakhouses and exorbitant home prices, it’s the in-the-know lobbyist or staffer or government-affairs liaison. There are thousands of them here, paid, often quite well, for that know-how. This machine handily replaces much of that, and without running up huge bills at Brasserie Beck.
Could the swamp really be automated? The question feels almost alien. At the moment, if “automation” and “Washington” are used in the same sentence, it’s usually to decry how behind the curve policymakers are on a transformative economic issue like industrial robots or self-driving cars. In its own workings, Washington seems almost a uniquely un-automatable place, a constitutionally erected edifice of institutions and people driven by irreplaceable experience and relationships.
Hwang is demonstrating that’s not true. FiscalNote isn’t some pie-in-the-sky, grad-school project. The firm employs 160 people today, with 1,300 clients and upward of $28 million in backing from hugely prominent tech industry investors (Mark Cuban, Jerry Yang, Steve Case). Toyota and the National Institutes of Health use FiscalNote to keep tabs on the political realm. Hwang’s also got a healthy client roster among world governments, which need to understand D.C. for their own reasons: FiscalNote is used by the foreign ministries of Canada, Mexico and South Korea. He has a competitor, a bootstrapped firm called Quorum in nearby Dupont Circle, that specializes in giving clients the ability to respond instantaneously to what the political world’s talking about right now.
For all the anxiety about modern robots, Washington has been automating itself for generations. Harry Truman is believed to have been the first president to regularly use the autopen, a machine that reproduces a human signature on documents. Since then, it has become routine for government officials to use the autopen on everyday transactions and promotional materials, and Barack Obama made history in 2011 when he signed a bill into law with it for the first time.
FiscalNote sits at the front edge of a change that goes far beyond the lobbying world. “Washington” writ large is a dense entanglement of politics, rulemaking, legal work, journalism and jurisprudence—all fields that have seen significant, if often quiet, incursions from machines. Washington’s law firms, a linchpin of the local economy, have already automated much of their paralegal work. Journalism, another mainstay here, is more of a challenge to automate, but that’s happening too: The Washington Post experimented with machine-written coverage during the 2016 Rio Olympics, and is now trying to do the same thing with House, Senate and gubernatorial races in every state in the Union. Stranger still are attempts to inject automation into the judicial branch, inspired by those who argue that computers are better and fairer at some kinds of decision-making jobs than human beings in black robes.
As quickly as technological change is coming to Washington, the profound questions it raises about both ethics and economics—what is “democracy” if it has machines at its core? whither the United States’ capital city if there are far fewer people left?—are lagging behind. It might be time for us to take them seriously. “We’re still going to need a lot of them,” Hwang says of those professionals hustling down the streets outside, “but I don’t think we’re going to need them at the scale at which Washington operates today.” When it comes to the nation’s capital, he says, “People vastly, vastly underestimate what automation is going to do.”
by Nancy Scola, Politico | Read more:
Image: André Chung 
