The full House Appropriations Committee is set to consider the FY 2027 Legislative Branch bill on Wednesday, May 13th, after the chamber returns from recess. On a party line vote, the subcommittee approved the spending package we examined when it dropped Wednesday, offsetting increases in member security and building renovation funds with an overall reduction of House spending over FY 2026 when factoring in inflation.

Democrats on the subcommittee decried the $200 million cut for the Government Accountability Office and the language limiting its impoundment authority, and will revisit it in the full committee. Party line votes in the subcommittee are not unusual, but often the differences are performative and not substantive. This time, however, felt different. My suspicion is the majority wasn’t happy with the limited amount of funds available for the Legislative branch, but they put on a brave face knowing they had little choice.

Republican and Democratic members of the subcommittee honored Rep. Steny Hoyer in what will be his last markup as he is retiring at the end of this term. This, too, felt real and not performative. Members often refer to each other as “my friend” even when they are not, but there is real affection for Rep. Hoyer, including acknowledgement that he is an honest broker and reliable counterparty.

Rep. Hoyer and Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole struck interesting common ground in discussing the budget reconciliation process underway to fund parts of the Department of Homeland Security. Cole said he “100-percent” agreed with his colleague that the use by both parties of the process to skirt appropriations was a major problem and that approving three years of funding for ICE and CPB that way instead of using annual appropriations bills was wrong.

Hoyer gave notice he will offer an amendment in full committee to strike a section of the bill that prohibits cost-of-living increases in member pay, which Congress has done for the last 18 years.

That last point is greatly misunderstood by the public and many members. Representatives have effectively had their pay reduced over the last two decades, meaning it has become more challenging for people who do not have the personal wealth to to serve. Congress needs people from all walks of life to serve as elected representatives, and the pay should reflect what’s required for non-affluent people to do the job. The same is true for their staff.

The pay issue is a longstanding problem. Daniel started writing about this in 2010, conducting one of the first modern longitudinal studies of House member and staff pay from the 1980s forward, and in 2012 conducted one of the first modern longitudinal studies of pay and retention in the Senate. How do things stand in 2026? Member pay is about $98,000 below the equivalent from their colleagues who served in 2009. While some aspects of staff pay have been addressed, it’s still a huge problem. As Daniel wrote in 2016, “no one sticks up for Congress as an institution, and great harm comes from our collective disdain.” He called for tripling the number of staff, doubling their pay, and addressing Congress’s woefully inadequate technology.

Rep. Hoyer is an exception to Schuman’s rule that no one sticks up for Congress. The former majority leader used much of his time for an impassioned defense of the institution, saying the House was “woefully under-resourced” to contend with the enormous size of executive branch bureaucracy. Doubling the budget of the legislative branch, Hoyer contended, wouldn’t be enough and he lamented Congress had nowhere near enough staff to “know what the devil’s going on” with federal agencies. Hear hear.

The former and perhaps future Chair of the Committee on House Administration, who also serves as an appropriator, expressed concerns about the impact of the FY 2027 legislative branch package on congressional capacity. In a letter we obtained, Ranking Member Joseph Morelle wrote Speaker Mike Johnson Friday that because “the current state of congressional resources and capacity has left our institution weakened and diminished rather than functioning as the First Branch of government,” additional investments in staffing and technology were necessary. Morelle also requested increased funding for member safety and building renovation.

Because of the pressures the Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo will place on lawmakers, Morelle called for increasing the cap for member office staff from 18 to 20 and increasing the MRA to make up for 15 years of not keeping up with inflation. He also urged a 20 percent increase to committee funding, noting that legislative branch committees are funded at one hundredth of one percent the level of discretionary funds the federal bureaucracy they oversee receive. The House Office of Legislative Counsel also deserves a 20% increase, Morelle wrote, seeing its workload in terms of measures introduced has increased since the 118th Congress by more than 80%. If anything, Rep. Morelle is not asking for enough of an increase even as we applaud his proposals.

We researched House committee funding levels from the 104-117th Congresses, and we found a median 11% decrease over that time. Since then, things have only gotten worse. Committees should be funded at a level proportionate with the executive branch they oversee. They need to significantly grow the number of staff they have, pay their senior staff better, and improve their technology. (We also looked at the Senate, which has similar but slightly less pronounced problems.) If, as Morelle wrote, committees are funded at one one-hundredth of one percent of discretionary appropriations, i.e. one basis point, we’d suggest doubling it to two basis points and by law keeping it pinned at that ratio. In other words, that increased funding level should no longer be discretionary.

Similarly, while personal office staff have been locked at 18 individuals since 1978, the population of congressional districts has grown by 50%, from ~510k people to ~760k. You’d need to add at least two staffers to keep up with the growth in casework; to keep up with the growth in government, you’d probably need to add a full time staffer for each committee the member serves on, plus additional staff for particularly tricky committees and subcommittee chairs. The Member Representational Accounts should be increased to cover those costs and to equalize congressional pay with their executive branch or private sector equivalents. The Senate accomplishes resizing their SOPOEA funds as a formula that takes into account the size of constituencies, and a similar approach should also be adopted by the House.

On workplace technology, an issue on which CHA is deeply engaged, Morelle urged full funding of the Modernization Initiatives Account at $10 million and support in the bill for enterprise-wide contracting for software to leverage purchasing power. In reality, the House Clerk and CAO both need double-digit bumps in funding for their technology. The House Digital Service should be expanded to fulfill its original vision of becoming a Congressional Digital Service, perhaps with the interim steps recommended by Reynold Schweickhardt and Zach Graves in 2022 plus the task force recommended by Alex Prokop. GAO and the Library also desperately need more funding for technology and staff.

With concerns about member safety only growing, Morelle proposed appropriations to support members hiring professional security agents through the Sergeant at Arms so as to not eat into MRA funds. The proposal also brings some structure to members’ choices about their personal protection, requiring hires to have a minimum of 10 years experience in law enforcement or military service to be allowed to carry a firearm. Morelle also suggested an expansion of funds for the coordination program between member offices, the U.S. Capitol Police, and local law enforcement departments and more money for member residential security.

These recommendations are all reasonable, but as we’ve testified, it’s time to fundamentally rethink how congressional security works, including reevaluating the focus and function of the Capitol Police and its oversight board. It’s also worth reevaluating how the U.S. Capitol Police are funded.

The Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee declined to start a more comprehensive renovation of the crumbling Rayburn Building requested by the Architect of the Capitol. Morelle notes that delay would only raise costs in the long run and urged funding for construction of space staff would use during a renewal project and $42 in mechanical systems replacement now. We are coming to the view that with the aging building on campus, a new building should be built as swing space to allow for the remediation of entire buildings all at once. This will be expensive, but ultimately will result in cost savings and faster results than trying to repair buildings piecemeal.

FISA AND FACTION

In what’s been largely covered as part of Speaker Mike Johnson’s adventure in leadership last week, the House passed a temporary extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It got over the finish line with 42 Democratic votes, but not before Republican dissenters added language the Senate would jam.

Daniel wrote voluminously [I thought I was merely being thorough – Ed.] about the underlying issues with a “clean” extension, but our interest is also piqued by the factional dimensions of the vote. The 22 Republicans who voted against it include some House Freedom Caucus members who were vocally opposed to the lack of privacy provisions, but also included many Republican Study Committee and Main Street Caucus members. The Democrats who voted in favor, meanwhile, were overwhelmingly members of more conservative party caucuses.

Interestingly, the 11 voting Democratic members on the House Intelligence Committee split 5-6 yay-nay, with some New Democrats joining the few Progressives on the committee voting against extension. A cursory analysis shows Democratic party leadership and intelligence types putting their finger on the scale to protect the Trump administration from court oversight.

If HPSCI members were split on what to do, the rank and file were forced to decide as surveillance hawks worked hard to withhold information from them. Senator Ron Wyden has provided an opportunity for some sunlight by securing a letter from Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton and Ranking Member Mark Warner to the Department of Justice and Director of National Intelligence requesting the release within 15 days of a classified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion that details misdeeds in the operation of Section 702. Sen. Cotton refused to allow legislative language that required the release of that information, even in the face of existing law that requires that it ultimately be released, just not at the timeframe relevant to the upcoming vote.

Cotton then threatened Wyden of “consequences” for the effort, attacking him personally on the Senate floor in what appears to be an example of projection. Cotton’s outburst is an indication of how tightly intelligence committee chairs believe they should be able to control information, to the detriment of Congress making decisions that have consequences well beyond national security.

POST-CALLAIS

A few quick thoughts on the effective demise of the Voting Rights Act in the context of Congress:

The ridiculous gerrymandering race this decision will set off will make the House look like what a Senate reflective of state population would be: single-party state delegations of various sizes. That’ll make the House increasingly malapportioned as a representative body and regularize the executive-legislative branch collusion we’ve seen in this Congress that is so corrosive to the constitutional system.

The Jim Crow South was an authoritarian state within a state. Its politics revolved around control of African-Americans and the maintenance of single-party rule. The Voting Rights Act was enacted to protect people who liberated themselves from white supremacist authoritarianism from its reimposition via electoral gamesmanship. The decision is the starting gun for that gamesmanship to transform elections into a de jure ratification of de facto one party control. Political choice, in any meaningful sense, will become a dead letter. Things are bad now, but they will become impossible.

We agree with folks like Lee Drutman that proportional representation for the House is the right solution to this structural problem. The establishment of multi-member districts where members are elected based on receiving the highest proportion of the vote can result in fluid coalitions. But just as importantly, it would take away the ability of states to draw lines so that members can choose their districts.

The problem with Drutman’s answer, however, is that most individual House members don’t believe it aligns with their political survival. Although it aligns with the survival of the parties and the factions therein, it does not necessarily guarantee the survival of any particular member the way noncompetitive single member districts do. This is the potentially fatal political flaw to his answer even though it would go a long way towards strengthening our democracy and improving its representativeness.

Majority-miniority district members could see this day coming since John Roberts’ confirmation, but hoped the legal bulwarks would hold and they’d stay in safe seats indefinitely. They traded short-term personal security in their seats for an uncertain future for their party.

There have long been problems with the way majority-minority districts have worked in practice. They have effectively created lock-in for members, making seats uncompetitive. Let’s be careful, here: it’s lock-in for Democratic members representing these seats, but also lock-in for far-right conservatives who represent the non-majority-minority seats. Fewer congressional seats are competitive as a result. And as Jonathan Rodden wrote in his excellent book, the consequence of this form of malapportionment is the enactment of legislation that is to the political right of the general populace.

There’s further distortions inside the chamber that arise as well. The incentive for those members who hold these majority-minority seats is to entrench the seniority system. Being in the safest of safe seats means that they are much more likely to be able to hold their seats for decades, and thus rise to senior leadership positions. Their primary inter-House concern, therefore, is making sure no one rocks the boat. The result of that are aged committee chairs and the clear-eyed trade of support for party leaders who will maintain the committee chair seniority system in return for supporting those leaders to stay in power as party leaders. This trade is not built around policy priorities, or even party priorities, but the mutual advancement of personal interests. It is, in essence, a party machine.

Super-partisan redistricting is going to raise the stakes of primary elections. Increased numbers of theoretically safe seats will put more members in tests of partisan loyalty and ideological conformity. Those on the wrong side of their state’s partisan ledger land in Hunger Games struggles with colleagues from redrawn districts or are simply eliminated.

Proportional representation provides pathways for ideological diversity and political skill to still matter. But you have to get there from here. Our preferred pathway is to improve the strength of factions in the chamber, so that members can show that they’re more than just a cog in a political machine. This would align individual incentives with party incentives, and thus facilitate the passage of voting reform in the form of proportional representation.

Let’s say the doomsday scenario doesn’t come to pass and the House operates more or less as before, just with fewer African-American members. (This is what things used to look like, after all.) The position of the Congressional Black Caucus will be diminished. As discussed above, institutionally, the CBC is a key pillar in the current Democratic leadership structure.

A reduced CBC should increase leverage for other Democratic factions to shape the House, perhaps as soon as the next Congress. The Court’s decision in Callais will accelerate a change in the caucus status quo that the passage of time is beginning to force. The diminishment of this leadership ally may be softened by one of its members becoming Speaker of the House, but it will open up opportunities to change the way the caucus has operated for decades.

ETHICS

Amidst the institutional blowback after the sexual misconduct-related resignations of Reps. Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzalez, everyone in the House – Speaker Johnson, Democratic leadership, Ethics Committee members, potential Democratic chairs in the 120th Congress – are talking about making changes to the ethics process.

We would expect a new Democratic majority next January would follow through on reforms to demonstrate they were, er, cleaning house just as other new majorities have. In 1995, Republicans placed Congress under many labor and workplace laws from which it had previously exempted itself and created the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights. (The reforms had been accelerated by Democrats in the previous Congress, who had not brought them to fruition.) At the start of the 110th Congress in 2007, Democrats tightened ethics and gift rules after the Abramoff scandal, then created the Office of Congressional Ethics the following year.

Even with additional accountability measures in the next Congress, the structural problem remains that no one really is in charge of ensuring members and supervisory staff act appropriately and professionally. Without such authority, no one is accountable for the ethics system. Instead, responsibilities are broken up across several domains. The Ethics Committee handles enforcement, but doesn’t write the rules. The Rules Committee handles that (along with the party steering committees), while House Administration has a role in their adoption at the start of a new Congress. No one is responsible for intervening before minor problems become major ones, and no one is responsible for protecting the victims.

Ultimately, House leadership has a strong hand in shaping these overlapping fiefdoms because they write the House Rules that establish the prevention and accountability frameworks and bring them into existence at the start of each Congress. Connection back to leadership makes the system even more politically complex because the incentives of partisan leaders are always electoral, less so institutional.

The cross-cutting political incentives exacerbate the effect of the lack of centralized, non-partisan and independent accountability. Members playing their roles in the system have strong incentives to work cautiously and pass the buck. The Ethics Committee admitted as much by explaining in a rare press release on April 20 how it has become “more aggressive” in pursuing sexual misconduct complaints in recent years, but frequently “lost jurisdiction” when the subject of investigation resigned, lost election, retired, or found another job in the case of staff. It’s a limitation concocted by the committee itself that shields the party from embarrassment once the member in question has shuffled off the main stage. Moreover, the Ethics Committee itself can set standards for what to do when members stonewall the committee to delay its proceedings, but as far as we know, they have not.

The OCE was a promising addition to the ethics system when launched by Nancy Pelosi in 2008 (Republicans renamed it the House Office of Congressional Conduct last year) to be a nonpartisan, independent alternative review body for misconduct allegations against members and staff. OCC can recommend cases that it examines to the Ethics Committee for consideration, which creates a deadline for when the investigation report must be released. The requirement of transparency and creation of a deadline was designed specifically to spur the Ethics Committee to action. That’s caused conflict with the committee. And the OCC suffers from a weakness from the point of its creation, when key players at the time ensured it did not have subpoena power for its investigations, providing another opportunity to members to stonewall.

Because OCC operates outside the normal political controls that restrain the Ethics Committee, some members have come to see it as a rogue political actor for doing its job. Accordingly, Speaker Johnson successfully hobbled OCC for months at the start of this Congress by creating a rule that board members had to meet formally to bring on investigative staff, then delayed appointing a board.

How should the House extract ethics enforcement from dysfunction? Cutting the Gordian knot of partisan gamesmanship and overlapping committee jurisdictions would be a start. Someone should be in charge of and therefore accountable for the ethics process, including developing the rules, issuing guidance, and executing enforcement. So, too, should there be someone, likely the same someone, responsible for identifying small problems before they become large and for providing help to victims. And we need to keep in mind that victims can be other members, staff, journalists, regular congressional employees, lobbyists, and the general public.

Maybe that’s the OCC. Maybe it’s a new office the House creates. The Ethics Committee may issue protestations that it is taking the problems seriously, and I’m sure members and staff feel that way, but the Committee is a structure unable to meet the moment. It suffers from a fatal design flaw.

It’s not only on leadership to reset the system. There needs to be a new way of thinking about the House (and the Senate). The frequently-cited perspective that Congress is not a single body but 541 individual small businesses with CEOs focused on re-election is part of the problem. Staff need to be congressional employees with congressional protections. Other legislatures have parliamentary staff as employees of the parliament even as they are politically loyal to their individual bosses. This is a better, more professional, model. And it comes with proper hiring practices, human resources, and mechanisms where the bosses cannot be both harassers and HR.

In the interim, there are pathways forward. Members should commit to hiring or finding placement for those fired in retribution for filing complaints. Members should report misconduct they see or strongly suspect. Indeed, there should be a duty on members to speak up if they see something – and to be held accountable if they do not.

The party conferences and chamber non-partisan staff should monitor staff turnover rates and intervene when they see high rates – that’s a strong signal of something amiss. Now’s the time to plan out what to do so some reforms can be put into place immediately, and others at the start of the new Congress.

ODDS & ENDS

Ethics news: The Senate banned members and staff from trading on prediction markets last week. It’s just about impossible to amend the chamber rules, so this provision went by UC.

House Ethics has opened up yet another investigation of improper sexual relations by a member. Rep. Chuck Edwards reportedly is being investigated for having an affair with his former deputy chief of staff, who started working for him in the North Carolina legislature. As a reminder, members of the House are prohibited from having sex with the people they supervise.

Member security: As congressional leaders were whisked away by security at the White House Correspondents Dinner, rank-and-file members were initially left without guidance on what to do next. Nobody knew how many members were even at the event. Who was responsible? The Sergeants at Arms? The Capitol Police? No one? Should there be someone in charge for this?

Anti-fraud bills: The House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee cleared nine bills tackling fraud and improper payment issues. Several involve GAO, including a requirement to report annually on state-administered programs at the greatest risk of fraud and replacement of its annual improper payment estimate with a rolling risk assessment.

Cybersecurity: The British Westminster Foundation for Democracy has published a new exploration of cybersecurity risks facing parliaments, which are unique given their disposition to openness and transparency.

BTW, AGI teaches a class on cybersecurity in Congress.

Zombie: Senator Frank Lautenberg might have died 13 years ago, but his campaign committee is still around.

While the spotlight has centered upon the House floor this week, appropriators Thursday morning will be tucked away in the Capitol, shaping the future of the next Congress and likely those beyond. The Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee will hold a markup1 of the FY 2027 funding bill bright and early at 8:00 AM Thursday that will devastate congressional oversight capacity, disrupt institutional modernization, and roll the dice on workplace safety in several parts of the Capitol campus.

The subcommittee was stuck with this position because the full committee provided a budget suballocation that is woefully inadequate for meeting the needs of legislative branch components. As we alerted committee leaders Friday, the funding level determination, i.e., the 302(b) suballocation, forced the subcommittee quickly to balance massive building renovation and security requests, rising operational costs across the board, and sustaining the level of support provided by legislative branch agencies.

The biggest budget buster was the Architect of the Capitol’s $1.6 billion request to initiate emergency full renovations of the Rayburn House Office Building, which it determined was no longer safe for occupants and visitors. The subcommittee’s bill provides roughly 50% less than the eye-popping figure. It doesn’t entirely ignore the problem, however. The bill includes $45.1 million in funding through FY 2031 for House office building care that can act as something of a downpayment on the Rayburn project. This increase is offset by significant cuts to the budgets for the Capitol Building and Library of Congress buildings and grounds and smaller cuts to Capitol Police buildings and security features.

RENEWED ASSAULT ON GAO

The AOC merely didn’t get close to what it asked for: the Government Accountability Office, on the other hand, received a crushing blow. It isn’t quite the repeat of the House’s original proposed 50% cut for FY 2026 the Senate ultimately rejected, but it is a similarly unserious number. GAO would receive $611.9 million in the next fiscal year under this bill, $200 million less or a 27% year-over-year reduction accounting for inflation.

For a majority party that insists it is deeply concerned about both fraud and the budget deficit, GAO is a curious target for such cuts. The agency reported it provided the nation an estimated $62.7 billion in financial benefits last fiscal year and $1.51 trillion since 2002. 27% of $62.7 billion is $17 billion in unrealized cost savings, or 1.85 times the amount of the entire legislative branch budget.

