System Update: HOW OUR TECHNOPHOBIC CONGRESS CAN FINALLY GET WITH THE TIMES.

• Author: Gedye, Grace
• Position: Cover story

Chuck Schumer, one of the most powerful people in Washington, uses a flip phone. The kind of phone with a tiny screen and real buttons, designed for making actual phone calls, not writing emails. But then, the Senate minority leader rarely emails, telling the New York Times a few years ago that he sends about one every four months. In case manufacturers stop making his favorite flip phone, Schumer has stockpiled ten of them.

Schumer's practically a techie compared to Lindsey Graham, though. The chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee told NBC's Meet the Press in 2015, "I don't email ... I've never sent one." The Luddite tendencies extend to other members of Congress. When Senator Richard Shelby needs to write to his staff, he favors handwritten notes. "I've been here a while; I'm a little older than y'all," he told Politico, by way of justification. When Paul Ryan paid a visit in 2014 to Jim Sensenbrenner, who at the time was a senior member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, he found the congressman tapping out letters on an IBM Selectric II.

These old-fashioned habits may be charming coming from your grandparents, but your grandparents aren't charged with legislating on cryptocurrency, regulating autonomous vehicles, or protecting consumers from data breaches. Members' technical naivete goes beyond their choice in phones and onto the floor of Congress. When experts testified before Congress last May about the promise of quantum computing--which could radically accelerate research into everything from pharmaceuticals to machine learning to carbon sequestration--Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger admitted, halfjokingly, to the panel, "I can understand about 50 percent of the things you say."

When Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified before Congress last December, Texas Representative Ted Poe attempted to grill him on how the company tracks users' location. "I have an iPhone," said Poe, who has since retired. "If I move from here and go over there and sit with my Democrat friends ... does Google track my movement?" Increasingly exasperated at what seemed like Pichai's evasions, Poe repeatedly asked, "Yes or no?" But, of course, Apple, not Google, manufactures iPhones, and whether or not the company was tracking Poe wasn't a yes-or-no question. It would depend on which apps he had downloaded, whether his GPS was enabled, and so on. Nailing down how Google collects user data has important policy implications, but by bungling some basic facts about the technology Poe let Pichai off the hook.

This lack of tech savvy causes problems well beyond wrangling with the Facebooks and Googles of the world, for the simple reason that tech is baked into all policy areas. Regulators worry that software installed in medical devices could be hacked. Lawyers and activists are concerned about bias in the algorithms used to assess bail. Legislators who want to fight climate change need to know which renewable energy sources are ready for commercialization. But the dearth of expertise hamstrings Congress throughout the entire policy process--from deciding which issues to prioritize, to drafting bills, to exercising oversight.

Of course, nobody expects members of Congress to be experts on everything--that's why they have staff. The problem is that congressional staffers don't always know much more than their bosses. They, too, need ad vice from disinterested experts to walk them through the intricacies of technical issues--and for the most part, they're not getting it. While a recent survey found that 81 percent of senior staffers thought that access to "high-quality, nonpartisan, policy expertise within the legislative branch" was "very important," only 24 percent were "very satisfied" with the current situation.

This wasn't always the case. From the 1970s through the mid-'90S, Congress had its own think tank to help it legislate on technical issues: the Office of Technology Assessment. But the OTA was killed off in 1995 by then House Speaker Newt Gingrich as part of his assault on government expertise. Ever since, Congress has struggled to navigate science and technology issues, with occasionally disastrous results.

The good news is that efforts to resurrect the agency are under way, with the newly Democratic-controlled House pushing to secure funding for it this year. Even some Republicans and conservative think tanks have warmed to the idea. Getting smart on tech is actually something this Congress could do. In the meantime, another government agency, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), is growing its tech team, too.

But the OTA, GAO, or any other three-letter government agency will only fix half the problem of Congress's tech brain drain. The other half has to do with the overall congressional workforce. The Gingrich revolution not only wiped out the OTA; it also decimated congressional staff ranks, and their numbers have never fully recovered. That's a major reason why Congress has become so dysfunctional. Staffers shape what information their bosses get, take meetings with interest groups, and participate in important negotiations. But congressional staff these days tend to be young, low-paid, and thinly spread--and those with technology backgrounds are as uncommon as, well, flip phones. To deal with an ever more technologically complex world, Congress needs a critical mass of staffers who bring science and tech experience to the table.

The idea that Congress should have its own dedicated corps of STEM nerds goes back to the 1960s. At the time, Washington was pouring more and more research money into everything from supersonic transport to the...