It may surprise many that members and aides don’t arrive on the Hill fully informed and fluent across the complex spectra of foreign policy matters. But leaders of congressional education programs, which vary widely, agree learning opportunities are essential for members and their staff. Some programs focus solely on one or the other; others cater to both. Some feature overseas travel; others host breakfasts in the District. To a tee, they stress pedagogical benefits and across-the-aisle relationship nurturing.
“Trust building is fundamental to making good policy and relationships on the floor,” says Patricia Moore Nicholas, program officer in Carnegie Corporation’s International Program. “We want to impart the knowledge that these individuals need to do their jobs, center them within the expert community, and get those bipartisan relationships going.”
In an ever-changing world, members and staff require continuing ed, as do doctors and lawyers, according to Dan Glickman, who recently stepped down after a decade as Aspen Institute Congressional Program executive director. (The institute recently named former congressman Charlie Dent as his replacement.) “They make policy decisions that impact every person’s life in this country,” he says. “They need to be up to date on the most current information possible, or they can’t do a very good job.”
Alexandra Bell, the outgoing senior policy director at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation (CACNP), and colleagues may sit for hours with congressional staff, who want to dive deep into policy weeds on nuclear subjects, like Iran sanctions. “We sometimes refer to ourselves as an external hard drive that offices can make use of,” says Bell, who was just named deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance.
Programs like Aspen’s, in which U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) has participated, allow members to analyze the most-pressing national issues. “Knowledge is power,” the 13-term congresswoman says. “They also give us a chance to build strong bipartisan and bicameral relationships, which we can then use to get things done.”
Project heads, among them former congressional staffers and members, have told the Corporation’s Nicholas not to believe the divisive tone she sees in the media. Lawmakers are rolling up their sleeves and having civil, constructive conversations behind closed doors. Much legislation is the result of months and months — even years — of quiet, painstaking work. “We weren’t sure collaboration could be happening,” she says, and by design, the Corporation avoids any form of politicking. But Nicholas was surprised to see bills emerge that bore apparent traces of the success that Republicans and Democrats were making by working together to find solutions outside the limelight.
"We want to impart the knowledge that these individuals need to do their jobs, center them within the expert community, and get those bipartisan relationships going."
Patricia Moore Nicholas, Carnegie Corporation of New York
When thinking pragmatically, participants also reflect increasingly on Congress’s evolving role in foreign policy decision-making. Congress has abdicated many foreign policy domains to the executive branch, experts say, because it’s convenient politically to blame presidents if something goes wrong. But the Constitution bestows many powers, including military force authorization, squarely on congressional shoulders.
“Congress has been happy not to have to make those hard decisions,” Bell explained in early January. “Some of the choices the Trump administration has made and some of the president’s behavior have opened a conversation on the Hill that had not been there.” Members and staffers who feel comfortable navigating foreign policy complexities are most empowered to effect change, she adds.
The issue is personal for Glickman, a former nine-term congressman representing Kansas. “Congress is the Article I institution. Over the years — whether by intention or neglect — it no longer seems to be the Article I institution when it comes to foreign policy and national security issues,” he says. “This area is really ripe for further development.”
The executive branch hasn’t stolen anything here, but Congress has found it safer to “rail about an issue but not necessarily have any responsibility to deal with it. That’s harmful to our democracy,” Glickman says. “It’s really dangerous to give that kind of carte blanche authority to an executive.”
Hyper-Collegiality
It’s amazing what can happen when you’ve simply got to come up with a consensus-based solution
As a Hill staffer in 2013, Monica Pham had focused on domestic issues until her then-boss, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), tasked her with being lead staffer on global health issues, including HIV/AIDS. Having trained in neuroscience and law, Pham applied and was admitted to the Wilson Center's Foreign Policy Fellowship Program in 2015.
“It wasn’t enough for me to be well-versed in just domestic issues. I needed to learn more about what was happening around the globe in order to be a well-rounded staffer,” she says. “I am a naturally curious person and am consistently engaged in learning, so any opportunity to be taught by working experts was one that I jumped on.”
