Author: Lorelei Kelly, Research Lead, Modernizing Congress, McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University

On a typical day, you can’t turn on the news without hearing someone say that Congress is broken. The implication is that this dereliction explains why the institution is inert and unresponsive to the American people. There’s one element often missing from that discussion: Congress is confounding in large part because its members can’t hear the American people, or even each other. I mean that literally. Congressional staff serve in thousands of district offices across the nation, and their communications technology doesn’t match that of most businesses and even many homes. Members’ district offices only got connected to secure Wi-Fi…