Do you remember the chaos caused by the sequester? That was the crazy measure that Congress passed – if members couldn't agree on a budget, it required across-the-board cuts. Well, they couldn't agree, so on January 1st, the cuts started.

Nearly everyone agreed – the sequester was a terrible idea. It would produce layoffs, cuts in service, hurting the elderly among others. But members of Congress didn't care.

Until, of course, the cuts affected them.

In the spring, the members went to fly home for a holiday – only to discover massive jams and lineups in the airports. Why? Well, the sequester had cut airport budgets, too. Staffing was low, and planes were late.

Suddenly, Congress leapt into action. Members raced back to the Capitol and passed a law restoring funding...to airports, and airports only. They worked so quickly that parts of the bill were written by hand.

What this story shows is that Congress isn't actually paralyzed. It's not dysfunctional. When it wants to get something done, it can.

It just needs motivation.

It needs to "eat its own dog food."

That phrase – "eating your own dog food" – comes from the world of software. When programmers are creating a new app, they often use it themselves, all day long, in their everyday work. They force themselves to rely on it. Because when you're forced to use your own software – you quickly discover the bugs, the problems, the crashes.

And you try to fix them!

The phrase was invented at Microsoft in the 1980s. But nowadays all smart software firms do it. One of my friends, Fred Beneson, works at the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, and they encourage staff to run their own projects – so they can see what it's like to use Kickstarter. So when Fred ran a t-shirt campaign recently, he quickly experienced some gnarly problems in the shipping. And because he'd seen the problems himself, he was able to fix them.

We need members of Congress to do the same thing. They need to experience the effects of their own lawmaking.

Right now, they often don't. They live in a world pretty much unlike that of everyday Americans. They have fantastic health care paid for by their employers – they've even got on-site doctors. They send their kids to private schools at a rate four times higher than the national average.

Now imagine if they didn't have that. What if they had to endure the same health care as the average American? Or attend the same schools? You can bet they'd fix it. They certainly did with airports.

As the legal scholar and activist Lawrence Lessig once said, software code is a type of law. It governs our digital world. And the same is true in the real world. Law is a type of code – the instruction set for how we live.

If people in Washington were forced to use their own code, maybe they'd finally see the bugs.

From a piece originally published in Wired Magazine: If Politicians Had to Debug Laws Like Software, They'd Fix the Bugs