Of course, this cut isn’t happening in a political vacuum. House leadership repeatedly has sided with Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought in maximizing executive branch power over spending to the detriment of Congress’s constitutional privileges. Back again in this bill is the language leaders tried to insert in last year’s package forbidding GAO from suing the executive branch for violations of the Impoundment Control Act without permission from Congress. Vought repeatedly has declared his view that the ICA is unconstitutional and again House leadership is trying to nullify it.

Proposed GAO cuts also come as the administration has not been forthcoming on how it’s spending money in various military campaigns, has moved massive sums of money around federal programs to pay for immigration enforcement, and rebuffed oversight of Department of Homeland Security expenditures. For FY 2027, the administration has proposed $1.5 trillion in defense spending, not accounting for the cost of military conflict with Iran. With hundreds of GAO analysts facing layoffs and frenetic defense spending planned, the potential for corruption is immense. The ability of future Congresses to provide proper oversight will be severely limited. House Appropriators at tomorrow’s subcommittee proceedings and at the full committee should decline to advance this legislation without significant changes. Hoping the Senate will once again advance better policy that overrides House leadership’s desire for messaging is no way to govern.

EROSION OF HOUSE LEGISLATIVE CAPACITY

The other offices and agencies the House relies upon to remain informed, productive, and equipped to balance the powers of the other two branches will feel the squeeze from this bill. Legislative support office and agency leaders cited higher contractor, technology, and equipment costs in requests for modest increases in their budget. These requests weren’t met.

Much has been made over the years about the need for the legislative branch to modernize the systems and tools it uses to retain situational awareness and remain informed on policy. Our accounting for inflation here is rudimentary, and technology and services cost increases often are higher than the 3.3% increase in the Consumer Price Index we used to represent inflation.

We have serious concerns, therefore, that what appear to be flat or slightly negative operational budgets will interfere with offices’ abilities to acquire the hardware and software they need to modernize.

The downstream impact of not being able to sustain current IT costs, let alone afford new IT capacities, will be the reliance on increasingly outmoded technologies as well as the interruption of in-house experimentation and development of the kinds of applications Congress needs to be effective. It also risks smothering a growing community of innovators inside and aligned with the legislative branch making it one of the more technologically innovative legislatures in the world.

EXPECT MORE POLITICAL STAFF ATTRITION

Personal offices and committees also will be forced to do more with less. The Member Representational Allowance increased at 2.5% above inflation, to $900 million, but still $29 million below what was in the president’s budget and at a time when increasing demands, such as security, technology, and member reimbursement for a second duty location, are coming out of the MRAs. The money available for committee staff shrank more than $8 million, or 3.6%, in this bill, to $216 million.

We are a broken record on this issue, but the floor for starting staff salary has been stuck around $45,000 for years, far too low for young professionals living in an expensive metro area. We already have seen offices moving work from entry level staff to paid interns in the hopes of freeing up money to forestall staff departures and to address increasing security demands.

CAMPUS SECURITY

The subcommittee bill provides the U.S. Capitol Police a bump – about 3.4% in real dollars. In real terms, this is a significant amount of money: an increase of about $30 million. But the $907.5 million in the bill is 11% short of the department’s request to the subcommittee.

USCP Chief Michael Sullivan testified to the subcommittee in March that the full workload facing the department requires about 500 more sworn officers. We have heard this story for a while, and the Capitol Police have received tremendous increases in funding year-over-year for more than two decades. With the publicly available information, we cannot judge what is the right funding level for the USCP. But we can tell that their increases in funding, combined with consistently tight legislative branch budgets, is a recipe for cuts for everyone else.

The House Sergeant at Arms is an interesting case as well, and we note that its role is largely focused on security) The House subcommittee mark places it at $127 million for FY27; it was at $145 million in FY26 (adjusted for inflation); and $36 million in FY25. (Yes, the mark is $91 million higher than two years ago.) Of the $127 million proposed funding level, $83.9 million is expressly reserved for member security. If we’re doing our math right and didn’t miss anything else, over the last two years, the remainder of SAA would increase from $36 million to $43 million.

THE SYSTEM

We’ve tracked and been active participants in legislative branch appropriations for quite some time. It is something of a thankless role for the members on the subcommittee, who aren’t going to be putting additional money for, say, the Congressional Budget Office in their constituent newsletter.

Members’ political incentives, at least superficially, do not align with bolstering the institution with the significant increase in funding across the board it needs. Moreover, members of the subcommittee routinely wish to “move up” to other appropriations subcommittees, as that’s where significant amounts of money are. The institutional capacity problem is even reflected in staff support for the subcommittee: generally speaking, there’s one Democratic and one Republican staffer per subcommittee per chamber, and that’s just not enough to provide continuity, attention, and deep expertise, no matter how much they try.2

What we hate to see is the legislative branch become a political football, intended to score points in a game that no constituents are paying attention to. A well-functioning Congress is essential to democracy. That requires money, care, and attention. With this appropriations bill, Congress is trading away its own future.

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Last week, the top line for Legislative Branch appropriations in FY 2027 emerged. It is far too low for what congressional agencies require, and as we explain below, will force appropriators either to allow House members and staff to continue working in a crumbling fire trap or lead to crippling cuts everywhere else.

We will see the first stage of how this plays out Thursday, when the full Appropriations Committee holds the markup of the FY 2027 Legislative Branch bill at 8:00 AM in H-140 in the Capitol.

Behind the policy fight over the renewal of Section 702 of FISA lurks House leadership’s ability not only to use assorted levers to control debate, but also to shape congressional relations with intelligence agencies. Daniel goes in depth to examine the deeper context of the current renewal process, which disadvantages even members of the Intelligence Committee, and considers reforms that strengthen congressional oversight of the intelligence community.

LEGISLATIVE BRANCH FUNDING

Amidst the whirlwind of congressional activity last week, the House Appropriations Committee released the first six interim budget suballocations for FY 2027 – the 302(b)s in appropriations talk that set the ceiling for discretionary spending by the 12 subcommittees. Included in the release was the Legislative Branch. Its 302(b) is a formula for disaster.

As we’ve been tracking, the Architect of the Capitol and the U.S. Capitol Police combined have requested budgetary increases of $958 million for next fiscal year. The Appropriations Committee, however, only increased the Legislative Branch 302(b) by $180 million. This amount would barely cover budget increases requested by all the other legislative branch offices for FY 2027. Overwhelmingly, the purpose of those requested increases was to cover increasing costs and mandatory cost-of-living adjustments for staff, not new capacity. This hasn’t factored in personal office and committee staff yet.

Friday, we sent a letter to Appropriations Chair Tom Cole and Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro recalling the warnings of inaction from the AOC and USCP regarding campus safety and how this budget line would force catastrophic cuts to legislative branch capacity.

The AOC and USCP requests represent major concerns their leadership have for physical safety on the Capitol campus. Architect of the Capitol Thomas Austin warned appropriators in March that the Rayburn House Office Building – the building in which they were holding the hearing – was at immediate risk of “catastrophic systems failure” that would put people’s lives at risk. After so much deferred maintenance, it needs immediate major renovation to be made safe. Last year alone, the building had two fires, 18 major leaks, and dozens of elevator and escalator outages.

U.S. Capitol Police Chief Michael Sullivan explained that his request for almost $170 million more in funding was to cover gaps already impacting the force, exacerbated by a deteriorating threat environment and increasing demands made by members themselves. The department is 150 officers short to staff every existing post across the Capitol complex without having to resort to overtime. To complete its full workload, the department needs 500 officers. Overtime is driving recruitment and retention challenges. Members, meanwhile, are making new staffing intensive requests like police presence on CODELs and keeping office building entrances open. Without additional funds, “a number of things would be at risk, and we’d have to make some very, very tough decisions,” Sullivan told the Legislative Branch subcommittee.

The committee’s budget allocation will force appropriators to make a choice between deferring action and risking disaster or being prudent with threats to life and limb and decimating legislative branch governing capacity. If the committee goes forward with the budget requests of AOC and USCP, it will have to cut $778 million for everything else to meet the 302(b) level, a 14.3% decrease from FY 2026.

Such cuts would be cataclysmic for the knowledge and skills base Congress needs to function. Forced to slash staff, legislative support offices would be left unable to meet all but high-priority requests for services, leaving rank-and-file members and even some committees without access to their essential expertise. If personal office and committee staff are spared an across-the-board axe, support office cuts would expand to resemble the crippling reductions of the mid-1990s, the infamous “big lobotomy” of the Gingrich era. If not, hundreds fewer staffers will be around to perform the political and constituent service work essential to a representative body.

If appropriators chose to defer Rayburn renovations another year and hope nothing really bad happens (or in similarly-conditioned Longworth), $7.3 billion still isn’t enough to cover legislative branch operating cost increases. In an inflationary environment for vendor services and technology, flat funding still would force legislative support offices to reduce staff and thus services. Internal experimentation and development of efficiency-gaining and knowledge-strengthening tech tools would struggle for resources. The historically bad retention problem facing member and committee offices would worsen.

It also would be a dangerous choice. The latest review of occupational safety and health inspections, gathered from the 117th Congress, found nearly 200 hazards in member offices inside Rayburn and another 122 elsewhere in the building. Some of these include blocked exit routes and failing fire barriers. Longworth actually had over 50 more hazard citations than Rayburn.s

Because FY 2027 starts shortly before the midterm elections, appropriators are setting the conditions in which the next Congress will operate. Maybe they’d rather stick the 120th Congress with the renovation bill. We would prefer to think the committee will be responsible and maintain the capacity of the legislative branch to be effective, even if the majority does change next January. To do so, the 302(b) will need significant revision.

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Congress’s Intelligence Undersight and the FISA Fight

Surveillance hawks’ efforts to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is a textbook example of House leadership’s ability to control both the legislative process and flow of information in pursuit of their desired outcome at the expense of a majority of members who want to amend the law. It also illustrates that Democratic and Republican leadership have much more in common with one another at times than they do with members of the chamber. That leadership has not yet succeeded in pushing through a “clean” reauthorization of the government’s surveillance powers illustrates the potency of a left-right coalition of civil libertarians, which, despite having lost many similar battles in the past, has built an alternate infrastructure capable of putting up a fight on the most unlevel of playing fields.

How Congress Came to Regulate Domestic Surveillance

We will talk about the political dynamics at play, but it’s important to understand the policies at root. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was enacted in 1978 after it became clear President Nixon used law enforcement and intelligence agencies to spy on Americans to further his political interests. Nixon’s purpose was to attack his political opponents, including elected officials, and undermine democracy and democratic accountability. The law was intended to restrain executive branch spying.

The government is authorized under FISA to collect information domestically through surveillance of foreign powers and their agents (and perforce those with whom they are communicating) inside the United States. Because targets are not U.S. persons, the government does not need to obtain a warrant because Fourth Amendment protections don’t apply.

If the government wants to surveil citizens, permanent resident aliens, or U.S. corporations, however, it still must get a warrant. This is a role for which traditional Article III courts are well suited. Nonetheless, FISA established a secret tribunal of federal judges to review these warrant requests. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court turned the concept of a federal court on its head – its proceedings and rulings are generally kept secret, there is no adversarial process, and its members serve limited terms and are handpicked by the Chief Justice (who we must note previously served in senior roles for the Executive branch, including in the offices of White House Counsel and Solicitor General).

The PATRIOT Act amended FISA to expand the range of circumstances in which the government could use surveillance. But the Bush administration also started a separate, illegal surveillance program right after 9/11, which was concealed from the public and hidden from most members of Congress, and largely obfuscated for the few who were briefed. The administration did not seek warrants from the FISA Court, either.

Toward the end of the George W. Bush administration, the public started to learn the administration actually had created a warrantless domestic wiretapping program inside NSA without the legal authority to do so. Once that program was revealed in the New York Times, the White House and Congress moved to authorize parts of the program under federal law and provide immunity to the telecom companies who provided information about Americans to the US government unlawfully. Section 702 of FISA is part of this response.

The way domestic information collection under Section 702 works in practice is this: the NSA gathers vast amounts of information related to a lengthy and growing list of criteria. It forces U.S. entities to provide this information under legal compulsion. And it doesn’t usually know whose information it is collecting. For example, if you pull information about all the phone calls that relate to a phone number, you don’t necessarily know whose phone number that is or who was on the phone. The same is true for an email address. Skippy123@aol.com could be anyone.

One problem arises when a communication stored domestically is between someone outside the U.S. and someone inside. All of this information goes into a giant database that the Justice Department can search by “selectors” like phone numbers and email addresses. Sometimes, federal officers look up information that belongs to an American without first obtaining a warrant. In fact, they knowingly use identifiers related to a U.S. person to sift through the data – hundreds of millions of communications per year.

The intelligence agencies, including the FBI, want to keep the information flowing without limitation, including information they are collecting and searching regarding Americans. So, too, do their congressional allies. But the Constitution is in the way, as are the fears of Americans who quite reasonably believe that this information collection will be weaponized by the White House against political enemies and disfavored groups.

Government disclosures show a history of use against racial minority groups, protestors, journalists, and members of Congress. (It’s also misused to stalk NSA employees’ potential girlfriends, wives, and random people, but that’s not the intent behind the law.) Thus, this collection is called the backdoor search loophole: it’s a way around the Constitution to surveil Americans regarding whom a warrant would otherwise be necessary.

Making matters even more complicated is the government is now purchasing tons of Americans’ information from data brokers as a way to get around the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement. The government does not obtain a warrant for these backdoor searches and data purchases.

The Section 702 Fight

It is the legal authority to surveil Americans without a warrant under the backdoor search loophole that is at issue with the expiration of section 702 of FISA. Proponents of a “clean” reauthorization, i.e., surveillance hawks and the Trump administration, would allow for it to continue as is. Opponents would add a warrant requirement and would constrain the government’s ability to go around the Fourth Amendment and purchase information from data brokers. This fight happens every time Section 702 is set to sunset.

Despite various reform efforts and even with a permissive set of rules, the U.S. government has failed to follow its own procedures to protect Americans against unlawful surveillance on many occasions. One accounting identified 278,000 instances between 2020 and 2021. The expiration of section 702 was written into its last reauthorization to push the intelligence agencies to comply with existing law and to provide Congress an opportunity to make changes in light of new information and changing circumstances.

The very question of when the law is expiring is itself contested. Proponents of a clean (i.e., blank check) reauthorization asserted that Section 702 would expire on April 20, 2026, and the intelligence apparatus would go dark. This is not accurate.

The 702 surveillance program operates under yearlong certifications from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. It received such a recertification in March. The secret FISA Court opinion has yet to be declassified – perhaps itself a piece of information warfare – but the New York Times reported “the annual recertification, issued last month in a classified ruling, means that the program can continue to collect phone calls and emails through March 2027 — even if Congress fails later this month to renew the statute that underlies it.”

Surveillance hawks are arguing behind the scenes that some companies have said they will stop complying with information collection requests. But, of course, the administration can go to court to force collection should that circumstance arise. Administration officials may fear the law itself is unconstitutional and wish to avoid a legal challenge in federal court.

Withholding key information prior to debates on renewing intelligence authorities is a typical behavior for surveillance hawks. For example, in the debate over section 215 of FISA, the government withheld information it had discontinued the program while arguing for its reauthorization. Tight control of information extends beyond the intelligence agencies to include congressional chamber leaders and the intelligence committees. In the case of section 215, important contextual information only came out because of loose lips and a podcast.

Inside Congress, leadership’s ability to shape the information environment contributes to strong pressure for a clean reauthorization and denies ammunition to reformers. Speaker Johnson has called for clean reauthorization in the lead up to the statutory expiration and was unwilling to negotiate with proponents of reform. Republican leadership has created a sense of pressure to herd members to vote in favor, warning surveillance authorities would otherwise go dark.

The tactic has not succeeded so far. When it became clear that surveillance hawks couldn’t win a straight reauthorization vote on the floor on April 15th, leadership pulled the vote. Late the next evening, they released an amended bill with a warrant requirement – except it was a potemkin provision. They were using their informational advantage to provide a draft that seemed to do some of what reformers wanted, and they loudly talked about it providing a warrant requirement, but it didn’t in fact do much at all except largely restate existing law in language intended to confuse. The use of complicated language and ordinary words given technical meanings that are the opposite of what they actually do is par for the course when it comes to intelligence.

Surveillance hawks thought they could create enough momentum and razzle dazzle to give members political cover to do nothing but have it look like something. The authorization with the faux warrant requirement failed 200-220 around 1:00 AM. Besides being a resounding failure, leadership failed to follow House rules, which require 72 hours notice of legislation to be considered on the floor. Perhaps out of desperation to maintain the pretense of expiration and to avoid losing momentum entirely, leadership then offered legislation to extend Section 702 through April 30 an hour later by voice vote, which succeeded.

By way of context, two years ago, an amendment that would have included a warrant requirement failed to pass the House in a 212-212 tie. It also only went down because of leadership shenanigans. This time, instead of incorporating such a provision, Republican leadership in combination with Democratic allies tried to slide through various forms of a clean reauthorization.

The Unlevel Playing Field

The foiling of a clean reauthorization is even more remarkable when you look at the advantages surveillance hawks hold over civil liberties advocates in both parties in Congress. Surveillance hawks control the leadership of both parties. Speaker Johnson is following Pres. Trump’s request for a clean reauthorization. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who had sought to join the House Intelligence Committee to bolster her national security credentials and as a counterweight to sexism, ended up being its longest-serving member in history. She has supported legislation and special orders to protect intelligence agency authorities.

Unlike most committees, the House Intelligence Committee members are chosen by the leader of each party. Leaders generally choose members who reflect their views and values. It is perhaps of little surprise that Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Jim Himes is an out-and-out proponent of surveillance authorities with little meaningful limitations, even as he attempts to obfuscate that publicly.

Both the Speaker and Minority Leader sit on the Intelligence Committee ex officio. Under House rules, they are provided an extra staffer to represent their interests on the committee and to provide privileged access to committee information through TS/SCI clearance. Speaker Pelosi’s former lead intelligence staffer is now in that role for Democratic Leader Jeffries. Other committee members enjoy no such privileges, neither an extra staff member nor an allowance for personal staff access to committee records. Members of the committee also receive a lower-level security clearance than TS/SCI obtained by committee and leadership staffers, meaning they do not have access to information about sources and methods that are essential to evaluating the credibility of information provided by the intelligence committee. Members, therefore, are wholly dependent on the good graces of executive branch officials and committee staff. Even if committee members hire individuals who have TS/SCI clearances from other positions, those staff are not allowed to use that clearance when serving Congress.

Classification is a problem writ large for Congress. Each House personal office is allowed two staffers to apply for a Top Secret clearance. While useful, the executive branch often nullifies this oversight capability by routinely classifying matters at a higher level of clearance than strictly is required. This is a process known as over-classification, and no less an authority than Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines identified it as a significant problem. It’s also an old one, dating back to a secret agreement between Speaker Tip O’Neill and CIA Director Stansfield Turner in 1978 to reduce the number of staffers with clearance because the executive branch announced intentions to reduce its number of employees with clearances as well. The House followed through, but federal agencies did not and it seems the CIA snookered O’Neill. Now, estimates of executive branch employees and contractors with active SCI clearances is in the six figures. Those in Congress likely are 3 orders of magnitude less.

The Senate, by comparison, recognized the information access problem as well as the principal-agent problem and now allows every senator to identify one staffer as eligible to obtain a TS/SCI clearance. This means that senators can have a person who works for them to attend briefings and research matters that they care about. And more than that, every member of the Senate Intelligence Committee gets their own staff designee. Every senator on that committee has a staffer who is paid by the committee, hired by the senator, and can obtain access to the material held by the committee. By comparison, the House has enfeebled its members on intelligence issues, forcing them to rely on the hierarchy.

