A view from DC: How to read policy tea leaves

In the weeks leading up to the U.S. midterm elections, it felt as though Washington, D.C., was holding its breath. There is little to do in the policy world while all attention is focused on the will of the mythical American voter. The elections serve as an event horizon beyond which it is difficult or actively counterproductive to make plans for advocacy and engagement.

This week the policy community started to breathe again. After decisive midterm results spelled a coming change in party control in both chambers of Congress, the capital is again filling with the pronouncements, plans and prognostications of what we might call the wonking class.

How does a policy wonk think in a time like this? What does the process of adapting to a shifting political reality look like? When I speak with students, or really anyone outside of the beltway, I am often reminded of how strong the bubble I live in is as a person who persists on a steady diet of "policy." Perhaps this is as good a moment as any to talk through the thought process that happens when the winds shift.

Being a policy lawyer means using language, precise and well-timed, to advance the goals of your stakeholders, tacking and jibing as you adapt to slight changes in the political discourse. If we are hired guns, words are our packing irons. This is as true for me working as I do for a policy neutral organization like IAPP as for someone representing the interests of a trade association, civil society group or a single corporate entity. Whether advocating, engaging with government entities or just amplifying someone else’s position, the chosen form shifts across different political moments.

Signal or noise?

Policy professionals spend even more time ingesting words that others have written. Especially when these words come from policymakers and government officials, they serve as the fuel for our day-to-day work.

Take as an example a letter that Rep. Frank Pallone, D-NJ, wrote to his peers this week after winning his 20th term in Congress representing New Jersey’s 6th district. Though it was not shared publicly, Punchbowl and Politico immediately reported on and shared the full text of the letter, at least for their paid subscribers. In the LinkedIn Live I hosted this week featuring three D.C. insiders, Alexandra Reeve Givens used Pallone's letter to help support her points about the Democrat's priorities while building on it the perspective of the organization she leads, the Center for Democracy and Technology.

The letter is Pallone's official signal of his intention to reclaim the gavel of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, a position that is not entirely guaranteed in the House based on his seniority and requires the support of party leadership. In addition to explaining his qualifications, the letter outlines his priorities for the term.

This bullet list of priorities, each word carefully chosen by Pallone and his staff, are like manna for the hungry policy class, searching for signals to help accurately predict the highs and lows of the coming congressional term.

We read significance into every bullet, every word, and even the order in which they are presented, knowing with a high degree of certainty that these signals were intentional on the part of the Pallone team. Not only do they show what is top-of-mind for the powerful Democrat, but they also are meant to show the relevance of his priorities to the lessons the political class learned from the election cycle. Pallone's priorities reflect what he knows his peers will expect based on what they have heard from the American people.

As such, the first four bullets prioritize healthcare policy reforms. The fifth and sixth bullets focus on energy and the environment. And the final three bullets focus on technology and consumers, the "commerce" side of Energy and Commerce's jurisdiction. 

Notably, one of the energy bullets is about data center development, a kitchen table issue for many Americans that became a surprisingly strong element of the election debate. But I am not an energy policy expert, so my eyes naturally settle instead on the final three bullets. 

Big Tech, privacy and pricing

The first of these bullet points promises to pass legislation that will "rein in Big Tech’s rapidly evolving artificial intelligence by establishing strong, commonsense guardrails centered on safety, fairness, and accountability." What do these words signal?

Let’s start with "Big Tech." The phrase has a long history in Congress as a rallying cry on both sides of the aisle. It has long meant the major technology incumbents, some of the most valuable companies in the world. However, during our current technological revolution, the phrase has become much more ambiguous. It doesn’t necessarily mean incumbents anymore, as it also usually seems to include valuable startup frontier developers like Anthropic and OpenAI. These companies would not have been part of the meaning of the phrase "Big Tech," just a few years ago.

Even the use of the word "artificial intelligence" has now become a policy signal after President Donald Trump decided his preferred phrase to describe this set of technologies is "super intelligence" or "SI." Administration officials, serving as they do at the pleasure of the president, immediately adapted their language to suit. For example, you can visit SIexports.gov to learn about the Commerce Department's SI Exports Program, which is tasked with "delivering full-stack SI solutions to the global market." 

Advocates speaking directly to the administration will be expected to do the same. Though this is a stark and sudden example of a policy-related linguistic shift, it is largely no different than the jujitsu a policy person must always perform to adapt to a chosen audience. 

A more mundane example: If writing for a European audience, I would use the word "convergence" to describe a trend of national rules governing technologies becoming more alike rather than diverging from each other. If writing for a U.S. policy audience, I would describe the same idea using the term "interoperability." On opposite sides of the Atlantic, officials find one of these terms palatable and one distasteful. Adapting accordingly is part of being an effective advocate. No matter how language shifts, there is always a way to get your point across.

The substance of this bullet is found in the use of "safety, fairness, and accountability." These are the only words Pallone is giving us to tell us the types of AI governance approach he is considering for the next term. It may not seem like much, but it does tell a story. "Safety" tells us that there will be a focus on catastrophic risk — not a surprise given the recent headlines about cybersecurity incidents and the bills that have already been passed on this subject in three states. It could potentially mean broader AI safety efforts, but it certainly includes the rapidly maturing legislative conversations around frontier guardrails.

"Fairness" is a word choice, when used by a Democrat, that most likely signals a focus on bias in AI models as well as, potentially, discriminatory outcomes of automated decision-making. Even as it remains intentionally open-ended, this word represents a shift in priorities for the E&C committee. And "accountability" could mean a lot of different things, but it likely shows that transparency-only AI legislation of the type seen recently passing in many states will not be enough for Pallone.

The next bullet promises to "Provide meaningful privacy and data security protections, including protecting kids online." This manages to do two things at once. It centers the continued focus on youth online safety as part of the privacy debate, signaling in a similar way that Republican leaders have done recently that passing kids' legislation would be its own type of win for privacy, even if comprehensive consumer privacy legislation is not passed. But it also privileges privacy protections, generally, without committing to pursue a comprehensive bill or more targeted or sectoral protections. Regardless, privacy is firmly on the agenda, even if it is the eighth of nine loosely ranked bullets.

The final bullet promises to "reduce prices for consumers by banning junk fees, requiring all-in pricing, and cracking down on surveillance pricing." This captures a wide range of Democratic policy proposals that we have already seen at the state and local level to respond to high prices. A personalized pricing effort from the leadership of a major congressional committee will be a new feature this term, echoing the many state legislative efforts we have been seeing.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar

In some ways, the order of the bullets does not matter because the subcommittee structure will allow for multiple priorities to proceed simultaneously. But overall these early signals do matter. The limited bandwidth within the two-year term, and the perennial fights over government funding and other baseline legislative priorities, means congressional leaders only have so many chances to pursue their top agenda items. We saw in the past term that prioritizing youth safety legislation meant the KIDS Act became the primary tech policy achievement of Rep. Brett Guthrie, R-Ky.'s E&C tenure. Pallone is well aware of the limited time to achieve any legislative priority.

Competing with that time will also be the promise to "conduct vigorous oversight of the most corrupt Administration in our nation’s history," as Pallone puts it in his letter. Oversight and investigations are part and parcel of Congress's role, but there is no getting around the fact that time spent on these matters means time not spent on legislation. It is certainly possible to do both. Both will be part of the agenda, but it is not possible to do everything.

Nevertheless, the D.C. crowd is poised to navigate these and other legislative priorities as we think through possible policy solutions over the next two years. Whether the political dynamics will allow for final passage of any major tech policy legislation will have to be a topic for another day.

Please send feedback, updates and tea leaves to cobun@iapp.org.