As more House personal offices encourage staff to develop workplace tools and the House CAO office provides direct support through the AI Center, staff will need additional resources for keeping tabs of interesting projects floating about the chamber. I launched this section of the newsletter in part to do my little part in helping to build such awareness and am pleased to offer the first recap of a project developed within a member office.

In Rep. August Pfluger’s office, legislative correspondent Zach Ramsey has created a custom browser extension for its Fireside21 constituent mail account that eliminates the pain and suffering involved in tagging and batching incoming email.

It sorts each message through three progressive tiers beginning with office-specific keyword rules that catch the clear-cut cases, such as casework requests. If no match is made, Ramsey trained a machine learning model on the office’s own past sorting decisions to batch emails by issue topic. If those two fail to identify the proper place for a message, an OpenAI model assigns a batch based on the office’s batch list and past decisions. If no classification can be made, the system flags a message for a staff review.

Personally identifiable information is shielded from the AI as only the subject line and message are analyzed on a staffer’s computer.

Emails received by the office automatically become part of the machine learning training data, improving the responsiveness of the system over time. Staff corrections also are weighted three times more heavily in retraining. When a new issue comes up, staff can add a new batch, and the system starts recognizing that topic as more messages are sorted into it.

The office, Ramsey said, was able to cut down the time commitment involved in its current workflow by around 70% using the plug-in, freeing up that staff time for other duties. This innovation, dubbed the “Pflugerbot,” helped earn Rep. Pfluger the Congressional Management Foundation’s Democracy Award for “Best of Innovation & Modernization” in 2026.