How does this play out? When it comes time for votes on matters like Section 702, the House Intelligence Committee and leadership play a game of show and tell. They bring members in for briefings that are classified at a level that their staff cannot attend. They provide documents that staff cannot read. They tell them of all the terrible things that will happen if one of these surveillance authorities were to end. This time around, they even created a special temporary SCIF – a room that can hold highly classified materials – just off the floor of the House.

Think about that. Personal office staff generally aren’t allowed on the floor, but leadership staff are, and so are committee staff who are managing a bill. They can grab a member off the floor, take them to the temporary SCIF nearby, have an intelligence official waiting or perhaps pre-selected materials, and work them hard. This is exactly what happened last week.

Privacy advocates, having experienced these tactics many times before, undertook their own education efforts. Senator Ron Wyden, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, sent a classified letter to be made available in one of the House SCIFs that detailed a set of problems with the way section 702 works. The problems identified in that letter are distinct from the major compliance problems found by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which also are secret.

We don’t know what Wyden’s letter to the House said, but you can read Wyden’s public letter from April 13th, available here, that explains the history of FISA and the reforms Wyden believes are necessary. Here’s the crux of his message: “There are multiple issues related to Section 702 that the American people and many Members of Congress have been left in the dark about, including a FISA Court opinion from last month that found major compliance problems. These matters should be declassified and openly debated before Section 702 is reauthorized.”

In a separate document, he indicated “there was a dramatic spike in ‘sensitive’ warrantless searches, which involve looking for and reading the communications of American journalists and American political and religious organizations. The FBI refused to explain why these searches more than tripled.” Are we surprised that FBI Director Kash Patel is not responsive to Congressional requests for information?

Wyden’s letter transmitted to the House was classified at the secret level, so staff should have been able to read it so long as they had secret or top secret clearances. But we have heard that the officials who run the SCIF began to turn away cleared staff who asked to read the letter. We heard that SCIF officials told staff there was not enough room at the SCIF to let people in and there was no time available to make appointments. When staff returned with their members in an effort to gain access, the representatives were allowed to read the messages, but not their cleared staff. (We have heard this from staff, but have yet to see it reported in the press.)

My research suggests that the House has four different SCIFs, one for general use (regarding which access was denied), one for the Intelligence Committee (which is located next door), one for the Armed Services Committee, and one for Foreign Affairs. The Senate has their own SCIFs. Clearly, space wasn’t the problem. It’s notable that the folks who run the general purpose SCIF report up the food chain to leadership.

Even More Structural Problems

While many committees have jurisdiction over matters that are classified, the intelligence agencies refuse to provide information to them unless the House Intelligence Committee agrees. Even when Congress orders the GAO to investigate intelligence related matters, the agencies won’t comply unless House Intel agrees. This was such a problem that the House passed legislation in 2010 to try to fix it, only for it to be rejected by the Senate when the intel agencies promised to do better.

The Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over the Justice Department and its misuse of surveillance authorities, cannot report a bill to the House floor unless House Intelligence agrees. But leadership routinely attaches the annual intelligence bills to the NDAA as a way of preventing amendments that would come up were it to proceed through a more regular process.

What To Do

The fixes to this are obvious and straightforward:

• All members should have at least one staffer eligible to obtain a TS/SCI clearance.

• All members who serve on the House Intelligence Committee should have staff designees. So, too, should members of Armed Services, the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, Foreign Relations, and others who deal with highly classified matters.

• Members of House Intel should be named through the same process by which other committee members are named, not handpicked by leadership.

• The intelligence agencies should be directed by law to be responsive to GAO requests and to be responsive to information requests from all committees.

• Multiple committees, not just House Intel, should be able to refer classified information to the full chamber for public release when warranted.

• The Intelligence Committee should no longer be able to block Judiciary legislation.

• The number of staff on all these committees should be significantly increased.

Many of these reform efforts have been blocked over the years despite garnering support from various committees including HPSCI. A good number of reforms were reportedly blocked at the behest of Speaker Pelosi through her top intelligence aide, who has worked on the hill in an intelligence role since at least 1999, and is now as I mentioned working for Rep. Jeffries.

The status quo is no longer acceptable and should no longer be tolerated. A better process and institutional design will lead to better results, including the possibility of a more balanced approach to oversight of intelligence matters. The House Intelligence Committee Chair and Ranking Member, and the leadership that appoints them, have become the chief advocates for the intelligence agencies, not their overseers. The structures established for oversight in 1978 have been turned on its head. For the sake of a strong and capable Congress that can hold the Executive branch to account, this can no longer stand.

In the meantime, Speaker Johnson will continue to work with HPSCI Ranking Member Jim Himes and others to move legislation to reauthorize Section 702 with as few constraints as possible. (It is unclear what role Minority Leader Jeffries is playing in the background to shape the policy outcomes.) Their latest proposal was described yesterday by Elizabeth Goitein and Hannah James in Just Security as “fool’s gold“ and “fake reforms.” It’s set for a Rules Committee vote today, with the purpose of reporting a rule that will once again create an unfair playing field for evaluating the legislation. We shall see if any amendments from reforms are made in order, and whether those amendments are the best articulation of their position. (I suspect no amendment votes will be allowed, fwiw.)

Their nature and shape of the Johnson-Himes alliance will be subject only to the cross-cutting partisan currents that deter some Democrats from more openly voting to give President Trump tremendous surveillance powers over the American people and some Republicans who know that, when the wheel turns, it could be their allies that come under the heel of a Democratic president. At a time of tremendous executive branch overreach, this is one decision squarely in the hands of the Congress.

– Daniel

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ODDS & ENDS

CHA: The Committee on House Administration reported out a bill raising the potential retirement age for Capitol Police officers. Officers are subject to mandatory retirement at age 57, but can apply for a waiver to continue on to 60. H.R. 8364 raises the waiver limit to 65, which would allow about 60 officers to stay on the job.

Rep. Stephanie Bice also introduced a House Resolution this month accelerating the public disclosure of reimbursements members have made to the Treasury for workplace or sexual misconduct penalties. The resolution would require a member sanctioned by the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights to submit their name, payment required, and accompanying report to the Clerk to be read on the floor within 14 days of OCWR issuing its report. Members failing to do so within 14 days would be suspended from their committees or leadership positions. It also would revoke House floor and facilities privileges to former members who have not paid their penalties.

Appropriations: The Appropriations Committee rejected an amendment by Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro to establish an office of inspector general inside the Office of Management and Budget during the markup of the Financial Services and General Government bill.

Members approved report language from Rep. Dave Joyce urging agencies to provide prompt and complete responses to GAO’s requests for information, noting that delays “impede congressional oversight and legislative efforts.” It also asked GAO to inform other congressional committees of unreasonable agency delays that impact its work.

Congressional AI learning: The Meridian International Center, located near Meridian Hill (Malcolm X) Park is taking applications for its next cohort of AI Congressional Lab participants. The program is open to congressional staff from any level of technical expertise and covers a variety of topics, including a hands-on workshop. Apply at this link.

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In the case of CBO, the slight bump in funding would be to hire about ten additional analysts, which Director Phillip Swagel said would put the office at its long-term target for FTEs. Acting Comptroller General Orice Brown, in contrast, said the budget GAO submitted was at a level that would cause “the least amount of disruption” in its workforce while providing long-overdue cost-of-living increases. GAO is planning on reducing about 140 positions even with the request for a 5% budget increase, some due to a wind-down of work tied to COVID-related programs.

New Appropriations Committee member Jon Husted asked about agency use of AI. Swagel said CBO has been using some AI tools for a few years and will have 120 licenses for Microsoft Copilot this year. It uses generative AI more in processing than in analysis work so far, with humans backstopping analysis for hallucinations. The hope with AI is that analysts, Swagel said, would be able to clear a backlog of requests by automating less-demanding tasks. GAO, Brown shared, uses large language models in many administrative tasks like tracking potential legislative mandates and flagging data within its large database of audits of state and local governments that receive significant federal funds. It’s also developed an in-house tool for its closed network.

These answers were encouraging that legislative branch offices are turning to various AI products to free up time for their expert specialists to do more of what they were hired to do, which is provide high-quality information to Congress as it makes public policy decisions. Leaders also made it clear that AI cannot replace the skills and abilities of analysts. Instead, we should view AI platforms, commercial or internally developed, as tools to improve the quality of that work. The temptation to use AI as a cost-savings mechanism to shrink the workforce needs to be avoided because Congress is too political and contextual a place to take humans out of decision-making processes. If anything, it needs more people providing more timely analysis allowed by AI clearing out scutwork.

(we practice what we preach here: AI transcription is a godsend for making this newsletter more informative and accurate in a timely way, but I read the output myself.)

On the issue of rising customer demand, Brown noted that although nearly half of GAO audits are mandated by Congress, about 93% of those are one-time audits. GAO tracks recurring mandates and informs committees if it views the information returned as being diminishingly pertinent, sometimes encouraging repeal.

The subcommittee will hear the budget requests of the Senate Sergeant at Arms and the U.S. Capitol Police Wednesday at 3:00 PM in Dirksen 138. The budgetary elephant is yet to walk into the hearing room – the Architect of the Capitol’s request of nearly $800 million to fund emergency renovations to the Rayburn House Office Building. When it does, we think it’s time for appropriators not to try to swallow the elephant the typical way (as with the renovation of the Cannon Building), but plan to manage building renovations more holistically. Longworth will need a similar overhaul soon and the Dirksen Building is about to turn 70.

Instead of following the AOC’s request to create swing spaces for Rayburn staff to cycle through, appropriators should explore building an entirely new office building that can serve high-quality office space for the entire staff of a structure under renovation. Such a building would serve the longer renovation cycle required beyond Rayburn, which likely will stretch decades. Congressional leadership also should revisit telework policies to reduce the demands for office space. The parks that cover up underground parking on the House side could be construction sites.

Requests to our readers: we have to rely on annual reports and testimony at budget request hearings for updates on the condition of congressional office buildings. Clearly, these are insufficient for us or the congressional community to create a full picture of building condition across the board. If you have information to share about problems in buildings (say, toilet water leaking down from the floor above), please email Daniel or I at our first name @americalabs.org. We’ll share a running list if we receive enough responses. Thanks!

Must Read: Matt Glassman tracks what’s happening to the once-bipartisan appropriations process, which is becoming more tilted toward partisan and presidential prerogatives during unified government. Whatever comes of impoundments and rescissions, he determines current congressional enthusiasm for using reconciliation for parts of the budget with strong partisan pull is driving the current process towards collapse, with significant institutional consequences.

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POWER OF THE PURSE

Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought made a rare appearance in front of the House Budget Committee Wednesday for a hearing on the president’s budget request for FY 2027. Several Democratic members took the opportunity to grill Vought on his conduct in doling out FY 2026 funds to federal agencies.

Rep. Scott Peters in particular took Vought to task on OMB compliance with the Impoundment Control Act, which Vought reiterated he thinks is unconstitutional (which is apparently all he needs to ignore). He insisted that budgets for National Institutes for Health programs were not cut, which Peters could barely believe came out of his mouth, and refused to say that withheld funds last year were deferrals.

Vought also took a swipe at the Government Accountability Office, saying it was often wrong and highly partisan in its assessment of executive branch actions and that he felt his office has “the moral and legal high ground” on spending issues.

When pushed again by Rep. Jimmy Panetta on impoundments, Vought said that the OMB general counsel considers appropriations laws to be “guidelines” and that the constitution, in his view, merely allowed Congress to set spending level limits within appropriations that the president can unilaterally reduce if they felt the need.

Rep. Becca Balint pressed Vought on cases where federal judges had found that the White House had cancelled or withheld funds to states that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 for political reasons. Vought again denied this finding’s accuracy, claiming out of hand that Democratic-led states simply were poorly run and overlooked fraud.

Vought repeated this performance Thursday morning with the Senate Budget Committee. The first senator to challenge him on impoundments during the hearing was actually Chuck Grassley, who told Vought he didn’t have the authority to impound community service block money, recalling how he had worked 40 years ago to save the program.

Democratic senators, however, mostly stuck to the current budget proposal, not extraconstitutional actions of Vought’s office. Senator Mark Warner was the most direct, challenging Vought, “you somehow believe that you’re a legislator. You’re not a legislator. You are ministerially supposed to allocate the funds that are appropriated.” Ranking member Jeff Merkley took up the constitutional angle afterward with Talking Points Memo.

If Vought continues to operate OMB as a rogue agency constitutionally, we would suggest congressional appropriators consider using the power of the purse to turn off the spigot of funds to his office. Congress has no obligation to fund an executive office that is aggressively disregarding the separation of powers.

It’s worth noting for all its micromanaging, OMB under Vought has no idea what the war in Iran will cost.

Federal agencies, meanwhile, continue to redirect appropriated spending and ignore congressional oversight of allocated funds. The Department of Interior is late with two congressionally-mandated reports describing progress on the review and approval of energy projects, which may include renewable energy projects to which the White House is hostile. Without the report, appropriators don’t know what’s been considered. (Speaking of congressionally mandated reports …)

NOTUS also found at least six programs or accounts within the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and State that have been redirected toward Immigration and Customs Enforcement on top of the $75 billion for the office provided by Congress in the budget reconciliation bill last year. The White House has not shared details of the redirection, which is common when agencies shift funds to fulfill congressional wishes.

MEMBER BEHAVIOR

Reps. Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzalez walking the plank together last week was a case of controlled accountability. It got us wondering how other parts of the congressional accountability system are being used.

The Office of Congressional Workplace Rights has been required since 2019 to report payouts by members to employees for workplace rights violations. This past fiscal year, only one member – former Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer – reported a payout. She’s now, of all things, the Secretary of Labor, and is under investigation for workplace misconduct including texting aides to bring her wine during work trips. Her husband has been barred from the Frances Perkins Building for making sexual advances on staff.

The most recent data we have on workplace rights consultation by OCWR is from its 2024 annual report. OCWR staff received 47 requests for advice from House employees and 29 from the Senate that year and 33 requests from the House and 24 from the Senate for information related to workplace rights. Only seven claims were filed against member offices in the House and one in the Senate, which could have included violations based on sex, race, national origin, age, or disability. Given the number of staff employed by both chambers, these are minuscule figures, and indicate staff do not feel comfortable utilizing what resources exist.

VIP service: Metropolitan Police treated Rep. Cory Mills with considerable deference when called to investigate an assault complaint against the congressman by a female companion last February. The investigating officer noted that the law required him to be taken to the station because of physical evidence of abuse and the woman’s initial complaint, but he could ride in the front of the car. When more senior officers arrived, the woman recanted, and the incident was recategorized as a domestic disturbance, and Mills was free to return to his apartment.

At one point, Mills threatened to call Attorney General Pam Bondi.

The TMZ Factor: The gobsmacking sexual misconduct allegations behind the exit of Swalwell and Gonzalez hit as video celebrity gossip outlet TMZ entered the congressional media scrum – well, at least outside, as they don’t have press passes yet. It already made waves by capturing members on junkets and vacations after failing to resolve the shutdown of DHS.

The fact that TMZ pays people for their paparazzi-style videos may lead to some disclosures of other members behaving badly. We worry, however, that the potential of ending up on the TMZ reel will drive more members to support tightening public access to details about travel and assets that can indicate corruption. Himself caught on camera heading to Cancún during a destructive winter storm in Texas, recall that Sen. Ted Cruz introduced along with Sen. Amy Klobuchar a broad restriction of public access to member data.

MODERNIZATION

The House Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee has approved Modernization Initiatives Account funds for a project to transform constituent engagement systems upon the request of the House Committee on Administration’s Modernization and Innovation Subcommittee. The project’s intent is to make it possible for member offices to use multiple applications that suit their needs rather than locking into contracts with one of the handful of correspondence management systems providers offering a one-stop solution many have found dissatisfying. Modernization Subcommittee Chair Stephanie Bice called the approval a “major breakthrough in the realm of constituent engagement” in a press release Friday.

The Office of the Chief Administrative Officer will work with members, staff, and other stakeholders to execute the project and explore secure sharing of office data to work across multiple applications. House Digital Service Director Ken Ward suggested a potential pathway forward last December in a Modernization and Innovation Subcommittee hearing by creating a secure “data lake” that apps could access rather than feeding member office data to a single CMS.

The Modernization Subcommittee also has sent an MIA request to the Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee for HDS to create a service academy nominations portal and dashboard for member offices to manage that process more efficiently for staff and constituents.

The ModSub is awaiting Appropriations action on another MIA request: to install digital signage and wayfinding resources in House office Buildings. That request would knock out another two open recommendations of the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, which the subcommittee is working through implementing.

To date, 160 Modernization Committee recommendations have been closed. Of the 42 that remain, 23 are in the ModSub’s jurisdiction.

As a reminder, the new voting days calendar is up and running on House.gov, providing updates on additions and cancellations, tracking pro forma days as they are announced, and allowing users to subscribe to calendars on multiple platforms and embed them on websites. The House Clerk’s office regularly updates the calendar.

AGI has been pushing for a unified digital calendar of House and Senate session days, so this project is a huge step forward. The next step is for the Senate to publish its voting and session information as data.

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The prospect of congressional debate about the conduct of immigration enforcement agencies feels as remote as the midwinter chill during this week’s heat wave. Democrats’ gambit to force a response to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection violence on the frozen streets of Minnesota’s Twin Cities by withholding votes to fund the Department of Homeland Security is petering. Republican leadership has accepted a two-track plan to use budget reconciliation to fund ICE and CBP and a regular appropriations bill to fund the rest.

The Senate had decided to move on from that debate, fund DHS, and allow ICE and CBP to operate with money already allocated through a previous reconciliation process. The House Freedom Caucus saw even this decision as a surrender and now, with Senate assistance, will aim to take immigration enforcement completely off the table for appropriators for the remainder of Trump’s term, if not years beyond.

Appropriators in both chambers are warning of the consequences of this decision. Although both parties have stretched its original purpose and used reconciliation to get agenda-defining legislation over the finish line, party-line funding for immigration enforcement threatens to routinize a two-track appropriations process during united government that would further stifle congressional debate and compromise. Deciding how to allocate federal resources, after all, is the most important process of collective decision making in which Congress routinely engages. Shifting to regularly funding partisan priorities independently from that process brings the executive and legislative branches closer into alignment in an area the Constitution clearly intends political separation. Appropriators have the deepest understanding of the broader importance of maintaining those norms.

The trouble is that the appropriators (and everyone else) are being outflanked by the best-organized and most-muscular faction within the House Republican conference – the Freedom Caucus. Speaker Mike Johnson regularly has acted in accordance to their demands, including swiftly re-jamming the Senate when it passed DHS funding and left town. Wednesday, HFC endorsed the ICE+CBP reconciliation plan “to ensure Democrats can never again take our nation’s security hostage.”

We won’t know how many congressional Republicans also have concerns that ICE is becoming an unaccountable and unfettered security force. Republicans who may question or oppose a secret police force rampaging through American communities, continuing to shoot unarmed people and allow their deaths in detention, have not generated the proportional factional leverage to respond. Although it may be a fair point that they risk political fire from the president in doing so, many of their re-election prospects look dim anyway because of the collapse of Trump’s support, including on this very issue. They essentially are choosing to go down without a fight.

CONGRESS AND IRAN

The congressional role concerning the war in Iran, meanwhile, is not being explored sufficiently for a different set of political structures and motivations that are no less diminishing of the institution. As Paul Kane explores in his first column for NOTUS, it is unprecedented that Congress has not held a public hearing on a military action of such a scale, recalling that the Republican-controlled Senate held six oversight hearings within the first 10 weeks of the Iraq War on top of prewar hearings held by Democrats.

Back then, committee chairs still had the gravitas and sense of obligation to conduct oversight even with a copartisan in the White House. It could be part of a political brand for a moderate like Senator John Warner or Richard Lugar. Now, the personal incentives are to stick with the Trump brand for the majority given the president’s control of the governing agenda. It’s also likely the case that targeting Iran has significant support among Republican members given its near half-century as a pariah state.

