POPVOX Foundation is a nonpartisan nonprofit, staffed largely by former congressional aides, focused on what it calls the pacing problem: the widening gap between how fast technology and society change and how slowly Congress is able to adapt. A related piece of that problem is structural. Congress oversees the entire federal government on a budget of roughly $7.2 billion total, less than a single cabinet agency, which means it often has to ask the executive branch for the very information it needs to legislate and conduct oversight.

Anne walked through how that gap opened a narrow, unusual window in early 2025. A wave of reductions in force, the "fork in the road" deferred resignation program, and other workforce cuts pushed thousands of experienced federal employees out of government. Rank-and-file employees are normally bottlenecked from speaking directly to Congress through small legislative-affairs offices. Departure removed that bottleneck, at least temporarily, and POPVOX moved to capture what people had to say before the details faded and they moved on to new jobs.

‍Check out the case study at this link, and the webinar below!

The conversation covered how POPVOX built Departure Dialogues to work for people with very different amounts of time to give, from a two-minute self-recorded video to a longer conversation, and how carefully the team handled anonymity, screening every submission by hand to honor each participant's stated preferences. Anne also shared a phased rollout (a small pilot, then two public waves timed around the workforce's actual departure dates), the coalition of partners who made it possible, and the themes that surfaced in the testimony itself: bottlenecks in legislative communication, conflicting statutes, and problems with federal IT contracting, among others.

What came through clearly across the hour was how POPVOX approached this work. Anne and her team ran the entire project on roughly a quarter of her time and partial support from one colleague, with no dedicated funding and no new hires, by design, so that other congressional offices could see it as something they could replicate rather than something only a well-resourced team could pull off. They brought together four partner organizations, Partnership for Public Service, Niskanen Center, Foundation for American Innovation, and Civil Service Strong, each playing a distinct role, and credited that coalition, not any single tool, as the reason the project reached the people it did.

It has been a genuine pleasure to work alongside POPVOX Foundation on this project. Anne and her team brought rigor, care for the people they were serving, and a clear sense of purpose to every part of it, and that showed in the quality of what they built. We're proud TheirStory could be part of it, and we're looking forward to seeing where POPVOX, and the committees and offices they hope will pick this up next, take it from here.

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