Winter 2004-2005

After attending the AAAS Fellow training in September, I decided to delay my fellowship until January. This allowed me to watch how the elections played out. Because I am from Colorado, I hoped the open Senate seat there might provide me with an excellent opportunity for my fellowship. My hopes proved correct: Freshman Senator Ken Salazar (D-Colorado) was sworn in as a member of Congress on January 4, and I began working as his Science and Technology Advisor on January 10.

Working for a freshman senator seems to be a quite different experience compared to most of the other Science & Technology Fellows in my class. For starters, Senator Salazar does not have a voting record on any of the issues. If an issue was not addressed during his campaign (and if he did not take action on a similar matter when he was Attorney General of Colorado) then as a member of his staff, I provide information that helps him decide what his position will be. For example, one issue that has been assigned to me is missile defense. This does not mean, of course, that all I need to do is help the senator decide if he is for or against missile defense. Instead, it requires looking into the funding, the technology, and the military necessity surrounding missile defense. Using this information, I then provide recommendations to the senator regarding different components of the program.

Another interesting aspect of working for a new senator is that there is very little in the way of established turf in the office. Where many other fellows were handed a portfolio of their issues the day they arrived, I am building my portfolio from the ground up. So far, I am covering missile defense, chemical weapons destruction, renewable fuels, MTBE, and science funding. Along with those topics, I also meet with constituents involved in fundamental research and aerospace engineering.

Working for Colorado is a good fit for my background. Colorado’s several national laboratories and large aerospace engineering industry provide ample opportunity for a Ph.D. engineer to make significant contributions to Senator Salazar’s office. My knowledge of the state adds a sense of place to the discussions and the work. I am very much looking forward to the rest of the year, and I thank the Institute of Navigation for providing me with this opportunity.

My fellowship is exactly half over as I write this update, and so far the experience has been nothing short of fascinating. To give you some insight into the scope of work that a senator’s office entails, this update will focus on two projects with which I have been heavily involved during the past several months.

First, I have been working long nights with Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) and his staff on the Senate’s version of the Energy Bill, which recently passed the Senate and will soon head to conference. Second, I was the office “point man” for two Colorado citizens detained by the United Arab Emirates.

Working on the Energy Bill has given me a view into some of the inner workings of politics. Sen. Salazar is a member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The first thing that became apparent is how much more effective a senator can be with legislation that is referred to his or her committee.

Legislation generally does not get addressed on the floor of the Senate until it has been taken up and passed by the appropriate committee. There is no requirement for the chairman to ever take up a bill referred to the committee; that is the power of the committee and even more so, of the chairman. But the politics of that committee can result in the chairman being more amenable to legislation proposed by the committee’s members.

Pinch Hitting
For all these reasons, Sen. Salazar’s office has been in the thick of the Energy Bill. What makes this even more interesting is the fact that an Energy Bill has not been passed by Congress for ten years, so for a freshman office, being involved in the bill was akin to showing up in the bottom of the ninth inning and being put straight into the game. That also meant there was a lot of catching up to do because legislation that had been proposed and tweaked year after year looked brand new to us.

Sen. Salazar has chosen a few key pieces of the Energy Bill on which to take the lead. These include increasing the country’s production of ethanol and biodiesel, promoting the use of renewable energy such as wind and solar power on a national basis, and advancing Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) technology to provide a cleaner future for coal-based power. Sen. Salazar has met with success on all of these issues, and throughout the process I was able to participate in and observe the back-and-forth that constitutes the making of a law.

Paragraph by Paragraph
The Energy Bill is more than 700 pages long; the work and politics that can go into even one paragraph is hard to believe. First, the staff members of the different senators involved have to hash out the language. This might take weeks or even months of meetings, slowly adapting the language over time to meet the concerns of the various parties. (At one time, I was actually in a room trying to come to agreement on language while a third party acted as a moderator.) But in the end, the way to finally seal — or terminate - the deal is for the different senators to speak face to face.

Colorado Detainees
A second and completely unrelated task I have worked on for several months is the fate of two Colorado men detained by the United Arab Emirates. These men had been detained in December 2004 while collecting GPS reference points. Although the charges were minor, because they were in a foreign country their passports were confiscated until the trial was resolved. To speed their return and to keep their families informed, I routinely communicated with the State Department’s American Citizen Services branch, drafted letters from Sen. Salazar to ambassadors and to the U.S. Secretary of State, and helped set up meetings between Sen. Salazar and the ambassador from the UAE. After six months of being detained, the men were released with a small fine and were finally able to return home. This is not the way I thought I would use my GPS knowledge to serve the state of Colorado, but it was certainly important, and I am proud to have played a part in their release.

I would once again like to thank the Institute of Navigation for this opportunity. I wish I could have attended the meeting in Cambridge to thank the ION Council personally, but the timing of the Energy Bill prevented that from being possible.