For their part, Democratic leadership seems more alarmed by the process by which the administration entered into the war than the decision to bomb Iran. Leadership in the House signaled as much by trying to introduce a war powers resolution during a pro forma session, which checked the box of messaging to the base but wasn’t even recognized by the chair. The Senate will attempt a similar introduction this week. But as we know, the post-Vietnam checks on executive warpower are shells of their original design because of the courts.

For members concerned about the process and specifics of the Iran war, the options are limited. After Trump announced his genocide countdown last week, some started discussing the procedurally burdensome 25th Amendment. Rep. Jamie Raskin has reintroduced a resolution to create a congressional commission authorized by Section 4 of the amendment to assess the mental and physical fitness of the president for office, something he’s been advocating for over a decade.

The only avenue with realistic chance for impact left is politics. We don’t know what will be most effective, but members most concerned about the Iran war likely should start by organizing into a cohesive bloc. Maybe they can persuade the Pentagon to provide a briefing by doing so.

Two more congressional actions on Iran still loom. Any agreement to cease hostilities that involves Iran’s nuclear program or lifts sanctions likely would need congressional approval under a 2015 law. Also, the War Powers Resolutions requires congressional approval of military action that lasts longer than 60 days, with a possible 30-day extension. Excluding the current cease fire, that deadline would be May 31. Some congressional Republicans have expressed interest in holding a vote on the extension.

The constitutional point of involving the legislative branch in questions of war and peace isn’t to give opponents of an action the opportunity to stop it. The framers of the Constitution wanted more minds in important decision-making processes to hedge against what we moderns call groupthink, or merely the natural human instinct to go along with the boss’s bad idea out of self interest. Congress isn’t employed by the president and – at least on parchment – and members have their own interests to look out for. The idea was that an independent set of decision-makers could make sure the executive branch had thought everything through. Historically, it’s even worked both ways as presidents have had to bat down congressional foreign policy imperatives.

This constitutional arrangement also posits some accountability for the outcome upon Congress as well. Perhaps this is why leaders in the majority have avoided any direct institutional engagement on the president’s actions against Iran.

The profound strategic impact of the war, however, is not going to let them dodge it. Because the administration viewed the Iranians as NPCs in their own national defense, they did not take the closing of the Strait of Hormuz as a credible outcome. The administration may be trumpeting how it pummelled Iran when other presidents wouldn’t, but this scenario is partly why they didn’t. This weekend’s peace talks collapsed with Iran still controlling traffic through the strait, a reversal of the freedom of the seas that has been a pillar of American foreign policy since the administration of John Adams. It’s why the navy has fought pirates since 1801. Freedom of seas is why the U.S. maintained a two-ocean navy during the Cold War, to ensure the essential flow of trade and resources needed to sustain a global alliance network confronting Soviet expansion could be sustained.

Frankly, these six weeks have produced one of the largest and most unnecessary strategic blunders in American history, empowering Iran regionally and globally much more than the prewar status quo and actively harming the economies of friendly nations and our own. The solution either is to give Iran even more of what it wants or conduct a longer and far bloodier war. We also don’t know if the current bombing campaign has significantly disrupted the Iranian nuclear weapons program, which apparently was not “obliterated” by Operation Midnight Hammer.

By not fulfilling the constitutional backstopping role, congressional majorities are in the soup with the administration. They will catch the political flack from the next bad idea. Most importantly, they are not positioned to deter whatever level of violence lay behind Trump’s threat to destroy the entire Iranian civilization. That’s a level of irresponsibility that honestly is sickening.

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APPROPRIATIONS

The Senate Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee will launch its work this week with a budget request hearing for the Congressional Budget Office, Government Publishing Office, and the Government Accountability Office Wednesday at 3:00 PM in Dirksen 138. We covered these agencies’ requests at the House-side hearing in March. GAO was the only one to request a significant budget increase ($48.2 million, a roughly 5% bump), which has seen flat budgets since FY 2024.

Given its size, mandate, and highly-professionalized staff, GAO often feels the most squeeze from tight legislative branch budgets. Acting Comptroller General Orice Williams Brown told House appropriators that the agency would still shed about 140 positions even with a budget increase to manage costs. During that hearing, Rep. Steny Hoyer nudged the coy Brown unsuccessfully to reveal what GAO really needs to be maximally effective. Senators will have another opportunity to explore what level of support would have the most benefit to congressional oversight.

Not all states and foreign governments that employ an auditing agency similar to GAO rely exclusively on appropriated funds to support it. Senators could ask whether GAO could explore alternative funding sources for its work and what types of options the office may have investigated that fit its mission.

At the latest Congressional Data Task Force meeting, GPO mentioned a new collaborative project with CBO to format some of its projection models into USLM XML, which would make them interoperable with other legislative branch datasets and useful to legislative branch app developers. With both agencies in the room, it’s a fine chance to hear more about this intriguing partnership.

Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought will be on the Hill this week to discuss the president’s FY 2027 budget request. He will appear in front of the House Budget Committee on Wednesday at 10:15 AM in Cannon 210 and the Senate Budget Committee Tuesday at 10 AM in Dirksen 608. Members will have the opportunity to ask if he intends to follow appropriations law in the coming fiscal year.

ACCOUNTABILITY

Now that she has been fired, the Justice Department is refusing to comply with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena of former Attorney General Pam Bondi. She was set to appear for a closed-door deposition on Tuesday.

Stephen Bannon is on the verge of having his contempt of Congress conviction dismissed after Supreme Court approval.

The House Ethics Committee has announced a public hearing to consider sanctions for Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick on April 21 at 2:00 PM in Longworth 1310.

In case you missed Daniel’s weekend essay on Congress’s institutional challenges to holding members responsible, even when they prey on their employees, please read it.

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It appears that Rep. Eric Swalwell is in deep trouble in his race for California governor. Reporting indicates that the honorable congressman has, at best, propositioned and engaged in sexual relations with his congressional employees, and at worst sexually assaulted them. A member of Congress having sex with someone in their employ is a violation of House rules (XXIII, subsection 18(a)). Sexual assault is a crime, punishable in the federal courts, state courts, and by Congress.

These allegations, reportedly made by at least four women, cover a number of years. With the exception of the widely reported claim that Rep. Swalwell was the target of a honeypot-style approach by a Chinese national in the employ of their spy agency—which, to be clear, resulted in no finding of wrongdoing by him—this conduct appears to have been, if not a well-kept secret, then something that the press had declined to report.

In light of these reports, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna is expected to offer a resolution to expel Swalwell from the House of Representatives. Such a resolution would be privileged and would likely come up for a vote quickly. And it bears noting that he is not alone. There are several other members currently in the news for serious ethical violations—Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, Tony Gonzales, Cory Mills—and those allegations appear to have significant merit and involve significant misconduct. (There are others, such as Rep. Henry Cuellar, who is still under investigation even with a presidential pardon, although it appears to be going very slowly; we note that Supreme Court dicta says a pardon can be understood as a confession of guilt.)

We would also be remiss not to note that Rep. Swalwell served on the House Intelligence Committee. Members of that committee are appointed by the party leader—at the time, by Rep. Nancy Pelosi—and are entrusted with oversight of the most sensitive national security matters. Having a member in that role who is engaging in behavior that could compromise their independence poses a grave risk not only to national security, but to the committee’s ability to conduct oversight of the intelligence community. House Intelligence was created in the wake of deeply troubling abuses by intelligence agencies directed at domestic political activity as well as abroad. Its legitimacy depends on the integrity and independence of its members.

Swalwell served on the committee from 2015 to 2023. He reportedly severed contact with the Chinese national in 2015, and a House Ethics Committee investigation from 2021 to 2023 found no evidence that he violated House rules, mishandled classified information, or committed criminal wrongdoing. (Oddly, the committee’s determination that Swalwell had done nothing wrong was itself kept secret from the public until Swalwell published it.)

That raises a straightforward question: what did those investigations actually examine? And if they did not uncover Swalwell’s misconduct, how confident should we be in their scope and effectiveness? If evidence of this conduct existed, why was he reappointed to one of the most sensitive committees in Congress? And if it did not, how good were those investigations in the first place?

There is another, more uncomfortable question. Some people are now coming out of the woodwork to say Swalwell spoke with other members about his multiple “relationships.” I wouldn’t trust anything I see on Twitter, and I wonder how anyone would know what was said in a private conversation. And yet, Rep. Matt Gaetz apparently showed nude photos of his “sexual escapades” (ugh) to other lawmakers and enough sources confirmed it for it to be reported on. Staff, of course, would have suspected, if not known about Swalwell, and it’s not surprising that staff in his office are declining to stand by him.

And yet none of this made its way into public reporting until now. (Right wing news media focused on allegations regarding Christine Fang, the alleged Chinese spy, but not on this misconduct.) Did Swalwell have a reputation and legitimate journalists chose not to report it? Were other members of Congress aware and chose not to act? Did leadership know—and if so, what did they do with that information? Clearly the staff who were the targets of his advances knew what was going on, but there is a long history of staff being intimidated, coerced, or otherwise prevented from reporting misconduct.

None of this is new. Members of Congress behaving badly toward their staff has been a persistent feature of the institution. If you read the debates and reports in the lead up to the original Congressional Accountability Act in 1995, you will find example after example of staff being treated as sexual objects, subjected to discriminatory pay practices, and forced to endure plainly abusive working conditions. In the wake of #MeToo, it became clear that the systems Congress had created to address workplace misconduct were not designed to expose it, but to contain it. Settlements were hidden. Processes were opaque. Accountability was limited. The passive voice was used.

Congress responded with the Congressional Accountability Act Enhancement Act of 2019. At the time, we argued that the legislation did not go far enough. We wrote letters, offered detailed critiques, and met with staff to make the case. Among other things, we argued that employees should not be able to contract away their rights through nondisclosure agreements or employment contracts. The statute itself did not fully address that concern. From what I recall, the implementing guidance addressed the NDA issue. But if these allegations are accurate, it appears that NDAs may still have been used to silence those he reportedly assaulted.

One of the principal reasons staff do not speak out is simple: they will be blackballed. We have seen this repeatedly. Staff who come forward find themselves unable to secure future employment in Congress. And because congressional service is often an entry point into other opportunities, speaking out can foreclose a career. If Congress is serious about addressing misconduct, it needs to address that reality. Staff who make credible allegations should be supported in finding employment in other offices so they can continue their public service.

There is also a structural problem with how misconduct is covered. Reporters rely on access. Members of Congress control that access. And when misconduct involves powerful figures, there are strong incentives not to report aggressively—whether to maintain relationships, preserve sources, or avoid being frozen out. We have seen similar dynamics in other contexts, including when members are plainly unable to perform their duties (e.g., Dianne Feinstein). Reporters know, but some do not report, because doing so would cost them access. It is a problem of incentives.

We may soon hear a great deal about “due process.” I expect a great thrumming from the punditariat and those allied with Swalwell in the hopes of saving his job, or those in similar positions hoping to save theirs. Some will analogize ethics proceedings to criminal trials—presumption of innocence, juries, extended timelines. But we should be clear about the distinction. Criminal proceedings can result in the loss of liberty. Ethics proceedings can result, at most, in the loss of a seat in the House of Representatives. It’s not the same. The dangers that arise from a compromised or criminal member of Congress is in the policy they make so long as they can vote and influence policy.

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What process is appropriately due in that context?

Historically, there was no House Ethics Committee, or even a Committee on Standards of Official Conduct. These matters could be addressed on the floor, and usually prompted by scandal. (This is assuming that party leadership didn’t deal with it first.) The ability to bring ethics matters directly to the House floor remains one of the few ways to obtain an expeditious resolution in cases of egregious misconduct. There are now efforts to limit the ability of members to offer privileged resolutions to bring such matters forward. See, for example, this proposal by Reps. Don Bacon and Don Beyer. While well intended, those efforts are misguided. They would further entrench a system that already struggles to act.

The House Ethics Committee serves an important function, but as an enforcement mechanism it has significant limitations. Members of Congress are, in effect, judging one another. They have strong incentives to be generous in their interpretations, both to preserve relationships and to ensure that they would receive similar treatment if the roles were reversed. History has shown this is a recipe for undersight, not oversight.

The Office of Congressional Ethics was created to address some of these concerns in the wake of the major failings of the Ethics Committee. It is nonpartisan and staffed with experienced investigators. It lacks subpoena power, however, and members can refuse to cooperate. It should be stronger, but some members keep trying to weaken it, and the Ethics Committee resents its independence. Ultimately, its authorities and incentives are not well matched to the scale of the problem.

All of this is compounded by politics. The House majority is narrow. The loss of even one or two members can shift control of the chamber. That creates a powerful disincentive to act, even in cases where misconduct is clear. The case of Rep. George Santos demonstrated that outcomes can depend as much on political calculations as on the underlying facts. (He was an obvious charlatan, and leadership’s antipathy for him personally expedited matters.)

One final point: The continued presence of members who engage in unethical or unlawful behavior is an institutional failure. Congress’s credibility is not undermined simply because misconduct occurs, but when that misconduct is not addressed. That is where individual misconduct can metastasize to something that threatens the entire body. We’ve seen this cancer spread to the point the Senate undermined the removal process for President Trump after the January 6 insurgency. Now Congress refuses to hold him to account for his manifest corruption. That, too, is an ethics failure—and it is the one that matters most.

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This past week the Trump administration dug in its heels over a fight on Department of Homeland Security funding—and, on Capitol Hill, is now in the final stages of losing the legislative fight but is hoping to leverage it for a unitary executive win.

Democrats agreed to fund DHS broadly, proposing to carve out additional funding for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is already operating with supercharged resources and multi-year funding authority following enactment of the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill.” The administration appears intent on deploying ICE/CBP as a kind of domestic militarized shock troops against perceived enemies. At the administration’s urging, House Republicans rejected the Senate-passed compromise; now, at that same urging, Mike Johnson is attempting to get them to reverse course and pass the very approach they walked away from.

In the meantime, the White House has shifted from legislating to dictating—directing agencies to continue paying DHS personnel without enacted appropriations. That is plainly unlawful, and it aligns with the broader effort for the administration to seize control of the spending power.

What makes this episode more consequential is that the administration’s move both concedes the legislative fight and begins to make legislation beside the point.

At the same time, Republicans are increasingly looking to budget reconciliation as a substitute vehicle for funding decisions it was never designed to carry, further displacing the appropriations process. That pressure is not limited to DHS; it is also being driven by the demands of an unpopular, unauthorized, and very expensive war that is going poorly for the United States. The administration’s just-released budget proposal calls for a 44% increase in military spending, to $1.5 trillion (and 10% cuts in non-defense programs).

Looming over all of this is October 1. Is there a plausible path to enacting appropriations bills on time? At the moment, it is difficult to see one.

The default backup plan is a continuing resolution, but the incentives are misaligned: Democrats are likely to prefer a CR into January, while Republicans will push to resolve funding after the election. Democrats are playing for when they control at least one chamber; Republicans, for as long as they hold a trifecta. The choice appears to be binary.

Layer on the congressional calendar: a compressed schedule, with members increasingly pulled into campaign mode starting in July, effectively no time in Washington in August and October, and only a handful of legislative days in September.

This forthcoming calamity is an opportunity for the Trump administration to double-down on its authoritarian ways: by asserting spending authority on its own.

For those who assume that a Democratic House would moderate this dynamic, it is worth questioning that assumption. Trump’s response to challenges to his authority is to double down, not moderate his behavior.

A House that more aggressively exercises its oversight and appropriations powers would likely raise the stakes, not lower them—and the administration’s response will be to push harder against both the institution and its members. I’d expect a heightening of tensions and further efforts by the administration to attack members of Congress individually and as an aggregate.

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Prosecuting Congress. A New York Times profile of Rep. LaMonica McIver turns on a question that should matter well beyond her case: the extent to which the executive branch can threaten the independence of members of Congress for doing their jobs. At issue is the scope—and real-world durability—of the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause, as Rep. McIver argues her actions during an ICE oversight visit were protected legislative activity while prosecutors claim otherwise. The challenges she is running into paying for her lawyers against a prosecution with unbounded resources illustrate the dilemma.

President Trump is known for pushing the Justice Department to prosecute his enemies on spurious grounds, such as the accusations of mortgage fraud against Sen. Schiff and efforts to recall Sen. Kelly to military duty to punish him for urging troops to disobey illegal orders. In fact, Trump pushed out Attorney General Pam Bondi, who bent over backwards for the president’s revenge tour, because she wasn’t acting with sufficient alacrity.

Keeping notes. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel pumped out another spurious legal opinion declaring unconstitutional the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which states that the official records of U.S. Presidents are public records and must be preserved by the National Archives. The tell for how overwrought these opinions are is the number of times they cite other OLC opinions. There are thousands of secret OLC opinions, which we believe should be brought to light. Why the attack on the PRA? As we learned in the TV show The Wire, you don’t want to keep around notes of a criminal conspiracy.

Who’s the boss? Speaking of the National Archives, the acting Archivist of the United States just abruptly quit. The story is just bizarre. The acting archivist, who was on leave from the Richard Nixon Foundation, lol, quit in the wake of a lawsuit concerning his unwillingness to preserve records. It’s unclear who the acting Archivist is now, although according to CNN, it’s Edward Forst, GSA’s administrator.

Congress Press. Congratulations to Derek Willis who just published 673,521 press releases from 860 members of congress from the last 26 years, all in a structured data format. You can find his announcement here and the data here.

GPO, the Government Publishing Office, has a new printer. Well, per their press release (sorry for the pun), it’s a Koenig & Bauer Rapida 106 LED UV offset press that “represents the most advanced offset printing technology currently available.” What it means is they can print more pages, faster, and rapidly detect and fix problems.

Crime Shouldn’t Pay. Members of the Trump insurrectionist mob that sacked the U.S. Capitol “are suing the federal government for tens of millions of dollars in damages, claiming that the ‘indiscriminate’ use of force by police officers repelling the attack caused them physical and emotional injuries.” Yes, this is the latest grift by criminals pardoned by the Trump administration, and their buddies who merely got lost on their impromptu Capitol tours, to get paid off by the guy who called them to attack Congress in the first place. Will the Department of Justice settle the lawsuit on sweet terms for the president’s criminal allies? The DOJ agreed to pay Ashli Babbitt’s family nearly $5 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit after she was shot trying to storm into the House chamber along with an angry mob.

How to strengthen federal inspectors general is the subject of a new report by students at Princeton, who took a deep look at what it would take to reform and protect these federal watchdogs.

Too old? The New York Times looked into extraordinarily elderly black members of Congress who are declining to retire. The Times story is interesting, but I think it missed a crucial issue. The older black members of Congress also were the core of Pelosi’s political machine and likely will be the core of Jeffries’ machine as well, making a deal to provide unified political support in return for placement in key roles. They did not necessarily share a common ideology, but did engage in a very effective form of group negotiation. Younger black members may be less likely to make that deal, as they may more closely identify with particular ideological goals, and thus generational turnover may allow the factions within the Democratic party to have more sway over policymaking.

The last word. Don’t blame Chris for today’s newsletter: he’s on vacation, and I just got back. I can tell I’m more than a little rusty. Let us know in the comments what we got right and what we missed.

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Staffing levels in the House reflect budget decisions for the legislative branch. When Member Representational Allowances increased in legislative year 2023, staffing levels rose quickly across the House. Since then budgets have remained flat and staffing levels began to decline again during legislative year 2025.

These recent budget constraints are accelerating changing workforce strategies inside congressional offices. Looking across nearly a decade of data from House statements of disbursement, permanent entry-level roles are gradually declining while the hiring of interns and other non-permanent staff has surged. These shifts have significant implications for workforce development over the long term in House offices.

This pattern began in 2019, when Congress created a fund to allow every personal office to pay interns. In the House, member offices soon created many new non-permanent positions while keeping the rest of the workforce relatively steady. By 2021, there were more non-permanent staff than members of constituent service teams. By 2023, interns and temporary staff surpassed the number of permanent administrative staff. Over the same period, only communications staff grew overall, but at a much slower rate and in lower overall numbers.

