“It’s Pretty Easy To Meet With Congressional Staffers Apparently” by 25Hour

(Crossposted from https://lifeimprovementschemes.substack.com/p/its-pretty-easy-to-meet-with-congressional )

I was inspired to do this by a tweet:

Specifically, I decided to leave a voice note in support of the CATS act (“Collaboration on Adversarial Threats and Security Risks Act”). The bill is short and simple: it carves out an antitrust safe harbor such that “pacing the frontier” or “agreeing to not break interpretability for that sweet sweet capabilities boost” (LOOKING AT YOU OPENAI) doesn’t intrinsically violate the Sherman Antitrust Act. Seems like an obviously good first step.

After leaving the voice note (and feeling mildly awkward about it), I was like “huh. That was surprisingly easy. I wonder what else I can do?”

And it turns out you can meet with congressional staff pretty easily if you’re a constituent in their district; if you have a reasonably well-scoped ask (especially around a specific bill) then you might not get your way but at very least you’ll make some staff member aware of your opinion and logic around an issue.

And this is important because congressional staff are the eyes and ears of their congressmen; they draft and edit the bills, and they form the base of knowledge on which the actual politicians [...]

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Outline:

(06:21) This is probably unusually high-leverage right now.

(07:46) In Conclusion

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First published:
September 23rd, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qThcAE3CADaPwjDzy/it-s-pretty-easy-to-meet-with-congressional-staffers

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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