Elmamoun Yousif Sulfab, who is well-known as “Moon” to his colleagues and other denizens of the Capitol, often elicits smiles and laughs from other Senate staffers, reporters and Senate sergeant-at-arms personnel who loiter the historic hallways ready to trade a joke or the latest news from the English Premier League.
His favorite soccer team is Barcelona but his second favorite is Manchester City.
Sulfab keeps Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) Capitol leadership office running in the most literal way. If a senior aide has a problem with his or her smart phone or computer, Sulfab is the person to call to get it fixed.
He also serves as an ex-officio member of the Senate Systems Administrators Association (SSAA), a staff-led organization comprised of systems administrators and information technology directors from senators’ offices, committees, leadership offices, who collaborate to resolve shared technology concerns.
He says his path to the Senate was “unconventional and unplanned at first.” Born in Khartoum, Sudan, to a family of political exiles, he relocated to Kuwait when only a few months old, living in Kuwait City during the Iran-Iraq war. He and his family left Kuwait after Saddam Hussein’s invasion in 1990.
He later moved to Virginia, where he graduated from West Potomac High School and then enrolled at Marymount University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree and a Master of Science in information systems.
Now, Sulfab is a Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech University’s School of Public and International Affairs and has more than 20 years of experience working on information technology.
One Republican aide remarked that Sulfab, who started working for McConnell in 2007, has been in the Senate so long that he has “a network of people” and is an integral part of the “Capitol community.”