Today, non-permanent staff represent one of the largest sources of capacity inside the House as over 5,750 interns worked in member offices in 2025. In 2020, congressional offices averaged roughly one intern for every ten staff members. By 2025, that ratio had doubled to two interns for every ten staff members. Interns and other non-permanent staff currently account for about 19 percent of total workforce capacity, second only to Legislative staff at about 21 percent.

The HillClimbers platform can track these changes because our dataset standardizes thousands of job titles into functional teams such as legislative, district, communications, administrative, leadership, and interns. Because some staff hold multiple roles, the counts use a “single role plus” method. Staff with a single role count fully, while staff with multiple roles are divided between their assignments. This prevents double counting while still capturing how offices distribute work. HillClimbers also can track when people holding these roles are assigned to an office on a daily basis. That data is revealing how the use of internships has shifted.

The Intern Workforce Is Now Continuous

Internship cycles once followed a predictable academic rhythm. Numbers rose in the summer and dropped sharply in the fall and spring. Summer internships still represent the largest share of the intern workforce and the largest-growing cohort of seasonal workers. However, fall and spring internship programs have expanded significantly as well.

Interns are increasingly present throughout the entire year rather than concentrated only during the summer months. In practical terms, nearly one out of every five people working in a congressional office is a House-paid intern on any given day.

Job postings reflect the same shift. Instead of generic summer internship positions, offices increasingly advertise specific roles such as spring legal intern, fall press intern, or summer district intern. These titles closely resemble the functions traditionally performed by permanent entry level staff.

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A Workforce Substitution

Looking more closely at entry-level roles reveals where much of the change is occurring. The number of staff assistants, one of the most common entry points into congressional careers, has declined steadily over the past decade. Legislative correspondent and aide roles have also declined. Field representatives and constituent services staff have remained relatively stable but show gradual downward pressure. At the same time, communications roles have expanded.

These changes are visible when entry-level roles are tracked daily across the House workforce

Taken together, staff assistants and legislative correspondents or aides declined from about 1,883 positions in 2016 to 1,574 in 2025, a reduction of roughly 16 percent in these core entry-level roles.

The pattern suggests that the traditional first rung of congressional careers is narrowing. Fewer permanent entry-level positions exist than a decade ago, even as offices continue to face the same workload demands.

Intern programs, meanwhile, have expanded dramatically during the same period. Interns now represent a growing share of office capacity and increasingly fill roles that resemble the responsibilities traditionally associated with early career staff. Offices still need people to answer constituent requests, support legislative work, manage communications, and assist with research. But the workforce fulfilling those tasks appears to be shifting toward more temporary roles.

Budget constraints likely play an important role. Member office budgets have not kept pace with inflation or the rising costs of operating offices in Washington and in districts. When resources remain fixed but workloads continue to grow, offices may rely more heavily on temporary labor.

Why This Matters for Congress

Is Congress gradually replacing the first rung of its career ladder with a rotating internship workforce? If more daily staff capacity relies on positions that reset every academic term, offices may face growing challenges maintaining continuity, training, and institutional memory. Internships are temporary by design. Most interns remain in offices for only a few months, and relatively few continue working on Capitol Hill long term. Since 2009, only 13% of Interns have remained or returned to the House.

Internships play an important role in congressional offices. They provide valuable opportunities for students and help offices manage demanding workloads. But the shift toward a larger non-permanent workforce may also have broader institutional consequences.

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The Congressional Data Task Force convened Thursday, benefiting from a nice venue upgrade inside the Capitol Visitor Center. These quarterly meetings highlight the great collaborative work taking place behind the scenes across legislative branch offices to unlock the enormous amount of information about what Congress is doing and has done in the past. It’s work that levels the playing field for members of Congress, legislative staff, and the public in terms of situational awareness and deeper institutional knowledge, which is why we think it’s so important.

The task force is reaching a new level of collaborative innovation by supporting the interest of congressional staff and members of civil society in using new technologies to make even more information available and to solve institutional challenges. With that in mind, AGI has requested the House Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee provide funds for CDTF to create a full-time coordinator position in the next fiscal year.

We will provide another summary on the Congressional Data Coalition website when we can cross-reference my notes and the video, but here’s what stood out from the presentations:

First, a few question marks

In FY2023, the House Appropriations Committee accepted the Clerk of the House’s assessment that creating a publicly-available lobbying disclosure system that included unique identifiers for individuals would require an overhaul of the system and provided $1.4 million to do so. The Clerk’s Office and Secretary of the Senate have been working on the system, but going on four years later, the Senate still has no timeline for rolling out its unique identifiers. It’s not fair to blame the technical staff for some hang-up that appears to be out of their control, but this long of a delay is puzzling.

At a CDTF meeting last fall, the Library of Congress teased the release of an annual report for Congress.gov for FY 2026. Thursday, it was revealed that the report is available on the Congress.gov website (here it is), which we very much appreciate. The Library is doing well to be responsive to the needs of users of the site, which is a significant lift given that it saw more than 82 million visits and 176 million page views in FY 2025, huge leaps in both metrics from the previous year. It’s held public forums to gather feedback since 2020 and has gathered more from interviews.

The report lists suggestions from its feedback repository, which the Library reviews with the other members of the CDTF to determine feasibility and level of priority. As the report notes, significant planning and coordination goes into the editing and publishing processes that make access to information on Congress.gov possible. Its list of user requests, however, only indicates whether an idea would be “impacted by current upstream system limitations” or not, without much context for what these challenges may be.

To be certain, some requests and feedback from users that may seem straightforward are actually complicated or are caught up in congressional rules (see, committees owning their data). We have some concern, however, that the Library might be playing too cautiously with aligning upstream systems for information it has its own resources to gather, and likely is somewhere.

Take, for example, the process for posting appropriations-related materials on Congress.gov. At the height of appropriations season, subcommittees often circulate bill text and report language via email to interested parties on Friday afternoons or post them on websites asynchronously with committee hearings or markups. They often come in a rush, leaving members and the public who do not subscribe to expensive alert services or are not checking obsessively themselves at a disadvantage when engagement is critical in the process. The Library currently waits, however, until materials have been sent to and published by GPO, which is often after the committee has approved the text, too late to affect the outcome.

CRS is tasked with publishing the appropriations status tables that appear on Congress.gov, which are extremely helpful one-stop resources for a lot of material from a dozen subcommittees times two chambers. CRS analysts almost certainly are keeping track of sporadic releases, or at least could be with minimal time investment. CRS posting that material to Congress.gov when it is first available would greatly enrich the value of the tables as a free, public resource. Accordingly, AGI has proposed appropriators include report language requesting immediate posting of materials released by subcommittees and full committees by CRS in the FY 2027 bill.

Government Publishing Office

The team digitizing the Congressional Serial Set, compilations of House and Senate documents and reports from each Congress, has about 4,500 volumes left to go. It has completed volumes from the entire 20th century.

GPO, the Office of Federal Records, and the National Archives hit another major milestone by completing implementation of the USLM XML format for its digitized volumes of the historical U.S. Statutes at Large collection.

The office also is working on several new collaborative projects, notably an effort with the Congressional Budget Office to format some of its projection models into USLM XML. Expanding use of the USLM schema makes the exchange of information in various legislative branch systems possible, ensuring interoperability that expands the possibilities of what tools can deliver for users.

House Chief Administrative Officer

Responding to recommendations of the House Select Committee on Modernization, the CAO has provided new guidance for vendors interested in selling technology services into the House on the House website. The Committee on House Administration has set a number of standards for vendors to protect House data and speech and debate rights, but new entrants into the chamber marketplace often were unaware of them, leading to product rejections that could have been avoided.

The new guidance includes information for cloud services most notably. CAO also has created a new unsolicited tech pitch page for services and products that includes the option to upload a five-minute demonstration video. We’ll be very interested in seeing what they receive, how member and committee staff are brought into the process of vetting pitches, and potential benefit to the Congressional Hackathon.

CAO also has launched the first ever downloadable and subscribable voting calendar for the House that dynamically updates when votes and pro forma sessions are taking place. The calendar, a collaborative effort of the House Digital Service and the House Clerk, can be embedded in members’ and organizations’ websites and even customized to match web page color palettes. See the sidebar of the legislative activity page on House.gov for the links.

Finally, CAO announced it had brought control of all House Committee videos under its in-house studio to simplify their custody. In addition to processing the video, the studio will provide them to Congress.gov, which requires matching up the YouTube or Vimeo post with the hearing ID. We think this change will boost accessibility for the videos going forward.

Linking video data to hearings in the metadata remains a challenge, however, for making past recordings useful to Congress.gov. It doesn’t sound like the CAO is going to devote resources to doing so, focusing on hearings as they come. Fortunately, AGI is planning to launch a tech project to use AI to identify likely matches between hearings and video automatically.

House Clerk

Now that the Legislative Branch Data Map has come together through a partnership between the House Digital Service and Congressional Data Coalition, the Clerk is adding Data Catalog Vocabulary (or DCAT) standards for the datasets. The descriptors in these standards make data catalogs published on the Web interoperable and more easily discovered.

In the Clerk’s Office presentation, Kirsten Gullickson also highlighted two findings of a recent collaborative legislative drafting study the Clerk and House Office of Legislative Counsel delivered to the Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee. Clerk Kevin McCumber mentioned them during the recent budget hearing: a member drafting portal so offices can track the status of requests made to the Office of Legislative Counsel (cutting email ping-pong); and a lightweight editor member staff could use to make changes to non-legal text of bill drafts themselves.

Secretary of the Senate

Senate Webmaster Arin Shapiro shared that the new Senate website is in development and is aiming for launch over the summer recess.

Enhanced information about Senate committees is now available on Congress.gov, including assignments listed on each member page and membership (including for subcommittees) on committee pages. Senate committee schedules also are available on Congress.gov. Internal users can track the full text of amendments in machine-readable format.

Library of Congress

The FY 2026 annual report for congress.gov that was mentioned above also listed the team’s priority initiatives for this fiscal year. The Senate committee information integration was one. Others include:

• Adding Senate days in session

• Searchable statute compilations

• Automating the workflow of adding official titles to bills engrossed in the House

• Improving access to Senate amendment texts from 2001 to 2015

• Automating the workflow of curating Senate resolution texts

• Fulfilling a Select Committee on Modernization’s recommendation by establishing a data source with the Clerk’s Office and the House Rules Committee to be able to add House Rules amendments to members’ profile pages on Congress.gov.

• Continued congressional and public client interviews on user experience.

The list also included providing a timeline for fulfilling a ModCom recommendation that Congress.gov provide information on related bills by February 1, 2026. The presentation did not include details about this timeline, so it’s worth following up about this in the next meeting.

The next public forum for Congress.gov will be the afternoon of September 24.

Civil Society

George Mason professor Jennifer Victor provided a demonstration of a project that captures her research into members’ participation in the caucus system and the networks between members it creates. Victor and her teams of student assistants built a database of all caucus membership between the 103rd and 116th Congresses using bound copies of Leadership Directories. The data can be queried via her Caucus Explorer platform. It also can generate network matrixes for members and caucuses.

The data can be downloaded by users, making this to our knowledge the best and perhaps only comprehensive source of caucus membership information around. Unbeknownst to us at the time, we completed Victor’s data for the 117th-119th Congresses’ membership in major ideological caucuses. That dataset is also available within GovTrack.

Joining from Portugal, Daniel Schuman shared AGI’s latest work to support the legislative data and technology infrastructure of Congress. First, he revealed a list we started compiling via crowdsourcing of active technology projects within or related to the legislative branch last month. View or contribute to the list at the Congressional Data Coalition website.

We also highlighted some relevant public witness testimony submitted to the House Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee last week, including:

• AGI’s request for funding for 1 FTE to support the CDTF

• Joe Eannello on updating the CRS Appropriations Status table to include bill text and report language at the earliest point made publicly available

• Nick Hart, Data Foundation, on funding & accessibility of the Legislative Branch Data Technology Map

• JD Rackey of BPC on funding for the Modernization Initiatives Account; Lorelei Kelly, Public Good Group on funding for MIA & Clerk

• Michael Stern on improving information about the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group on the House Office of General Counsel website

• Jim Townsend, Levin Center, on GPO hosting IG reports

• Haiman Wong, R Street, Sean Vitka Demand Progress, and Daniel Schuman of AGI on strengthening congressional cybersecurity

Daniel also shared news that AGI is launching several tech projects for the good of the legislative branch, including:

• Transforming appropriations bills and reports into data

• Tracking changes in appropriations report language

• Automatically identifying reporting requirements in bill text or report language

Building off our engagement with Bússola Tech in Brazil, Daniel shared the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s use cases for AI in parliaments compilation.

Finally, Daniel shared a reminder that the “Data Skills for Congress” professional certificate program, a free online series of training, will be offered again this summer from June 28 through August 27. It is sponsored by the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley and supported by USAFacts.

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ETHICS HEARING

Now that the House Ethics Committee has found Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick guilty on 25 of 27 counts related to improper use of a government overpayment to her business, the body will decide next month on recommendations for her punishment, including expulsion.

Some Democrats said they would prefer seeing how her criminal case plays out before taking action to expel her, which is not what happened in the case of former Rep. George Santos. But the ethics system shouldn’t simply be a mirror of the criminal justice system. The House has an obligation to set its own professional and personal standards of conduct and to hold members accountable to them. Now that its ethics process has run its course, it’s up to members, not jurors or voters, to decide Cherfilus-McCormick’s fate.

CONGRESSIONAL MODERNIZATION IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

Bússola Tech, the Organization of American States, and AGI recently organized a high-level roundtable of congressional stakeholders to discuss the state of modernization efforts in the House and Senate and how they relate to challenges facing other countries’ parliaments. The discussion honed in on the institutional requirements for modernizing practices and systems and handling new developments like artificial intelligence.

The event was also an opportunity to honor the career of recently-retired House CAO Catherine Szpindor, who was pivotal to House transformation efforts.

Bussola Tech has published a recap of the event, available here.

ODDS & ENDS

Daniel recently participated in the second annual Open Source Conference organized by George Washington University’s Open Source Program Office. We hope this community becomes more connected with congressional tech enthusiasts.

Security $$$. Members of Congress collectively used $1.3 million of MRA funds on security services in 2025, according to Legistorm. A total of 228 members reported one security-related expense. Spending actually peaked in 2023, with members using $2.16 million on security. This current figure is in line with recent averages. Nevertheless, it’s still another downward pressure on budgets for staff.

Don’t bet on it. Rep. Seth Moulton appears to be the first member to outlaw staffers from participating in prediction markets.

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If you missed my recap of House Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee hearings from last week, the headline is emergency renovations to the Rayburn building and a request for a 20% increase from the U.S. Capitol Police are going to cannibalize the legislative branch budget unless its top line is raised by nearly a billion dollars. This hit comes amidst an environment in which austerity and inflation already are stretching key legislative branch offices to the limit. GAO, for example, asked for a modest budget increase after three full fiscal years of flat budgets and still is planning to eliminate more than 140 FTEs.

With the USCP budget surpassing $1 billion and the AOC needing close to a billion dollars more in FY 2027 to start an expensive multi-year project, maybe appropriators finally will say what’s a few billion more and level up the entire legislative branch budget to where it belongs. It’s worth remembering that over the last 50 fiscal years, spending on the legislative branch has averaged 0.4% of federal discretionary spending. CHA Ranking Member Joe Morelle endorsed finally doing more with more in last week’s markup.

An additional route would be to explore alternative funding sources for larger agencies so they don’t gobble up too much of the legislative branch’s 302(b). It’s worth examining whether the USCP could draw funds from defense discretionary appropriations (where the $170 million increase the department has requested for FY 2027 would be the equivalent of four hours of the Iran war) or possibly mandatory spending. Congress also should have a better understanding of the nature of the threat environment it faces and whether resources are being funneled into tracking and investigating non-credible threats at unsustainable levels.

Given its direct oversight role, GAO’s budget should be scaling with the size of the federal bureaucracy. It is going in the other direction. In FY 1992, GAO received 0.08% of federal discretionary funds. Its current funding is almost half of that figure. If appropriators will not increase its budget directly, GAO should be able to explore alternative funding sources that state oversight bodies, other federal agencies, and similar entities around the world use to supplement their operating costs.

TALES FROM THE USCP IG

Without adequate controls in place, the US Capitol Police bought four firearms and use-of-force training simulators but only had room to install two, a recent inspector general report explains. The simulators that have not been installed are needed to start training required in a directive from 2024. The department spent more than $500,000 on the simulators.

The department IG also recently found that USCP is not following standard operating procedure established in 2009 to hold semi-annual audits of issued keys. It hasn’t checked on the possession of keys with each authorized key holder since audits were halted during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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CONGRESSIONAL INDEPENDENCE

Reform to the appointment process of some legislative branch officers is paused for the moment. The Committee on House Administration pulled the Legislative Branch Agencies Clarification Act (H.R. 6028) from its scheduled markup last Wednesday at the last minute. Chair Bryan Steil said that the committee would work on amending the legislation further to give it a better chance to pass.

The original version of the bill changes nominations for the Librarian of Congress and Director of the Government Publishing Office, removing the President from the process and granting a bipartisan congressional commission power of appointment. It also makes the Librarian and GPO Director positions subject to removal by a majority vote of House and Senate leadership only.

To provide additional organizational independence to the Copyright Office, the bill also removes the Library’s supervisory authority over it and grants the President appointment power for the Register of Copyrights. The Librarian currently appoints the Register.

These changes are important reinforcements of legislative branch independence after the president’s firing of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and attempted firing of Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter (who was reinstated by a federal court) last May. The statute granting presidential nomination power for the Librarian position is silent on removal, but the White House’s explanations of why Hayden was fired sounded political. As we wrote at the time, “the second branch of government should not be able to dictate the operations of the first branch of government.”

The bill also brings two more legislative branch offices into alignment with the Architect of the Capitol’s amended selection process. After a misuse of government property scandal involving Architect J. Brett Blanton, Congress changed the nomination and firing procedures for the position after frustration with President Biden’s slow reaction. That position now is nominated and dismissed through a commission of House and Senate leadership and the chairs and ranking members of relevant committees. Ultimately, we believe the heads of all legislative branch offices should be nominated exclusively by the members they serve.

MEMBER PAY

The committee also unanimously advanced an amended version of H.R. 5891, which withholds member pay during government shutdowns. Introduced in response to last fall’s government shutdown, the bill had been pulled from a previous markup in January.

This is the type of virtue signaling bill we think actually is counterproductive and potentially harmful to the democratic nature of Congress. It offers weak deterrence to initiating government shutdowns because it does not align with what really causes them, which is the desire to intensify the contrast between political positions of the two parties. Voters being courted with such measures already have low trust in government institutions, and self-castigation does not restore it. Pay deferral also unfairly punishes members without enough personal wealth not to rely on their congressional paycheck to pay the bills and further disincentivizes people of modest means from running for federal office.

Rep. Norma Torres spoke of the challenges wage-earning people face running for elected office – she began her career as a 9-1-1 dispatcher – but voted along with her Democratic colleagues to advance the bill anyway.

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ODDS & ENDS

OCWR deadline. Today is the deadline for submission of comments to the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights on possible changes to its claims filing process, preliminary review process, deadlines, and mediation procedures among other policies. Instructions for submission and more information can be found here.

ICYMI: Senate Approps guidance: The Senate Appropriations Committee has issued its request guidance for program and language requests and Congressionally Directed Spending requests. These deadlines have been entered into our appropriations process tracker.

Faction. Access journalism is framing potential new Democratic members of the House’s reluctance to support Leader Hakeem Jeffries for Speaker in personalist terms. We would counter that, it’s more important for incoming members to the left of Jeffries to think about self-organizing in ways that expand their legislative role than it is who they will select as a leader.

