Congressional staffers' biosecurity briefings in DC

Allison Berke

Not fundedGrant

$0raised

Project summary

This August, I am organizing at Stanford a three-day intensive workshop on biosecurity and pandemic preparedness for an audience of 20 Congressional staffers. The workshop educates staffers on biosecurity topics relevant to current legislation, and creates a community both among the staffers and between staffers and researchers, to allow for advising and dialogue as relevant issues emerge.

Crucial to maintaining this community, and growing to include staffers who were interested but unable to travel to Stanford for the workshop, I would like to organizing three events (one per quarter) in DC, to update staffers on recent developments in biosecurity-relevant research and policy priorities and to bring Bay Area-based researchers to DC to present their work to staffers and other DC-based interested parties (like the NSC and OSTP).

Project goals

-Maintain involvement and interest in a biosecurity policy community among staffers who attend the August biosecurity workshop, and provide regular updates on relevant research results and policy priorities

-Draw in additional staffers who were unable to travel or attend, and bring them up to speed on the policy interests and takeaways of the workshop attendees

-Provide a means for Bay Area-based researchers (e.g., graduate students and post-docs) working on projects with biosecurity relevance to present their findings and recommendations to policymakers in an engaged and action-oriented environment

-Develop interest in future iterations of the Stanford Biosecurity Workshop

How will this funding be used?

-Event costs (e.g., space rental, catering, printed materials)
-Travel for Bay Area-based researchers

-Staff salaries for project planning and execution, communications

-University overhead and indirect costs

What is your (team's) track record on similar projects?

The August workshop is bringing 20 Congressional staffers to Stanford for three days of intensive educational programming on biosecurity and pandemic preparedness, involving 29 speakers, two field-trips, one immersive scenario exercise, nine panels, and three keynotes. This workshop builds on previous workshops on cybersecurity policy that I helped organize at Stanford, which brought in similarly-sized cohorts of Congressional staffers and of journalists (alternating years). These events continue, through a different institution at Stanford, in the form of "AI bootcamps" for Congressional staffers.

How could this project be actively harmful?

If staffers' takeaways from the events are that biosecurity risks are too great to allow ongoing biotechnology development and innovation, this would be a harmful outcome. We are purposefully crafting the messaging of the August workshop, and would maintain the messaging through these quarterly events, to avoid promoting fear and uncertainty, and instead focus on near-term policy priorities that can promote the development of a robust US-based bioeconomy while controlling security threats as much as possible and preparing for potential adverse events.

What other funding is this person or project getting?

The August workshop is receiving $198,000 from Open Philanthropy, and we have applied for renewal funding for a second workshop in 2024. These interstitial DC events have no funding at this time.

Gavriel Kleinwaks

over 2 years ago

Hey Allison, I'm interested in this idea and it's very much in my wheelhouse. A few questions:

What results have you seen from the previous cybersecurity/AI workshops, aside from continued participation—have you seen signs that staffers are bringing what they’ve learned to their offices and impacting policy?
How are the participating staffers chosen/recruited? (Are you targeting offices strategically?)
What would you do if you only hit your minimum funding target of $75k?
How did you decide that quarterly workshops would be the ideal frequency?
- I worry that quarterly workshops will saturate busy staffers’ interest and that you'd get diminishing returns from both your own time commitment in organizing this, and for asking for so much time from others. Intuitively I would’ve assumed that 2/yr would be better, especially considering events in the same general realm that other organizations, such as the Center for Health Security, run. (Incidentally, have you been in touch with CHS about this? Just curious if you'd considered a collab, not a criticism if not.)

For other regrantors' context, I have a strong positive impression of this proposal, because it resonates with my understanding of the field and shows thoughtfulness in many key points:

Policy is very relational and driven by attention; the line about maintaining involvement and interest in a biosec community really inspires my confidence.
The biosecurity field is in an odd place, attention-wise—there’s been a combination of momentum from some parties and (COVID) fatigue from others. I think the timing is good for an effort like this one, aimed at building core understanding of biosec outside of COVID.
Colleagues and partner organizations I know have been very pleased with the outcomes of workshops. (Eg my boss made a major strategy update for our whole org based on success he saw with a workshop.)
I initially thought that some other organization would have covered a project like this, but to my surprise, when I considered the (outside of government) biosec organizations I know of, nobody really is handling such a general information-sharing effort.
The angle (Congressional staffers) is a little under-approached, to my understanding. (I've been hearing more about targeting the executive branch, but this just could be a coincidence.)
The research-policymaker connection is vital but breaking out of silos/getting people's attention/finding the right levers is always difficult; targeting that goal in particular is very thoughtful and valuable.

