Nancy Mace and the Burners

A strange look inside the operations of one of the key Republicans shaping tech policy in the new administration.

I’ll have more news to share with you all about my new newsletter launching with WIRED. I have faith in this crew to fully migrate over there.

But before that one drops, I’ve got a fun and weird one up on the site with a scoop that only makes sense in the social media age: Nancy Mace's Former Staff Claim She Had Them Create Burner Accounts to Promote Her.

Here’s that WIRED story, but I also wanted to take a quick trip down memory lane with my coverage on Mace, which has largely focused on her approach toward the attention economy.

I reported for The Daily Beast on her leaked staff handbook, which had a lot — and I mean, a lot — of material on her media presence and not so much on legislation.

New members of Congress usually face a two-way dilemma. Should they allocate their staff resources toward constituent services, or toward legislating? If you want a crack team of legislative assistants and more experienced aides to go big on getting bills through committee and onto the floor, there’s less money to spend on the parts of constituent work that goes beyond fielding phone calls and requires getting answers from a host of government agencies and sometimes even foreign embassies.

Here’s a quick passage from that story:

One former senior aide to Mace recalled asking themselves one question more and more during their tenure in her office: “Are we in a PR firm, or working for a member of Congress?”

The office’s staff handbook, which two aides said was also written by Mace herself, demonstrates the boss’s relentless focus on PR and media—along with her grueling expectations for staff.

In the document, the responsibilities and expected deliverables listed for the position of communications director are extensive; the person is expected to send out at least one press release per day, for example, a frequency rarely seen on Capitol Hill.

Beyond drafting press releases, website posts, and tweets, staffers on the communications team were told they needed to book Mace on a national TV outlet between one and three times per day—a staggering nine times per week, at a minimum, according to former staffers who had seen past handbooks—and on local TV channels at least six times per week.

The most recent version of the handbook is notable in how much more detailed it is in explaining communications roles compared to legislative or constituent-oriented ones.

Then there was the story on Mace pleading with her staffers to let her go down to the House floor on January 6th as the chamber was being ransacked — just days after she was sworn-in as a freshman member of Congress — and “get punched in the face” by rioters to “get media attention,” according to former aides who witnessed it firsthand.

And with that, I hope you’re having a good start to the summer. Stay tuned for more newsletter news on this (mostly dormant) newsletter.