Masterclass. James Wallner and Matt Glassman discuss Senate procedure and political theater with the FAI’s Tim Hwang.

Proper spending. Protect Democracy goes under the hood of how to identify anomalous apportionments, which it is helping to track with its OpenOMB project.

Transitions. It was good to see the Washington Post’s Paul Kane cite in his farewell the Bipartisan Policy Center’s J.D. Rackey and Michael Thorning’s recent report launching their examination of congressional weakness and paths to restoration.

Member wealth. The new NOTUS special report on members’ private assets is impressive.

Protest votes. A new study by Profs. Anthony Fowler and Jeffrey Lewis reveals that current methodologies for tracking ideology in Congress do not account for protest votes by members frustrated with their own party’s position on an issue. Correcting for these votes reveals that polarization may have started earlier than scholars previously thought, and that polarization may be slightly more intense than roll-call votes without this context indicate.

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Before getting into the details of the hearings, here is a recap of the shared office and House-side office requests for FY 2027 submitted to the subcommittee, by order of size of the request:

The Architect of the Capitol: Total budget request of $1.6 billion – an increase of $788 million over FY 2026, a 105% increase

• The near-doubling of the AOC year-over-year request is to launch a major renovation of the Rayburn House Office Building, which is at risk of “catastrophic systems failure.”

United States Capitol Police: Total budget request of $1.02 billion – an increase of $169.7 million over FY 2026, or nearly a 20% increase

• $734 million for salaries and benefits – an increase of $89.6 million over FY 2026.

• $273 million for general fund expenses – an increase of $69.5 million over FY 2026.

• $15.7 million for additional security enhancements.

Government Accountability Office: Total budget authorization request of $910.3 million, with offsets bringing the appropriation down to $860.1 million – an increase of $48.2 million over FY 2026

• The additional funds will cover cost-of-living increases that GAO has absorbed because of flat budgets since FY 2024.

• GAO is proposing cutting 143 full-time positions through early retirement and voluntary separation to lower personnel costs.

Office of the Chief Administrative Officer: Total budget request of $253.1 million – a $19.8 million or 8.5% increase over FY 2026

• $15.9 for increased sustainment costs for personnel ($5.2 million) and program ($10.7 million) like cost of living increases, software license renewals, and increased contractor costs.

• $3.4 million for a variety of new high-priority projects.

House Sergeant at Arms: Total budget request of $147.3 million – an increase of $6.7 million or 4.75% over FY 2026

• $23.75 million for 221 FTEs, an increase of five from FY 2026.

• $2.1 million in additional funds for the Residential Security Program – a 2% increase from FY 2026.

• $2.8 million in additional funds for the District Office Security Program – a 2.5% increase from FY 2026.

Congressional Budget Office: Total budget request of $76.3 million – a $1.5 million or 2% increase over FY 2026

• 85% of the increased funds would go to staff pay and benefits.

House Clerk: Total budget request of $51.8 million – a 5.71% increase over FY 2026

• A $1.7 million net increase in program changes.

Office of the Legislative Counsel: Total budget request of $19.2 million – a 2.5% increase over FY 2026

• Additional funds would go to cost-of-living increases. It should be noted that OLC was able to hire an additional 17 attorneys this Congress with additional investment in FY 2026, increasing its attorney pool by nearly 60%.

Office of Inspector General: Total budget request of $6.4 million – a $134,000 or 2.2% increase from FY 2026 to keep up with inflation.

Office of Law Revision Counsel: Total budget request of $4.1 million– an 18% decrease over FY 2026

Office of General Counsel: Total budget request of $2.1 million – about a 2% increase over FY 2026.

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SUMMARY & ANALYSIS

This set of requests is the kind of perfect storm we always fear. Congressional preference to defer maintenance on its buildings once again has come back to bite appropriators, as it did with the Capitol’s crumbling dome and the similar need to make emergency renovations of the Cannon Building. Adding the funding increases requested by AOC and USCP, the legislative branch budget would need to increase by $958 million before appropriators even get to the rest of the requests enumerated above. That’s more than 13% of the FY 2026 appropriation for the entire legislative branch. (also recall, the Library of Congress asked for an additional $34.4 million several weeks ago.)

The roughly $80 million in additional funds requested in last week’s hearings reflect the increasing costs of doing business that Congress is experiencing along with every other American employer.

If appropriators try to whittle down a nearly billion-dollar increase figure by imposing blanket austerity, they will break the legislative branch. Members’ increasing demands for services from these offices already are overheating their capacity. The inflationary environment will worsen the impact of freezes and cuts to other offices in the search for what would really amount to spare change with the numbers involved. If the AOC and USCP cannibalize more of the legislative branch budget, Congress will face a human capital crisis.

As a reminder, we keep a repository of previous legislative branch appropriations documents on GitHub.

FROM THE HEARING ROOM

In keeping with First Branch Forecast practice, I tried to attend most of the hearings. I was the only person from civil society to attend any as far as I could tell, and I saw a reporter only at the Capitol Police hearing. The lack of a public witness day may have dampened interest, but it was discouraging given the importance of these offices to the institution.

Written public testimony from 17 witnesses is posted on the Appropriations Committee’s Member Day hearing page. AGI submitted testimony requesting the committee set aside funds for the Congressional Data Task Force to hire a full-time coordinator position to facilitate greater institutional awareness and collaboration regarding available data, ongoing tech projects, and AI experimentation.

AGI’s full set of policy recommendations for the FY 2027 legislative branch bills can be downloaded on our website.

Only Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington testified in person on Member Day, urging the committee to support an independent audit of the Congressional Budget Office. Only two members submitted written testimony: Rep. Sylvia Garcia in support of restoring the House Office of Diversity and Inclusion and job eligibility for DACA recipients, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib to propose a $20 million child care benefit for all House staff, including district office employees.

TL:DR

What stood out across the hearings I attended was that members of Congress have steadily ratcheted up their demands on legislative branch agencies without making commensurate investments in their capacity. Although this observation is not novel, it was evident in the details of the answers of witnesses across the hearings.

At times, members of the subcommittee (plus full committee ranking member Rosa DeLauro) asked witnesses in subcommittee hearings if their requests actually reflected what was needed to fulfill their missions. Witnesses demurred, but we know the answer is “no.” Leaders of legislative branch offices were cautious with their requests, with a few asking for additional money for programs in the single millions of dollars.

We would encourage members of the subcommittee to follow up with offices about not only the minimum they need for their missions, but the added capacity that would benefit the legislative branch overall. Legislative branch appropriations has been stuck in a cycle for some time where offices react to, and to some degree, anticipate member requests for services. The leaders of these agencies are disincentivized from proposing their vision for what they actually could deliver to the legislative branch if resources were less of a constraint. There should be more two-way dialogue about finding institutional solutions for the multitude of members’ needs.

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US CAPITOL POLICE

Chief Sullivan framed his request for additional funding in terms of the increasing threat environment facing members, their families, and staff. It wasn’t clear, however, in the subsequent discussion how much the explosion in recorded threats was responsible for the 20% increase in his budget request. Instead, the hearing generated a picture of a department stretched thin to secure the sprawling Capitol campus and respond to ever-growing member demands for added security. Sullivan mentioned an “exponential growth in the asks” made of the department. Members’ requests for USCP presence at codels, for example, have more than doubled since last year.

When pressed on staffing levels and high rates of overtime, Sullivan explained that the 1250 uniformed officers in posts around the Capitol complex were 150 short of the number needed to staff every post without having to use overtime. Reliance on overtime plays a role in officer turnover as Sullivan said the department has to draft officers regularly into overtime roles involuntarily. He also noted that every time members request additional doors of congressional office buildings be opened, it costs the department about $650,000.

How many officers would Sullivan want to add to be fully staffed? Although the department has added about 360 officers since 2021, he thinks the department is still about 500 short “to complete the workload that is being asked of the Capitol Police.” A question for the record on how the 15,000 incoming threats the department has cataloged adds to that workload would be useful, as it sounds like physical security from uniformed officers is the greatest demand driver.

The physical and architectural composition of the Capitol complex should be recognized as part of the problem. The older office buildings have many, narrow entrances. Closing some invariably adds to the lines on the sidewalks. The road network creates a maze of vehicle checkpoints. Nobody wants a Congress that is less accessible to the public, but the current threat reduction posture might simply be untenable with the number of manned posts it requires.

Despite the sticker shock of the budget request, members generally accepted the USCP description of need and solution, declining to interrogate how the other half of the force not patrolling the campus or manning checkpoints is making use of its resources. When subcommittee Chair David Valadao asked how many of the 15,000 threats required a significant level of investigation by the department, Sullivan had no numbers at the ready. Other members did not follow up on the investigative burdens of the department, which Sullivan said were complicated because “direction of interest” cases rarely lead to prosecution, but are done anyway to contribute to larger cases of threats.

Members did not raise governance or oversight issues with Chief Sullivan, who was making his first appearance in front of the subcommittee. We are hopeful that additional questions for the record will elicit Sullivan’s views on the independence of the USCP Board and whether it has the resources to provide sufficient oversight of the department.

HOUSE LEGISLATIVE SUPPORT OFFICES

Witnesses and staff from four of the seven House offices crammed into a Capitol meeting room the afternoon after Sullivan’s testimony, including House Clerk Kevin McCumber, Sergeant at Arms William McFarland, Acting Chief Administrative Officer Anne Dressendorfer Binsted, and Legislative Counsel Warren Burke. Here’s what stood out from statements and discussion:

HOUSE CLERK

• McCumber highlighted a number of modernization efforts and service improvements over the last fiscal year, including taking responsibility for the House digital calendar, closed captioning and Spanish language coverage of floor proceedings, and the completion of a report with the Office of Legislative Counsel on a legislative drafting portal.

• After the Clerk and Government Publishing Office implemented a process allowing members to waive GPO proofreading services for introduced bill drafts in September, McCumber reported that members chose the option about 10% of the time.

• Working with Senate partners, the Clerk launched the first deliverable for the lobbying disclosure system modernization project, a unified public search website (lda.gov).

SERGEANT AT ARMS

• McFarland noted that during FY 2026, SSA had deployed a new mobile duress app members could use when in the District but away from the Capitol complex and a secure member portal for their offices to access resources. The duress app, McFarland said, provided an accurate location for users up to 50 yards.

• This fall, SSA will deploy a common operating picture system that will be able to provide the location of members in the DC area and in their home districts at once.

• SSA projects to install 150 security systems in members’ residences in calendar year 2026 and 200 installations for former members.

CHIEF ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICER

• This was the first hearing for Acting CAO Binsted. She highlighted several high-priority projects in her written testimony:

  • House-wide multifactor authentication for mobile devices. Once deployed, it will allow multifactor authentication on House computers as well.

  • A secure testing environment within its cloud storage for the CAO to test custom AI tools with House data. Such a resource would allow CAO to experiment without exposing data outside of its own IT environment.

  • Modernization of House correspondence management systems by procuring a cloud-based bulk email system.

  • A centralized committee video repository to make archiving hearing video much easier after a change in majority.

OFFICE OF LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL

• Legislative Counsel Burke noted that his office was still experiencing a training bottleneck as attorneys needed to train their new colleagues along with completing their existing heavy workload. The training process, as we discussed with Burke’s predecessor Wade Ballou, takes years.

• AI, Burke noted, is likely to expand OLC’s workload. “Text produced by outside entities, whether a human or a computer, often takes significantly longer to review and revise as necessary to ensure the text accomplishes the sponsor’s intended policy goals,” Burke writes in his testimony.

GAO AND CBO

In her first hearing as Acting Comptroller General, Orice Williams Brown reasserted the value of GAO to the taxpayer, noting $62 billion in financial benefit last year through implemented recommendations. Staff reductions, however, will force the office into a reprioritization process, focusing on programs in national security and health care along with congressional mandates. These large and complex programs had the most potential for waste, fraud and abuse, she testified. Other audits will take longer to initiate.

Detecting misused funds, of course, is only one part of GAO’s responsibilities to Congress. Through her questioning, Rep. Maloy noted GAO plays a pivotal role in congressional oversight through program evaluation. It isn’t just that money allocated to programs may be wasted in execution: the programs themselves may be wasteful, ineffective, or redundant. But the growth of executive branch funding and personnel has put Congress in an arms race it is losing. “We need to question more often why we’re spending money on things and why we have the personnel in executive branch agencies that we have,” Maloy concluded. “We’re not just here to keep funding everything.” She stopped short, however, of reconsidering GAO’s request.

Rep. Steny Hoyer took the line up later, asking Brown directly if $910 million is enough to accomplish GAO’s mission and if she felt constrained to set a low budget request. After she navigated the questions carefully, Hoyer suggested greater reinvestment was needed. “My presumption is every increment that we cut, which is Miss Maloy’s contention, that as the executive department expands, our ability to oversee it diminishes very substantially,” he said.

CBO, too, was created to provide the legislative branch commensurate evaluative resources that previously only existed in the White House. Although Director Phillip Swagel spoke to revision and greater transparency of the agency’s predictive models, the hearing did not address whether CBO, too, was equipped to go toe-to-toe with executive branch capacity.

ARCHITECT OF THE CAPITOL

In the final hearing of the two-day blitz, Architect of the Capitol Thomas Austin laid out the consequences of deferred maintenance. Last year, the Rayburn Building experienced two electrical fires, 18 major leaks and dozens of elevator and escalator outages. Staff will have to relocate during phases of the renovations to “swing space” buildings. The project, he said, will require 15 to 20 years.

The Longworth Building, Austin noted, is not far behind Rayburn in terms of condition and also needs significant work. The AOC does not have the capacity to do both at the same time, however.

SENATE STIRRINGS

The Senate Appropriations Committee has issued its request guidance for program and language requests and Congressionally Directed Spending requests. The first deadline for programmatic requests is for the Legislative Branch subcommittee on April Fools Day. All deadlines except for Defense are in April.

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The House Appropriations Legislative Branch Subcommittee will speed-run four hearings for FY 2027 budget requests over two days this week. The action will start at 10:15 AM Tuesday when U.S. Capitol Police Chief Michael Sullivan appears to testify on the department’s budget, followed by a member day hearing at 11:30. Both will be held in 2362-B Rayburn HOB. The roster of members testifying is not available as of publication.

The full committee also will meet Tuesday at 2:00 PM to consider the budget requests of the House Clerk, Sergeant at Arms, Chief Administrative Officer, General Counsel, Inspector General, Law Revision Counsel, and Legislative Counsel. That hearing is in room H-140 of the Capitol.

Wednesday will be the Government Accountability Office and Congressional Budget Offices’ turns at 9:00 AM, the first budget hearing for acting Comptroller General Orice Williams Brown. The Architect of the Capitol will follow at 11:00 AM. Both hearings will be again in 2362-B Rayburn HOB.

Remember, we are tracking the member day hearing dates and the various deadlines for member and public witness requests and written testimony for all appropriations subcommittees with this tracker. Consider becoming a paid subscriber or donate to AGI so we can keep it up.

After this March blitz of hearings, House appropriators will continue the pace, according to Aidan Quigley and Paul Krawzak at CQ, looking to start markups in mid-April.

Amidst this initial flurry of activity, we believe members need to have serious conversations about increasing funding for foundational parts of the legislative branch. Hopefully, some participants in the members’ day hearing will get it started on staff pay as funding levels help disempower the legislative branch. House committee staff received an increase of less than 1% in FY 2026 after three straight years of flat funding. It’s not just that they need to be paid commensurate with their skills and experience, but there needs to be more of them. House member offices have a few more options to move money around to retain top staffers, but in amounts that often are insufficient.

Absent a significant 302(b) increase for the legislative branch, the U.S. Capitol Police continue to place considerable strain on the congressional budget overall. The increased threat environment, which USCP described last year through 15,000 recorded threatening or concerning comments, will keep funding demands high. The discrepancy between that figure and the number of investigations and prosecutions that result from USCP investigations, however, remains enormous. Members should be asking this week about how efficiently and effectively the department is operating with nearly a billion dollars and whether it has the appropriate oversight mechanisms in place through its board structure.

As we noted last fiscal year when the House put its budget in the crosshairs, GAO is the legislative branch agency that feels the most squeeze within the 302(b) constraints. Its allocation has been flat or close to it since FY 2023 while Congress has added to its workload through increasing numbers of mandatory reports. Taking a longer view, as we discussed with former comptroller general Gene Dodaro, GAO should have roughly $400 million more in its budget if Congress had funded it at the rate of inflation since FY 1993, for an agency that returns more than $100 for every dollar appropriated. Perhaps it’s time to explore alternative funding models that can restore GAO capacity and garner it some independence from presidential politics.

Although tremendous progress has been made in recent years, the technological infrastructure undergirding House operations remains underdeveloped. Because of the confluence of better data accessibility, the variety of artificial intelligence tools available, interest across the legislative branch in developing new in-house tools, and proof-of-concept successes in programs like the House Digital Service, now is the time for members to start asking legislative branch officers not just whether current funding levels are sufficient but what innovations increased resources could unlock.

AGI has developed a full slate of legislative branch appropriations proposals for FY 2027 that can be accessed on our website.

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MODERNIZATION

Big news: each Senate staffer now can receive a no-cost license for either Gemini Chat or ChatGPT Enterprise through a new policy set by the Sergeant at Arms. SSA will provide more information within 30 days, according to a memo obtained by 404 Media. All Senate employees also received access to Microsoft Copilot Chat.

The change nearly aligns the Senate with House policies, which allow use of Anthropic’s Claude Pro as well.

Copilot Chat, the memo noted, does not have access to any Senate data inside internal drives, shared folders, or emails. It can only access Senate data that is explicitly shared in a prompt.

How much is generative AI being used by members and staff already? George Mason Economics PhD student Nicholas Decker found that in this Congress, 25% of documents in the Congressional Record were generated by AI after running the text through AI detectors. He did the same for all bills proposed.

The heaviest use case was for extensions of remarks, the material members submit into an appendix rather than verbatim on the floor. Using the program Pangram, Decker found 26% of extensions of remarks were written at least half-way by AI. Only about 3% of floor speeches were largely written by AI.

Decker found that AI-written text was dragging rhetoric more to the left on social issues positions according to DW-NOMINATE scores for all users.

In terms of productivity gains, he did not find a correlation between office use of AI and the raw number of bills introduced by member offices.

ODDS AND ENDS

It’s Sunshine Week, the annual celebration of government transparency and openness. This year’s calendar of events includes the induction of AGI’s Daniel Schuman into the FOIA Hall of Fame.

OMB Director Russell Vought asks federal agencies to pretend GAO doesn’t exist in the latest A-123 Circular.

GovTrack has added data I collected about members’ membership in various ideological caucuses in the House, analyzing which caucuses are overrepresented in which committees.

Digital access. A UK-based research team has published a paper on how AI can be used to improve processing digital archival backlogs, provided proper frameworks are in place.

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Daniel and I spoke this week with Wade Ballou, the recently-retired Legislative Counsel of the House of Representatives. In that role, he lead the House Office of Legislative Counsel, the 70-attorney team that drafts legislation, amendments, and other bill text, from 2016 to 2024. He enjoyed a 40-year-plus career at HOLC, joining the office in 1983 when bill drafting was still done on legal pads. Through an interest in software development, Wade was instrumental in HOLC’s contributing to the development of the United States Legislative Markup data standard that underpins cutting-edge applications like the House Comparative Print Suite. He received the Democracy Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Congressional Management Foundation in 2024.

This free-ranging conversation is a unique window into this little-known but essential (and very busy) part of the legislative branch and how separation of powers issues trickle down into the gears of the institution. It’s been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Chris Nehls: Mr. Ballou, why don’t you just start out by explaining what the Office of Legislative Counsel is because I think most of our audience think that members of Congress write bills and or their staff write bills. There’s actually much more to it. Can you explain what the office is and what your role was.

Wade Ballou: At a high level, the office was established to advise and assist members in the performance of the legislative part of their constitutional duties. It was established formally in 1919 and received a charter in the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970. The office to begin with is nonpartisan and maintains confidentiality with respect to each member for whom it prepares a draft or provides advice.