Pham, who went on to work for then-Senator Kamala Harris and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, now works as senior director at the biotechnology company Biogen. In the Wilson program, she was surprised to find a lot of common ground with colleagues from across the aisle. Having worked for “extremely progressive members” up to that point in her career, she discovered that, fundamentally, her conservative colleagues wanted the same things for the country, albeit via different approaches.
“I still consider it one of the most eye-opening experiences from my time on Capitol Hill, given how much I learned and how much more open I became to welcoming new ideas and new viewpoints,” she says. “This is something that I think is sorely needed in Washington these days given the hyperpartisanship. We all need to be more open to new ideas, listening, and forging more common ground. That’s the only way we can move forward as a country.”
That’s part of the point of the program, says Aaron Jones, director of congressional relations at the Wilson Center, who was himself a participant when he was a Hill staffer. A Mexico trip that was part of his fellowship forged “lifelong friendships on both sides of the aisle,” he says.
When staffers of differing ideological stripes put their heads together on the same team during simulations, results can be very different from the bickering one might see on social media or cable news. “The hawks become doves, and the doves become hawks,” Jones says. “It’s amazing when you put them in a situation where they’ve got to come to a consensus-based solution.”
Sarah Miller, then legislative director for Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), didn’t overlap in the program with Pham, but she had a similar experience. Miller, who handled the congressman’s foreign affairs, intelligence, appropriations, and trade policy, was impressed that the Foreign Policy Fellowship Program included people from both the House and Senate — and from both sides of the aisle. She participated in spring 2018, and remains engaged as an active alumna.
“It is hard to get Hill staffers to disconnect from their office for an extended period of time, but everyone in the program was completely engaged, because the Wilson Center program provided qualified and well-versed speakers during each session,” she says.
Her favorite session in the program was about Arctic policy. “It is a topic not frequently discussed on Capitol Hill, but I was able to understand the policy issues and implications much better after the session and take some of this information back to my former boss,” she says.
Like Pham, Miller found the program’s capacity to make connections across the aisle indispensable.
“Working for a member of Congress on the Foreign Affairs Committee, it was easy to see things through just one side of an issue and predominantly work with the committee staff in my party,” she says. “The Wilson Center program allowed me to hear from colleagues across the aisle in an off-the-record setting, so no one was nervous to speak up about their views.” Bipartisan teams worked on miniprojects and presentations between sessions. “This time allowed for staffers to understand and learn about issues from another perspective and made working together on Capitol Hill on legislation a more seamless process,” she says.
In 2017, Sen. Thomas Carper (D-DE) spoke in Congress about the value of an Aspen Institute seminar in Tanzania in which he participated “with Democrats and Republicans, House and Senate,” per the Congressional Record from June 19.
In addition to the program’s bipartisan appeal, Carper said he learned a lot about Africa. A proverb stood out in his mind: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” The senator took away from that proverb that Congress too must go together, “and we will be glad we did.”
Program leaders agree that bipartisan cooperation is essential as Congress rethinks, or reclaims, essential powers. Glickman thinks many would be surprised how many members don’t know one another. When he served, “back almost in prehistoric times,” members of Congress worked five days a week in Washington. They might spend not even half of that amount of time in D.C. these days, devoting most of their time to campaign fundraising. That makes educational trips — almost pilgrimages — such essential camaraderie forgers. “My Aspen staff doesn’t like when I use the word ‘trip,’ thinking that means a vacation,” Glickman says. “They’re conferences.”
On trips the Wilson Center organizes, participants develop “tight bonds,” and the most personal conversations develop on the bus between formal itinerary events, says Aaron Jones, director of congressional relations. Members act as they do in the office when, say, meeting a Swedish minister. But on the bus, foreign affairs and armed services committee members, who don’t tend to cross paths, compare notes. “We know people work on legislation together long after the trip is over,” Jones says.
