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Comment by figassis | Hacker News Reader

You can get aides so I’m not worried about their ages. Problem is how do you convince a competent tech aide to work for them at crap salary vs a tech company? Maybe get part time aides? Or just pay for some consulting hours?

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  > You can get aides so I’m not worried about their ages.

  >> The vast majority of Congressmen don't even have an aid who specializes in tech.

The problem is aids cost money. I happen to have a senator with one, and actually had a long conversation with them. The main difference with my senator? They have way more aids than most other senators. I'll admit, I'm mostly going off of his word, but it doesn't seem all that trivial to check who the aids are or even how many. All I can seem to find is that the average number of staff members is around 30 and that's definitely not all domain expert aids.

What they also told me is that most of the expert advice tends to come through lobbying. Or "industry relationships" as he put it while using air quotes. It's a budgeting problem, not just that it is hard to get a competent tech aid at such a low salary but even just a handful of domain expert aids in the first place.

I see, that's interesting that there is not a budget allocated for, say, X aides per senator, that they can hire and dismiss based on their current needs. I also see how "industry" takes advantage, because their expert advice costs $$$ but is fully subsidized by the lobbying budget. Govt can't compete, but some rules and a sustainable budget can solve this problem.

Yeah it was surprising to me too. But I guess not surprising that government doesn't have enough money. But it also made a lot of sense about how lobbyists were so effective. How it looked like things could be justified as not nefarious but can quickly go that way.

I am going mostly off of what this guy told me but I have no good reason to distrust him. (It felt like talking nerd to nerd, not with a politician)

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