Within that, we then assist the members at conference. So when they’re having a formal conference with the Senate or having the informal ping pong back and forth, we assist in preparing whatever the version of the bill is required at that point.

We assist as well in the committee process, working with the chair and, if desired, the ranking members in preparing the substitute for the bill. I say substitute because that’s the way that the committees have been proceeding for a few years. We also are assisting each member of the committee, that’s majority and minority, in preparing their amendments to the substitute and then assisting the members. After the markup is completed, if the bill is ordered reported, then we prepare the report materials to include any Ramseyer if needed – the document that shows how the law is actually changed by the reported version of the bill. The committee itself does their report which explains what the committee did, then they include all the elements required by the House rules.

Moving to the floor, we will prepare member amendments to the bill. The rules committee is pretty much acting as a de facto floor where members are able to be seen. All of those amendments are prepared and the members submit them to the rules committee.

And then finally, in terms of the general drafting area, we assist members in the preparation of their bills and resolutions that they are working on that they might introduce or they might use to further negotiations either among themselves or with the executive branch.

The final part of our charter in terms of what our functions are has that wonderful clause that says, oh, by the way, anything else that the Speaker asks or approves, you can do that, too. Under that rubric is, at least in my mind, where we’ve done most of our software development work.

Some of the value that we bring as we assist members is we bring a curiosity – why are you doing what you want to do? What’s your motivation? What’s the problem you’re trying to solve? – and really seek to understand for the benefit of us then asking questions of the member to help the member think through what they’re doing. Our secret juice, as it were, is curiosity, and our method is asking questions. Because ultimately, what legislation does not only changes law or makes law, but in doing so it draws lines. Where does the member want to draw lines? We are seeking to understand that so that we can then faithfully give them a draft where we represent to them that in our opinion, this draft, if enacted, will actually carry out your desired policy.

Daniel Schuman: How many people are in your office?

Ballou: Well, I left a year ago or a little bit more, so I’m not sure where they are right now. When I left, we had 71 or so attorneys. I think they’re up to about 75 or so, and about 20 support staff.

Schuman: And what’s the volume of bills and amendments that you might, that your office might be called upon to help draft?

Ballou: Individual numbers lately, the bills run anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000, maybe even up to 20,000 drafts. Not every draft is actually introduced. And then it’s a like number of amendments that we are preparing. So it’s a busy place. The context frequently is short deadlines, and a lot of pressure to get it right – and I’ll put that in air quotes here – many times without full information provided to us.

Nehls: This, it seems like a tremendous work pace, but also very different from what attorneys usually are doing, which is dealing with case law or laws that exist. Can you explain what the different skill sets that somebody at the Office of Legal Counsel would need that might be different from the average attorney out there.

Ballou: As you mentioned, coming out of law school, you have been steeped in figuring out what the law is relating to a particular set of facts that are presented by your client and then applying the law to those facts or perhaps arguing from the facts, which law should apply. If you are a litigator, if you are in a transactional practice, then you want to understand what the law is so that you can structure the transaction so that it will be upheld in a court and achieve the goals of the parties involved in that transaction.

Law schools typically don’t teach anything about the legislative process. They’ll get to section eight with the enumerated powers, but they don’t really get into how the process works and how laws are made. So that would be one difference right off the bat. You are going to be dropped into a foreign process in terms of what you were training for.

Our goal is twofold: to train you to think legislatively. That is, you are presented with a policy from a member and that policy ought to be based on a desire to solve a particular problem. So it’s helpful to find the facts. And then the question is, what do you do with that policy? Rather than applying the law, you’re changing the law. So you need to learn to think, how do I change law?

And then relating to that, you typically in the role of Congress are directing the president to do something or a secretary to do something. Getting yourself into that mindset of, Mr. President, with all due respect, here’s what we are requiring you to do, and here’s when you have to report back, et cetera, et cetera. That’s the basic change that needs to happen, which is why being curious is really important. What’s going on on the ground with the real facts, what’s going on in the law? Because typically it’s not just one place where you need to fix law.

But law is complex and there are a lot of moving parts. You need to be able to identify all the parts that need to be modified in order to carry out the policy, and then the questions. It’s not ours in terms of legislative counsel to figure out what the right answer is in terms of modifying all those parts. Rather, they become questions that you ask the member or the member’s office. Your policy impacts law (A), here’s how it impacts it. Here’s what would happen if you do not change it. Here’s what happens if you do change it. And oh, by the way, here are a variety of ways that it could be changed. What do you, the member, want to do with this? So the member is always in charge of the policy. In terms of the draft, as far as the member is willing to go, that basically means that if the member doesn’t go very far, the draft doesn’t go very far either. So a caveat emptor for everybody who reads bills, uses bills that you really need to do your independent analysis of what the bill does and how well it works.

Schuman: Okay, just two quick questions on that. We talked about this a little bit before. You can’t just show up at your office and be able to do this. It takes time to develop the skill set. Could you talk about just how long it takes for someone to be able to be a competent drafter, to be able to assist members to do this.

Ballou: Back in the good old days, we used to say it took about seven years. The reason I say the good old days I was in the office for a little over 41 years. I began in 1983., and everything of course, was done without computer technology. Nowadays, I would say it takes roughly about five years.

The reason is we are able to take advantage of the technology to speed up the training. But more importantly, we have moved from the solo practitioner model that was in place when I joined to a team model. We have a two year formal training program and out of that, we put you onto a team. And then you are mentored as a member of that team really forever. At some point, we all mentor each other and we all assist each other. So, after about five years, you have seen the variety of kinds of situations that arise and you either know how to solve them or address them or you know where to find the answer or who to ask.

Schuman: The other question I had is that it seems like the nature and pace case of law itself is changing. So the principles of interpretation that you would see from the courts are in significant flux, right? Chevron [deference] being knocked down is one example. The major questions doctrine is another. I would not necessarily be confident that one canon of interpretation that we would have relied on last week will necessarily be around next week. And your job is to write for the ages.

There are some people that say the way to solve this is by having Congress write in greater detail, right? Have the laws be much, much more detailed. Although, if you’re dealing with a court that is not so interested in the detail, then that might be challenging. I just wonder, how do you think about it? How do you think about writing in what seem like very fluid circumstances with legal interpretation?

So how in the world do we think about it now? Because when I draft, I draft under assumptions being the typical rules of statutory interpretation, the long standing precedents of the Supreme Court the, typical agency interpretations of their regulations. When that gets in flux, then you’re losing your anchor points from which you can advise and provide any level of certainty that your draft, if enacted, will carry out the intended policy. So it’s becoming much harder, and it’s because of the Supreme Court decisions and how they are rippling through the rest of government. - Wade Ballou

Ballou: I recall saying to the ranking member a number of years ago of House Administration kind of when he asked a similar question about how we’re doing and I said, well, I’m not sure I know how to do my job anymore. And of course, he looked at me like I’d lost my head. And then I explained, so let me talk a bit more about that. Our training involves not only just the basic structure of drafts: how to put them together, how to think about that, and just the very close, careful attention to words and word choice, but it also involves a lot of work in the Constitution and therefore Supreme Court decisions as you move on to a team in areas of law.

The complexity involved there is the procedure of the House and to some degree of the Senate, because you have to be aware of what your draft might do if and when it lands in the Senate and how it can unintentionally upend the Senate process. It’s not that when we make a draft that it’s all of these things. Rather they are prompts for questions to the member. If we do it this way, this is what we think the result will be in the Senate. Do you want to proceed anyway? It’s kind of again, up to the member.

So how in the world do we think about it now? Because when I draft, I draft under assumptions being the typical rules of statutory interpretation, the long standing precedents of the Supreme Court the, typical agency interpretations of their regulations. When that gets in flux, then you’re losing your anchor points from which you can advise and provide any level of certainty that your draft, if enacted, will carry out the intended policy. So it’s becoming much harder, and it’s because of the Supreme Court decisions and how they are rippling through the rest of government.

Schuman: So, for things like Humphrey’s Executor [v. U.S.], right? Where it seems like the federal courts are saying that the establishment of independent executive agencies is no longer a thing. We don’t quite know how far that goes, but it seems like it’s going pretty far. If you were back at your desk trying to draft around that problem, it becomes significantly more difficult.

Ballou: It’s a real problem. At its core, the question for the member is, is this supposed to be independent or is this supposed to be clearly within the executive branch? In the past we would do one approach or the other. They’re established in the Department of the Treasury X office or whatever, or we would direct the Secretary of the Treasury to do something if we wanted something independent. Well, we’ll set up this agency and we will provide perhaps for five heads in terms of directors or commissioners or whatever you want to call them.

Nowadays, it’s a bit unclear as to just how far the court will go in upending the understanding of how American law worked for the entire 20th century. I think it is really important to understand what the law was addressing and that is the complexity of problems that were facing the American people. It was the Congresses at the time working with the presidents at the time to come up with a solution that worked for the people. And over time, as they found what worked and what the Supreme Court would say met the constitutional requirements – that’s kind of what the 1930s was all about. From a legal perspective you had a pretty stable system. It would be a little iffy on the edges perhaps, but in the middle, everybody knew pretty much what the rules were. Now, the system is no longer very stable and it’s unclear what the rules are going to be, which is really bad for the people because one of the key principles in law is providing certainty so that people can then make their decisions and go about their daily life.

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Schuman: When I started as a staffer, I had the idea that staff write the bills and it’s not unusual for people to try to cobble together their own legislative text and send it to leg. counsel. But that’s not necessarily the best process, is it? Could you talk about what you think an ideal process would look like?

Ballou: Yeah, but let me address whether or not a staffer ought to write legislation. It depends! Do you know what you’re doing? I learned a lot from staffers who have a lot of experience. They taught me much about the law. There are some really, really good staffers who continue to work for members and for committees. So, I would not discourage them from writing legislation.The kind of conversation that I would end up having with them would be very different from one who was uncertain about how to proceed and really wanted our full assistance.

For the one who wants the full assistance, the place that they need to begin is with their member. What’s the problem? And what does the member want to do to address that problem? And until they get a good understanding of that, it is really hard for them to proceed any further. Let’s assume that they get past that point or they’re almost past that point. We then come to a place where there’s actually a difference of opinion in [OLC], at least at the time I was over there. I like for that staffer to contact me and say, hey, we’re thinking about a bill. Here’s the problem that we want to solve. What do you think? So no drafting at that point, but kind of are we hitting in a good direction? Are there things we ought to think about? So it’s the kind of function that we do.

The Congressional Research Service will do that as well. A lot of outside groups will also do that. It’s really important for them as they work their policy to get that early check, to make sure they’re moving in a direction that is ultimately going to be fruitful, unless they’re simply trying to poke the bear – and that, too, is a valid thing that they might want to do.

At the end of that process, they need to then provide drafting instructions or specifications – that concept is used interchangeably. That includes a description of the problem and what their proposed policy solution is, and then as much guidance as they can provide on what they would like to see. They then submit that to the office. The office would assign that to the appropriate team based on subject matter.

And, lo and behold, I would get it. The ideal thing is I would have thought about it for a bit and contact them and say, hey, I’ve got some clarifying questions, and then I would just run through what my questions are. That takes us all the way back to that curiosity thing I mentioned. If I’m curious about it, I’m going to want to know what’s going on around the problem and around their solution, and have they thought about some other alternatives that seem to be similar and perhaps, in my mind, may actually be more effective.

Once I get enough answers, at some point, I’m going to actually begin trying to write out that policy and express it in a draft. Almost always in the writing process, I will think about things I did not initially think about with my first set of questions. And here’s where part of the skill of drafting comes in – is finding out when I’ve asked enough questions to get the basic outline of a draft, finding out how that member’s office would like to work.

Some member offices like to work with that basic outline and then begin to fill in what’s not said yet in terms of more policy directions. Others prefer to have a more complete draft, so finding out what they want and then completing a draft up to the desired point and providing that back to the office of the member so they can work with it.

And sometimes I never hear from them again. What they needed was enough of an expression of the idea to begin to shop it and find out, okay, this idea doesn’t have any legs, it’s not going anywhere. Sometimes they’ll come back. In fact, more often they come back with revisions, and so we’ll begin that modification process. And it can take as long as a member wants. I can think of some drafts I’ve done that I think I had 70 versions by the time it was completed. Now, to me, that’s actually a member’s office that’s not willing or able to make a final decision. So the ideal average, for me, usually was somewhere between three and five drafts expressing a policy.

Schuman: They provide you with the nucleus of an idea or legislative text and then you have to manage it and you’ve got other things that you’re doing. Like how long does that take?

Ballou: Virtually everybody wants to know the answer to that. And the answer is, it depends. How complex is the idea? How important is it to the member? So, when I get back to the member, are they working on it because they’re really on top of it, want to move it and will answer questions, or is it just one of a number of things and it’s kind of on the back burner? I might hear back in a month. I’ve had some where we might begin in the first session of a Congress, say early on, and I might not hear from them until the middle of the second session of that Congress, or if they get reelected in the following Congress.

Schuman: When I first came to the Hill, it was try to cobble together texts. The more that I talk to you and think about it, it almost seems like the staffer should write a summary of what they’re trying to do or even not law, but like pseudo-law like – this should work sort of in this way. Don’t worry about this amends that or whatever, but worry about having the concepts be coherent so that you can look at the gestalt, you can look at the whole of what they’re trying to do because you can always turn it into, into the legal language. Spelling out the idea is what’s most useful, but I don’t think most people think about it that way. How, how would you think about it?

Ballou: Yeah, I’ve done enough software development now to compare it to developing software. I remember there were actually several of us in the office who were interested in software, etc. and, and worked with our developers. And I can’t tell you how many times they came back to us and said, don’t give us your solution: Tell us what you want to do. We are the software experts, and we will then engage with that and provide you software that you can then work with and we can improve. It’s the same way with legislation. If I get a draft prepared by somebody else assuming you want me to engage my full effort on it, I’m basically going to have to begin over again. And I will treat that draft as instructions, but I want to rethink the problem from the beginning.

This is yet another reason that it takes a long time to actually train somebody. I will ask the new attorney to walk me through their draft. Not because I’m being mean: I want to find out. Do they understand it? What gaps are in there that they see or in that discussion process I can ask about? Well, how was your interaction with the members and staff, what else did they say that you haven’t included yet? And as they get good at that and walking me through their draft, what they’re really learning is not only how to relate to the member client, but then to sit in a drafting session and to, with confidence, walk everybody in that room through the draft, how it works, what the law is. And to do that with confidence so that they can manage a good drafting session.

Nehls: So you mentioned software development. I’m curious how the office was using technology given the huge workload and if it could punch it down with some technology, and what you think could be done to help staff even more, maybe in the future now that we have generative AI and things like that? I don’t know if you want to unleash gen AI on writing law or, or interpreting it, but there are things that are finding efficiencies out there.

Ballou: Well, it’s there and like any other technology, the Congress is going to need to address it, understand what it does, what it does not do, what the limitations are, and then figure out how best to employ it.

But to answer your question a little bit better, it might be useful to recognize what the office practice was when I arrived in 1983. I had a couple of pens, a couple of pencils, a pad of paper and I would write out my drafts in longhand. I would then hand it to a clerk typist who would type it up. And eventually, that would be the draft that was provided to the member’s office. That is the form it would be introduced in and the member might make handwritten changes on it. And then the Clerk of the House would send it all over to the Government Printing Office, which is what it was called at the time. They would typeset it with a hot metal typesetting process. None of that happens anymore as far as I know, although it’s important to retain the ability to write out longhand.

Nehls: I would’ve been fired with my handwriting.

Ballou: There are stories about how drafts didn’t quite get to where they needed to be because of handwriting problems. So that’s where we began. About the time I was coming into the office was when the big publishers were using the mainframe computers, a system called Atex and our office actually acquired one. We had a few dumb terminals that we would put on the desk of our clerk typists. As I recall it had a lot of memory, like 20MB. And that was huge, right? [we laugh] So that’s where we began in terms of computer technology.

As the PC came on the scene, a few people, as I understand it, left the Atex company and formed another company to write software for the PC. And that’s the software that we used in the PC called XyWrite. It was actually wonderful software. It was a form of a word processor, but not like WordPerfect or Microsoft Word. We used the GPO locator codes they had developed as a process for typesetting. The fateful decision was made for our software to include locator codes that provided a wonderful efficiency in the printing process and began what turned out to be an early form of legislative data.

The downside of that from the office point of view is we began taking on a type setting function. So in addition to the legal work, we became the typesetters over time for more and more legislation and now our function began to get blurred. What are we doing? Are we typesetting? Are we a law office advising and assisting members? That confusion in my view has continued up to the present time. Software in the future would be very helpful to address what the role is. Are we going ahead in the future, advising and assisting, or are we going to continue to be the typesetters? But now, it’s not just typesetting to make the page look right: It is inserting useful XML tagging to help the downstream user, which is a very important thing to transparency and open government. But you’ve got the legal office who’s under time pressure to focus on the legal result and get out a draft doing software work, and that is providing a significant tension.

Schuman: I want to pick up two points for that. One, is it also allowing you to generate version control for the Ramseyer. It allows you to show this is what it was before; this is how it’s changed or here is how it went into the committee; this is what’s been reported out. And that function is challenging. But, one could imagine that some of those features may be automatable, or some of them may be automatable in the future where that work can be decreased perhaps for alleged counsel.

Ballou: Yes, and that is exactly the line that we attempted to take and continue to maintain as far as I know as we move from XyWrite and the GPO locator codes into the XML world and the tagging. The line that we really tried to hold was how much of this can be automated? If I don’t have to insert tags and you can automate it, go for it, let’s do that because information is best captured at the source. The further you remove yourself from the source, then the more work is required to look back and insert useful information.

The example that I like to use is the short title [for bills.] The original reason for a short title was exactly that: Rather than require the lawyer to write out this long title – An Act to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 to provide a tax credit for whatever – you could simply cite the short title. So it saves time, it saves space, particularly when you’re in a context where time is important. Early in that GPO process when you were using a typewriter, making changes was hard. It was time consuming, so you wanted to be careful with your original draft, and you want it to be really careful about making changes forward.

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Schuman: When we’re talking about automation, one is the actual drafting, the tools that one can use to add structured data. One could also imagine there might be an automated or semi-automated process for intake, right? As a staffer, I’ve got this idea and [OLC] have virtual Wade, and it’s asking well, have you, have you thought through what this bill is? Can you create an intake process to help them shape it before it comes to you? Is that something that you have explored as well?

Ballou: I began exploring it, I don’t know, six, seven years ago. And I ran into an interesting fact about just how our office works. As I’ve asked others around how I think all offices work, which is, “Our system works fine for my purposes. I don’t need to change. And therefore, we’re not going to.” So, it became really hard to introduce something new and a different way of getting at things like referral once it hits our office, or what would be helpful for the staffer as they interacted with [OLC]to help them make a better request.

The useful thing about the fact that I failed in making a change five or six years ago is that the technology continues to get better. You know, we mentioned AI: I suspect that using AI, you can have a pretty good, quick query process where the staffer can engage with, let’s call it a leg council bot or something that will guide them in making a better request that will also then have a way of pretty accurately making a referral to the right team. I think that would improve the process in terms of requests.

The hidden challenge I’ve run into over the years as we’ve tried to improve how we function and function more efficiently is that the combination of our efficiency gains ultimately get lost because it has the effect of speeding up the legislative process, at least as far as interaction with our clients are concerned. It’s not intentional, but what happens is the last minute changes are, oh, I need to make this change – can you do it in five minutes or two minutes or one minute? And, they find out that, yeah, actually you can at least occasionally: And that occasional becomes the norm.

Schuman: I’m hesitating whether to open up a can of worms, but I want to be respectful of your time. The legislation that you write is technically complex and it’s difficult for many people to understand what it means. And you’ve helped develop the comparative print project and other tools that explain how an amendment would change a bill and a bill would change the law. So it’s more difficult to have obscurity around hidden references to knock out a single word someplace else.