Jones served eight years in the office of U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY) and was part of the second Wilson cohort as a staffer in 2013. A year later, he was running the program. All of the projects strive for bipartisanship in their programs, but Wilson in particular hasn’t struggled to attract as many participants from the right as the left side of the aisle. But Jones has had to “disabuse” many Republican offices over the years about supposed partisanship at Wilson. “I have worked very hard to remove that patina,” he says, noting a third of the center’s funding is federal. “We’ve got the Appropriations Committee looking over our shoulder. We’re not going to mess with that,” he says. “Everybody says they’re nonpartisan, but we actually have to be.”
Most programs report that it is easier to recruit men than women. Exceptions are Brookings and Wilson, which report more women participants, and Partnership for a Secure America (PSA). All are trying to increase racial diversity. “We get a cross-section of diversity as it exists on the Hill,” says Curtis Silvers, executive director of PSA.
When he was searching for a job on the Hill, where he is now a House Judiciary Committee professional staffer, Will Emmons kept hearing staffers rave about Wilson’s foreign policy fellowship, which exceeded his expectations. “This is a rigorous and highly relevant experience that was well worth the wait,” he says.
Other programs meet members and staff where they are — say a Rayburn or Cannon House Office Building conference room — but Wilson prefers to host staff for its Friday evening presentations and simulations. Then they can’t excuse themselves early and return to the office. “If they’re a mile away, we get to hold onto them a little bit,” Jones says. “That has generally worked for us.”
Amid the pandemic, the programs have adapted to virtual meetings, which both collapse and expand space. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) used to host weekly breakfasts and lunches at Hill restaurants, which could draw up to two dozen staffers. In the move online, it created nimbler “telebriefs.”
“Washington tends to be very insular. It’s a lot of people in the beltway talking to people inside the beltway,” says Sam Brannen, director of the risk and foresight group at CSIS, who recently joined the Department of Defense. Brannen and Louis Lauter, vice president for congressional and government affairs who was also named to a Department of Defense role, realized virtual programs easily accommodate speakers from anywhere. A recent geoeconomics discussion enlisted experts in Singapore and California.
“We triangulated three time zones thanks to people getting up early and staying up late,” Brannen says. “We took away, ‘Isn’t it great to have a non-American voice in the room?’” Hybrid events are likely in CSIS’s post-pandemic future, they say, and Brannen suspects that it won’t be thought weird or disruptive going foward to have meetings with some people in person and others via video. “I think the flexibility and networking element is here to stay,” he says.
Brookings too has found flexibility online, but attendance is higher at live events. “Sometimes an hour-and-a-half Zoom call at the end of the week is the last thing anybody wants,” Anderson says. He anticipates a hybrid future, one embracing both in-person and virtual approaches. “I wouldn’t recommend having this program if we were going to do this virtually for the next 10 years,” Glickman says. “You just need to have this physical contact, plus you need to visit places where action is occurring.”
Anderson is optimistic about the future. “I think it has the potential to be a major period of reform, kind of similar to the post-Watergate era,” he says. There were ethics reforms, but given the proximity to the Vietnam War, “It was a big era of reform in foreign relations and other areas of national security,” he adds.
Going forward, measuring the success of congressional education programs can be a challenge. When Bell served in the Peace Corps, she had to fill out a quarterly questionnaire asking how many people she affected that quarter. “Even at a very young age, I found the question to be sort of strange,” she says. “There were 11,000 people living in the general area, so I just started writing ‘11,000.’ No one ever questioned it.” She sees CACNP’s work as a similar long-term investment.
She and colleagues have seen members of Congress talk on C-SPAN about what they learned at a CACNP dinner the prior evening. Bell also takes the “huge flurry of condemnation” from both sides of the aisle when the United States withdrew in November from the relatively obscure Open Skies Treaty, allowing unarmed aerial surveillance flights, as a reflection of the success of programs like hers.
After an Aspen trip to Tanzania with nearly two dozen members — including the head of the Peace Corps — Congress oversaw the largest increase in Peace Corps funding ever in a single year. “I think most people would say that was a direct result of that particular conference,” Glickman says.
