When Victoria Houed applied to be a technology fellow on Capitol Hill in 2019, she had hoped to work on consumer protection. Instead, she was placed in the office of the Speaker of the House. 

“This was totally unexpected — not part of my plan at all,” she said. 

Houed’s one-year fellowship was funded by a nonprofit called TechCongress, which has placed 140 technology experts from the private and public sectors into congressional offices.

Now in its 11th year, TechCongress was founded by a former staffer, Travis Moore, who worked for a Democratic House member for six years. 

“I started TechCongress because I needed it when I was a staffer. I found myself increasingly underwater as tech issues popped up,” Moore said, adding that when complicated technology policy questions arose, experts were hard to find. “We’re talking about the first branch of government, and that expertise needs to live in-house.” 

He modeled TechCongress on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health Policy Fellows, a program that brings medical professionals to work on Capitol Hill for a year.

As Moore researched the potential for such........

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