Eric Schlecht Succeeded In Washington D.C.

I started my first job working for Congress exactly twenty years ago this week, and what I remember most about beginning there was that it felt like an incredibly intimidating place to work.

Luckily, one of the first people I met in my new job was the economist Eric Schlecht, who helped me figure out how to excel in my job and demystify my heady surroundings. Schlecht, who died earlier this month, had an exemplary career on and off The Hill, and made his mark both by changing policy and helping his friends climb up the greasy pole of the DC policy world as well. I remember him more for the personal kindness he showed me when I began my Hill career, when I was in desperate need of it.

In my new job I would see—and occasionally interact—with Senators and Congressmen who were household names, and these instances would require me to speak intelligently on complex issues, many of which I had only just begun learning about. At first I found these to be nerve-wracking.

The rules of the Senate and the House struck me as arcane and unknowingly complex, and I struggled to understand precisely what was occurring on my infrequent trips to the floor with the chair of my committee.

Even the Senate and House office buildings were difficult to navigate: My first year there I constantly got lost, and when I finally became comfortable navigating in the Capitol a massive construction project closed my main routes, leaving me confused yet again.

When Eric and I met he was working for another, more important committee than mine. I knew who he was—he was a regular contributor to National Review before he took a job with Congress and I read every one of his columns and learned a lot from them. He was in a spot I aspired to be in one day, but I had only a vague idea as to how to get there.

Eric, however, was anything but intimidating. He and I quickly hit it off and he was a font of information for me, helping me discern which issues were likely to gain traction in legislation and which were going to languish, and also teaching me how to figure this out for myself by explaining which publications were the most reliable and who could be trusted to provide a true sense of the Senate’s agenda.

Schlecht advised me to change how I wrote memos or position papers when my audience consisted of Members of Congress. His big tip—keep it short and engineer it so that any memo can be skimmable—may seem almost elementary today but it’s not how most staffers thought about their work at the time, and it benefited me greatly.

He also helped me understand the hierarchy of jobs for economists on the Hill, and his gig—at the time he was the economist for tax and budget issues at the Republican Policy Committee—was clearly one of the best jobs out there for our cohort. Thanks to him I got to know some of the people there, and a few years later I got that same job. It was easily my best gig on the Hill, and the visibility the job gave me—while at the RPC I wrote memos that went to the entire senate staff who covered my issues—helped launch my post-government career.

Unfortunately, Eric’s post-RPC career didn’t go nearly as smoothly. He was forced to resign from the RPC after a health incident left him unable to work for several months. He returned to Congress as a legislative director for Congressman John Shadegg, and when the Congressman retired Eric created his own public relations shop that focused on pushing back on the Affordable Care Act.

While its repeal remained a possibility—and an animating agenda item for the GOP—his strategy shop had several clients and maintained a robust portfolio of activities. But when his clients despaired of its repeal and dropped it, Eric realized he had tired of the policy game as well, and rather than seek new clients or a new gig he ultimately closed up his shop.

He eventually returned to Pennsylvania and took a job outside the policy world, although he would occasionally write and publish opeds (which I would sometimes edit) both to express his thoughts.

While I respected his decision to leave the policy game, it still stung me a bit: having a friend who had been so helpful to me in my career leaving town to do something else represented both a personal and professional loss, and our occasional phone calls and the odd lunch when he returned to town were a pale substitute for when we worked down the hall from each other and talked multiple times a week. But he seemed to have few regrets about leaving this town or his policy career.

There are many ways to measure success in the D.C. policy world: While it may be impossible to put “helping my friends succeed in their careers” on a resume, it matters much more in the grand scheme of things than anything else we might list on such a document. I’m fortunate that Eric Schlecht took the time to help me in my own career.