“Much day-to-day congressional work never results in legislation,” says Silvers, of PSA. “It’s an imprecise measure at best.” But at a recent PSA event, an alumnus who isn’t currently on the Hill shared that he used a technique, which he learned in the program, amid a stalled policy negotiation. “It broke the logjam, and they completed it,” Silvers says.
Many congressional education program participants and alumni strive to bring their problem-solving skills to bear on fundamental questions about the mission and responsibilities of Congress. They also find that overseas conferences provide fertile ground for a better understanding of their colleagues across the aisle when stateside, and they are increasingly reconsidering Congress’s and the nation’s place in the world. Furthermore, the pandemic has been a painful reminder that many of the world’s biggest problems traverse national borders. Likewise, policymakers who must help us navigate and solve those crises cannot afford to isolate international affairs from domestic policies and vice versa.
And in the present moment, as partisan tensions run high stateside, we as a nation cannot afford for our politicians to be so divided. It is more vital than ever to convene and nurture settings for bipartisan relationships to develop. That is the surest path forward to getting the hard work done that will unify us as a nation and help us, collectively, envision and achieve a better future.
Adapting to COVID
Some work-arounds are becoming advantages in the ways grantees are operating their projects
Corporation-supported congressional education program leaders agree. Training and relationship building work best in person, and that’s particularly true when it comes to benefits to members and staffers across the aisle — from breaking bread together to serving on the same team in a simulation. At the same time, as they told the Carnegie Reporter, several have noticed promising results in their newly adapted programs tailored to Zoom and other online platforms.
Curtis Silvers, executive director of Partnership for a Secure America, has found that COVID has made programming much more difficult, “especially when you’re trying to build long-term relationships.” In 2020, the program broke participants out into smaller groups online, to increase personal interaction. It also found “fun steps” to mitigate online challenges, including sending meal vouchers to participants, and distributing snacks and a sparkling beverage during a program graduation. “These are a lot more work for us, however,” Silvers says.
He too has found more efficiency online in certain areas, particularly lectures, which aren’t otherwise interactive. Post-COVID lectures may continue online, and they’ll be recorded. “People whose schedules have to be adjusted can view it later,” he says. There may also be hybrid events in the program’s future. “We’re using this period now to find some alternatives that we might do online to simulate some of the international components,” he says.
Alexandra Bell, formerly of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and a new member of the Biden administration, saw a loss of camaraderie when the center had to move its programs online, pointing to the usefulness of connections forged by people in the same room. But she too has found benefits to going digital.
“We’ve been able to put on rapid-response briefings. Something happens in the news, like the India-China dust up over the summer. That’s a very-complicated problem that a staffer may not have half a day to read up on,” she says. “But they can certainly make a 45-minute Zoom briefing, where we bring in an expert to talk them through, ‘Here are the key things that you should know right now at this point.’” She thinks those rapid-response Zoom briefings will continue post-COVID.
At the Center for Strategic and International Studies, web-based telebriefs, forged during COVID, have also exceeded expectations, says Louis Lauter (recently named to a post in the Biden administration) and Sam Brannen. “In my experience, within the virtual format, the hardest thing is to get participation from the audience, but I think in this group, it’s been pretty good, because it’s this self-selecting group that really is excited to engage,” Brannen says.
“There’s no question you lose the hallway conversations that happen in a physical format. So much of Washington business gets done on the margins literally, and so it’s tough,” Brannen says.
Online programming has been “a little more awkward to get those conversations happening,” says Scott Anderson, of Brookings. But he too sees advantages to virtual programming. “In the online format, you have such a better ability to bring in really interesting and excellent outside people, because you don’t have to fly them to Washington. You don’t put them up in a hotel. They don’t have to take 48 hours out of their schedule to come talk to you,” he says. “They only have to come for 90 minutes. That’s a huge advantage.” Going forward, Anderson hopes to have hybrid events in addition 1to in-person ones, when it’s safe to do so, perhaps alternating in-person and online programs.
Menachem Wecker, a former education reporter at U.S. News & World Report, is a freelance reporter.