Gavriel Kleinwaks

over 2 years ago

( @AllisonBerke )

Allison Berke

over 2 years ago

Thank you, Gavriel! These are great points, here is some additional detail:
-What results have you seen from the previous cybersecurity/AI workshops, aside from continued participation—have you seen signs that staffers are bringing what they’ve learned to their offices and impacting policy?

Aside from word-of-mouth interest (and a waiting list) for subsequent cybersecurity policy workshops, we did get attendees reaching out for advice to speakers from the workshop they'd attended, and workshop speakers were subsequently invited to DC to brief members and staff of House and Senate Intelligence Committees, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Senate Armed Services Committee, and to advise the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource task force. We also had then-Senator McCain, Congressman Ro Hanna, and members of the Congressional AI caucus arrange visits to Stanford (and specifically to FSI / Hoover, which hosted the workshops) to discuss cyber policy and AI policy. Now, you could say that Ro Khanna, a Silicon Valley representative, would likely have come to Stanford anyway to discuss AI policy, which is true. We did see ideas supported at the workshops come up in future reports that staffers who attended the workshop contributed to (like the national research cloud, or reforms to recruiting and retaining cybersecurity talent in House Intelligence committee strategic technologies and advanced research subcommittee reports), and the idea of a White House "cyber czar" came up frequently during - but was not original to - the cyber policy workshops prior to the actual creation of the position. We are thinking about the best way to provably and publicly identify or document the impact of these workshops. Often a successful policy idea has "many fathers", as the saying goes, so it might be more effective to keep track of ideas promoted at the workshops that don't end up in policy.

-How are the participating staffers chosen/recruited? (Are you targeting offices strategically?)

For this summer bootcamp, I reached out to staffers who support members on, or are professional staffers for, science & tech, health, homeland security, and intelligence committees, as well as Hopkins' Capitol Hill Steering Committee on Pandemic Preparedness, and a handful of personal recommendations. I initially reached out to legislative directors and chiefs of staff, and was from there occasionally directed to health policy directors, or legislative assistants focusing on pandemic preparedness or health or biotech. I emailed about 245 people to get to a final group of 20, with 10 who were initially yeses but had to drop out for scheduling reasons. Based on the track record of the cybersecurity workshops, I would expect that a successful workshop on this topic will lead to word-of-mouth interest and it will be a faster process to get to 20-25 attendees for next summer; I think keeping up engagement throughout the year will help with that also.

-What would you do if you only hit your minimum funding target of $75k?

The easiest thing to do in that case would be to scale back to only one event (late fall or early spring). I'd also consider partnering with another organization that has run a similar workshop (like Institute for Progress) to cost-share.

-Why quarterly instead of 2x/year; what about CHS: I have been in touch with CHS; while we didn't partner with them for the summer workshop because we wanted to hold it at Stanford, and get together as many Bay Area experts as we could, I would explore working with them for these DC events. The summer workshop is three days because that's the longest we can get approval to host Congressional staffers, but I think the quarterly (fall, winter, spring) events would be shorter - an afternoon plus cocktail reception - to lessen the time commitment on staffers and also allow those of us traveling from CA to spend time before and after the event having individual meetings. If there isn't sufficient interest for multiple DC events, or if it seems like these are cannibalizing the population of attendees who would otherwise go to the summer workshop, I'd consider scaling back to fewer events, or targeting different audiences that we aren't able to have all together at the summer workshop, like judicial staffers and journalists. We held one of the cybersecurity policy "bootcamps" for journalists and the media, and were considering having one for judicial staffers (this was shelved because there was a lot of interest from congressional staffers who hadn't been able to attend the previous workshop, and we didn't want to wait two years before offering a second congressional bootcamp).

Austin Chen

over 2 years ago

Hey Allison, thanks for submitting this! Upvoting because this looks like a thoughtful proposal and I'm interested in hearing about how the August workshop goes.

I would guess that a $75k minimum funding goal is higher than our regrantors would go for, given that most of our large-dollar regrantors are primarily focused on AI Safety, but I'm curious to hear what our bio or policy regrantors have to say about this kind of project!

Allison Berke

over 2 years ago

Thanks, Austin! That's useful to know about relative funding amounts and priorities. There is already another group at Stanford doing an AI-focused congressional staffers' bootcamp, so at least that angle is covered.