The Race to Pass Obama’s Last Law and Save Tech in DC

IT WAS 10:15 am on Inauguration Day, and John Paul Farmer was beginning to lose hope.

Barack Obama gives his farewell address in Chicago on January 10, 2017. JON LOWENSTEIN/REDUX

The former Obama White House staffer had spent the last night at his sister’s apartment in Washington DC, working the phones and emailing any sentient being he’d met during his years in Washington. Farmer was trying to find someone, anyone, who could get the Tested Ability to Leverage Exceptional Talent Act—the Talent Act, for short—to President Barack Obama. The bill would make law a program to give technologists temporary tours of government duty.

It had received bipartisan support in the House and Senate that week, but it still needed the president’s signature to become law. If he signed, it would take another act of Congress to dismantle.

But with roads closed throughout Washington, security checkpoints causing even more gridlock, a shoestring staff left at the White House, and less than two hours to go in Obama’s presidency, odds seemed slim that the physical piece of parchment on which the law was printed would get to the 44th president before there was a 45th.

Farmer, who co-founded the so-called Presidential Innovation Fellows program, the centerpiece of the bill, wasn’t sure they were going to make it. Neither was Matt Lira, a senior advisor to House majority leader Kevin McCarthy who’d been instrumental in McCarthy’s decision to introduce the bill. Lira hoped the Talent Act would show that bipartisan consensus is possible in Washington, particularly when it comes to technology. But it was starting to look like the opportunity would pass.

Over the last week, it’s become clear how much of a president’s legacy can be erased with a signature. On everything from immigration to the Dakota Access Pipeline, President Donald Trump has begun the work of erasing the last eight years. But this isn’t a story about that. This is the story of how a band of technophiles from both sides of the political aisle joined forces in the last minutes of the Obama administration to ensure that President Obama’s efforts to modernize the government would survive his term of office.

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