But most people look at the bill summaries, and those bill summaries are generated at various points later on in the process. The Library of Congress generates one, CBO generates one, committee staff may generate one if it goes through the committee process. But all of these folks are trying to capture a conceptual framework that you, in partnership with the member office, have established. The two of you are probably the ones who best understand what this is and what it’s trying to do.

Ballou: That’s right.

Schuman: Where should this function live of trying to summarize what a bill does?

Ballou: I think to that question for me, the legislative attorney working with the member’s office, I owe that office and that member complete confidentiality as to why they’re attempting to do what they’re doing. I see it difficult at best for me to write a summary of what it was. At what point have I crossed the line and unintentionally revealed some aspect about the bill that the member either wanted to reveal himself or doesn’t want revealed and just hope others haven’t figured out. So there’s that problem. That’s not insurmountable. I can think of a variety of ways to work around that, but it’s there.

A more significant challenge for me if I were to do [the summary] would be the amount of time that it takes. So I suspect we could develop a way where the summary comes along with the draft and the additional time isn’t significant, but if we’re not careful, then that number of bills and amendments that we talked about, which requires a lot of time, now I’ve got a like number of summaries that I’m also working on. That will increase the amount of time that I need to devote to any particular project.

The thing that concerns me more about relying on summaries produced by a member or a member in combination with us is that members are always coming from something from a partisan point of view. Can you really trust that summary? Is there a twist in there? Have they intentionally not said something? And let’s imagine that we find that one of the above is actually true. Will there be any kind of a sanction that the House rules apply in terms of procedure or process, a point of order or something against that summary? Because it’s not the bill itself: It simply says the bill does the following five things. Maybe it does five and a half, and the most significant change is the half. And it didn’t say anything about the half. Was that intentional? An oversight? I don’t know.

But you’re right that most people don’t read the bill. From what I can tell, they read a statement of facts, some kind of a summary of what the bill does, or in the worst case, they look to their leadership and leadership says, here’s how our party is going to vote on the bill. Well, if that’s really what’s happening, why do I need to read the bill at all?

Now, most members that I talk with say, “I originally came to Congress because I thought I could make a difference. I thought I could represent my people and do something for them and then represent them as I engaged my other members from around the country for something that’s for the good of the country,” only to find out that they fall into a bucket which is a party. There’s a lot of behind the scenes that happens in the development of ideas. If you’re not engaged in that particular part, then except at the caucus level, why should I read the bill?

Now, there are important reasons that you should and there are contributions that you can make if you really want to be a legislator and engage in the process. If you want to grandstand, you don’t need to read the bill. You find out a couple things about it, and then you can make up whatever story you want to make up and you’re off to the races.

In my view, as I watch some of the committee markups, that seems to be what happens in terms of how the bills are described or amendments are described. I remember the very first time that happened with something I had written. I went to the markup and the bill was open for amendment. A member offers an amendment and then describes it, and as I’m listening to it, I turn to my mentor who had taken me over to the markup and I said, “that’s not what I wrote! He’s not describing it right.” And he said, “that’s okay. It’ll be okay. Don’t worry about it. I had no idea how these guys interact at markups.

Schuman: Some of the work that you’ve done has made it harder for people to hide some of the games that get played with legislation. But the sheer volume and the change in nature of the process can also make it harder for members and staff and the public to understand what’s happening as well. But this is the process we have, right?

Ballou: Well, not only is it the process that we have but it’s the process, at least at the high constitutional level that’s set out in the Constitution. And the Constitution assumes that each member of the House, member of the Senate will show up and will engage in the process and be responsible and actually do their duty, not delegate it to somebody else, which is what we’ve seen in this last year of simply the House not acting.

The legislative output – not that this is a great measure just numbers by itself – but it’s the fact that members are not engaging in the issues that concern their constituents, from what I can tell. That becomes really important because the public doesn’t see that there’s a functioning legislative process. And so if there’s an incursion on the legislature from one of the other branches, they’re not upset about it because people want – and I use air quotes again – they want something done. And if the Congress isn’t going to do it, maybe the president will. Or maybe the president needs the help of the court in order to get there. And in that process, the fact that one of the branches isn’t carrying out its function allows the others to really make inroads into that function. That upsets what the Constitution is actually all about, which is dividing power out, so that power is not consolidated in one place. Ultimately, that’s my concern as a legislative attorney. The appropriate exercise of power ends up representing the people fairly well. Is it ideal? Of course not. Is it better than alternatives? I personally think so.

Schuman: And on that note, that’s a perfect ending. Thank you. Thank you so much for your generosity with your time. Thank you for your service.

Ballou: You’re welcome.

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House appropriators are racing out of the gate for FY 2027. The Legislative Branch Subcommittee held its first hearing Friday when Government Publishing Office Director Hugh Halpern and Acting Librarian of Congress Robert Newlen testified on their budget proposals. Full committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro was a notable participant in the morning’s hearing.

The hearing focused heavily on cybersecurity and artificial intelligence efforts at both offices. Newlen requested an increase of about $34.4 million, or a 3.8% increase in the Library’s budget, much of it for mandatory pay and cost increases.

The Library also requested $5.4 million in additional funds to establish a centralized AI enterprise platform that can provide more robust service for the Congressional Research Service.

CRS has been trying out commercial generative AI platforms in a few ways, using it most successfully to integrate geographic information systems data and infographics into reports. Newlen testified that CRS had reached the limit of these platforms’ usefulness in its analysis work and needed to develop its own training models that can work with its unique data types in a controlled environment. Doing so, Newlen said, would help CRS staff provide better quantitative data analysis in reports and reduce the backlog of bill summaries in Congress.gov. Continuing to rely on commercial models, he said, would leave the Library behind.

When pressed by subcommittee members on cost savings and greater efficiency through AI, Newlen and Halpern noted that generative AI largely freed employees from rote or routine tasks like reformatting bill text data and allowed them to engage in tasks more aligned with their skills. The technology did not reduce personnel needs, however. When asked by DeLauro whether the Library had adequate resources overall, Newlen noted that CRS was still thin in some policy areas for lack of staff.

GPO only receives about 9% of its operating budget from Congress, Halpern noted, and so could submit a flat funding request. The rest of its budget comes from contracts to produce documents for federal agencies. $80 million of its $132 million request for FY 2027 is for congressional publishing programs. Some of those funds would support final development and deployment of an all XML composition system called XPub, which is replacing a 40-year-old system. It would be a major accomplishment for GPO in standardizing data formats across the legislative branch, completing a project begun in FY 2022.

Subcommittee Ranking Member Adriano Espaillat asked about cybersecurity threats coming from Iran and its proxies. Both witnesses said they had adequate funds to maintain the latest cybersecurity systems. Halpern related that early in his tenure an Iranian-connected group had defaced a GPO website, but had not penetrated systems, and that they had a solid track record for security since. Newlen noted how much the Library had taken away from the ransomware hack of the British Library in 2023. Data in Congress.gov and sensitive data CRS uses in its work would be the most tempting targets, he said.

MORE ON APPROPRIATIONS

The deadline for members and public witnesses to submit testimony to the Legislative Branch Subcommittee is this Friday at 5:00 PM. Submission instructions can be found at this link. The Member Day hearing will be March 17 at 11:30 AM in 2362-B Rayburn HOB.

Be aware that half of the House Appropriations subcommittees have deadlines of this Friday to accept member funding requests. Requests for member day in-person testimony are also coming up fast for most subcommittees. Many are next week. Public witness written testimony deadlines are falling between late March and early May. We are tracking these dates with this spreadsheet, which includes links to subcommittee guidance.

The president’s budget, CQ reports, should arrive on the week of March 30. It’s due by statute on the first Monday of February – the most regularly blown deadline in Washington.

In case you missed it, AGI released its FY 2027 legislative branch appropriations recommendations last week. It includes proposals for both chambers of Congress individually, Congress as a whole, legislative branch offices, and the U.S. Capitol Police. The document can be downloaded here.

Daniel and the Foundation for American Innovation’s Soren Dayton also released a new appropriations playbook to guide nonprofits through the annual process. We know from experience that this type of advocacy is manageable even for small organizations and can lead to steady progress on issue areas. Not enough nonprofits engage appropriators, however, and this guide’s goal is to equip more to try. Inclusive Abundance sponsored the publication.

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MODERNIZATION

The House’s constituent flag request portal is receiving an upgrade. The Committee on House Administration’s Subcommittee for Modernization and Innovation received approval of funds for FlagTrack 2.0 out of the Modernization Initiatives Account on March 4. Improvements will include a portal for constituents to track the status of their order, including delivery dates.

ModSub is awaiting Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee approval of funds for a digital signage and wayfinding project for House office buildings and a CMS innovation project “to create a dynamic data platform and vendor ecosystem designed to modernize how Members engage and interact with their constituents” announced in July. Both projects contribute to implementing a half-dozen Modernization Committee recommendations.

ModSub also announced it had closed two outstanding recommendations of ModCom: Recommendation 20, requiring House Information Resources to reform the approval process for outside tech vendors; and recommendation 185, requesting the House provide more public information about the vendor approval and onboarding process so that potential vendors can plan ahead.

Senate staff recently visited the Subcommittee’s House Gallery Closed Captioning Pilot to see how it could be brought to the chamber. Meanwhile, work continues in convincing Senate offices to join the Legidex staff directory deployed in the House.

COMPTROLLER GENERAL SEARCH

Choosing a Comptroller General is a 15-year bet on the integrity of congressional oversight. The American Governance Institute and seven cosponsoring organizations have sent to Congress a set of principles outlining how nominees should be evaluated. At the heart of the framework is a simple but consequential idea: independence is everything. The Comptroller General, as head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), must be guided by evidence, not ideology, and committed to serving Congress—not any party, administration, or political faction.

Download the nine-point document at this link.

Leadership looms large in the criteria as well. GAO is a large, complex organization with a global footprint and a sweeping mandate. Running it effectively requires more than technical expertise; it demands strategic vision, operational discipline, and a demonstrated ability to cultivate a culture of nonpartisanship and analytic rigor. The principles also point toward leading on modernization through leveraging data science, emerging technologies, and innovative audit practices to ensure GAO remains relevant in a rapidly evolving federal landscape.

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ODDS & ENDS

Architect of the Capitol employees finally installed the plaque honoring law enforcement officers who defended Congress from insurrectionists on January 6, 2021, three years after the statutory deadline to do so. Congress mandated the plaque be placed in the Capitol through a 2022 law. Without instructions from Speaker Mike Johnson to install it, AOC kept it in the basement. Workers put it up at 4:00 AM on Saturday, suggesting a ceremony is not going to follow.

House Democrats have kept attention on the delay by mounting paper posters of the plaque on the walls outside their offices.

Claiming victims may be “retraumatized,” the House Ethics Committee openly opposed Rep. Nancy Mace’s resolution that would have required it to release all reports on investigations of sexual misconduct by members. Members referred her resolution to the committee.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez offered detailed analysis of the privacy concerns raised by the text of Mace’s resolution, which she voted against although she herself is a survivor of sexual assault. A resolution “guaranteeing the safety and agency of victims and survivors would get me to a YES,” she offered on X.

Maybe trivia fans can help out, but when was the last time a congressional committee subpoenaed a cabinet secretary of their same party? That’s the achievement Attorney General Pam Bondi unlocked last week via the House Oversight Committee. The committee wants her to sit for a deposition about the Epstein Files.

The past isn’t dead. In his last column for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, veteran congressional reporter Jamie Dupree urges Georgia state legislators to replace the statue of Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens representing it in the Capitol with someone else.

Stephens delivered what historians view as the declaration of principles of the Confederacy on March 4, 1861 in an address to the Georgia legislature known as the Cornerstone Speech. The speech declared that Thomas Jefferson was wrong to see slavery as “a violation of the laws of nature.” The “corner-stone” of the Confederacy rests, he asserted, “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

As Dupree notes, Georgia sent the statue of Stephens, who was elected to the House of Representatives before and after the Civil War, to the Capitol in 1927. Its sculptor was Gutzon Borglum, the artist behind Mt. Rushmore and the bust of Lincoln in the Capitol crypt. He also was a dedicated supporter of the Ku Klux Klan. If it seems incongruous that a master artist could work both sides of the Civil War (and be a Bull Moose Republican and a Klan supporter), by 1927, great swaths of white Americans’ cultural output had centered national reunion upon white supremacy. Therefore, even assessing the meaning of the Stephens statue for the time of its creation is to acknowledge its racist symbolism. Beyond time to go.

Mash the subscribe button. I’m not into YouTube except for very niche home repair tips, but I have to say, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse being a top-10 congressional member influencer is kind of a surprise.

Read/listen:

Kevin Kosar at AEI interviews former Office of Management and Budget director and House Appropriations Committee staff director (and current NYU law professor) Shalanda Young.

Writing for the Toda Peace Institute in Japan, Lorelei Kelly shares how deliberative technologies can modernize how Congress approaches the work of representation and hears “authentic civic voice.” The paper is based on more than 100 interviews with congressional staff.

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These types of responses hold little political risk for opposition leadership because they have such limited chance to be impactful. This is not entirely Democratic leadership or Congress’s fault: although Congress delegated short-term or situational uses of force to the president in the War Powers Resolution, the Supreme Court created a ratcheting-up problem for the legislative branch by striking down the legislative veto in the Chadha decision. It now takes an impractical supermajority in each chamber to claw back warmaking authorization authority.

The challenge for Congress post-Chadha has been to move beyond the rhetoric of legal constraint on the presidency, which White House Office of Legal Counsel chief Jack Goldsmith described this weekend as “empty,” to where the institution can still be effective: the realm of politics. Congress is where military and foreign policy should be debated and where explicit constraints on presidential action can be made.

Congress also decides how to allocate the resources of the federal government in ways that limit military adventurism. Until political winds shifted, members refused to allocate funds for modern warships after the Civil War and an internationally-deployable army after World War I. Now, leadership in both parties ensures Congress directs enormous resources to the military and makes every attempt to bury opposition to it, either through committee assignments, district funding carrots, horsetrading with other parts of the budget, or in the case of the Democratic Party, consistently punching left. It’s hardly surprising that presidents find ways to use that military, particularly because the nature of the office incentivizes it to create the political perception of protecting the American people.

Congressional debate about American military intervention and presidential warmaking regularly has occurred in the nation’s history. They often happened inside political parties, as different factional perspectives emerged on topics like establishing American colonial holdings and American intervention in other powers’ wars. Presidents had to navigate these intra- and inter-party conflicts, and it made them more deliberate in significant uses of force.

We, however, continue to live with the legacy of the Cold War, during which both parties tried to avoid looking soft on Soviet projections of power by supporting ballooning military budgets and interventionist presidential policies. This desire closed factional gaps, at least until the latter stages of the Vietnam War. Conservatives reacted hard when congressional Democrats tried to regain control of the imperial presidency, and the pattern snapped back into place. The War on Terror simply was layered on top of this structure, as again hawkish congressional leadership decided against picking political fights with the executive branch.

As he has in so many ways, Trump’s use of military force has upended this paradigm. Military strategy expert Phillips O’Brien wrote this weekend that he thinks Trump views “the US military as a way of getting cheap wins, of executing what he can claim are overwhelmingly successful operations and for which he can take credit.” Although Trump has assembled a massive air armada, he can still turn it on and off. The assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may provide an opportunity to do so, although, as General James Mattis frequently said, “the enemy gets a vote.” Iran may continue military strikes long after Trump has lost the stomach for it.

Congress isn’t going to receive straight answers on the end goals of military action against Iran because there aren’t any. Justifications already shifted dramatically in a week between Trump’s State of the Union warnings about Iranian missile and nuclear weapons programs to embrace of regime change to Iranian interference in U.S. elections. The point is the political benefit of action that looks decisive, like the supposed “obliteration” of the Iranian nuclear program in June that suddenly reemerged last week to be on the verge of success. The same rationale and motivation was used to sink civilian vessels in the Caribbean and whisk Maduro out of Caracas. These targets were chosen for their political salience. Iran has been an arch-nemesis for almost 50 years. Very few Americans care about Venezuela or supposed drug runners.

How should congressional Democrats (and Republicans opposed to this adventurism) respond to a president using warmaking authorities with little interest in outcome beyond his own domestic political benefit? Lean into the institution’s inherent political powers. The legal framework offered in the War Powers Resolution is the start, not the end of the political debate that can endanger the benefit the president sees in unrestrained action. The appropriations process is another avenue. The aperture for discussion should widen beyond the specifics of Iran to expose what kind of nation we are becoming in the world, to which the public is more likely to respond. Constantly introduce measures that keep the fundamentals of unilateral use of force by this president at the forefront.

Doing so would require Democratic leadership to loosen the reins on the factions in their party most capable of making these arguments. That didn’t happen in the debate about the invasion of Iraq, and we saw the consequences. To be sure, Republicans will respond by increasing the political heat on the next Democratic administration if it engages in uses of force. Speaking as congressional institutionalists and champions, that’s good. The constitutional system was not designed to hand these decisions off entirely to one person.

The concern about the conduct of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement fits into similar questions of presidential power and overreach. Administrations have poured billions of dollars into the agency and furnished it with military-grade weaponry. The Trump Administration has expanded it in order to use it at a much broader scale. Congress has handed the presidency a massive internal policing capacity, once again with limited oversight and constraint. Its size and political utility to an administration will determine its use and conduct, not legalistic frameworks. This is a dangerous kind of agency to leave around.

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APPROPRIATIONS

The appropriations process for the legislative branch will begin this week as its subcommittee will hear budget requests from the Library of Congress and Government Publishing Office on Friday at 9:00 AM in Rayburn HOB 2362-B. Their requests aren’t yet available online.

The Labor, Health and Human Services and Interior-Environment subcommittees have their member days on Thursday at 10:30 AM and 1:00 PM, respectively.

Appropriations Chair Tom Cole announced that the committee is accepting submissions for earmarks Community Project Funding requests, increasing the limit for member offices to 20 each. The committee is using an electronic submission portal and has shared resources on the process on its website.

A few weeks ago, we ran a poll about a subscription-only appropriations process newsletter. Thank you to everyone who responded. For now, we’ll keep weaving lightweight appropriations talk into this newsletter and keeping this tracker of deadlines updated.

MODERNIZATION

The Congressional Data Task Force has announced the dates of its meetings for this year. The next meeting will be on March 26 from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM in Room 217 of the Capitol Visitors Center (and online). Subsequent meetings will be on June 11, and December 3, with the to-be-scheduled Congressional Hackathon falling in between, traditionally in September.

It’s also likely that the Library of Congress will hold its Congress.gov public users meeting in September.

The POPVPOX Foundation released a proposal to create a congressional office dedicated to helping members and staff understand AI and use it in their duties. They argue for an independent office with an initial $1 million appropriation (growing to $3.87 million) to ensure it is dedicated to change management rather than treat AI as another aspect of IT management and suggest starting small with a House-only office that then scales up to include Senate coverage. They use the House Office of the Whistleblower Ombuds as a model for this approach.

It’s a thoughtful and detailed proposal for a serious issue that does not have adequate resources dedicated to it. Given the benefits that generative AI can provide member and committee offices, it’s important to have institutional support for overcoming inexperience. The congressional reform field needs more organizations like POPVOX Foundation that can burrow into the details of pressing topics for congressional stakeholders

We would take a different approach toward institutional support for AI deployment, favoring a broader perspective of its current adoption. Although individual member and committee offices may continue to lag behind in figuring out adoption of generative AI, in many cases the legislative branch is at the leading edge internationally in deployment of other forms. The legislative branch data exchange goes back to the 1990s. The House Clerk’s Office started development of the Comparative Print Suite, which shows how legislation would change existing law, in 2017. It’s now a global standard. CBO is engaged in advanced data modeling. GAO’s AI use inventory includes summarizing GAO mandates, organizing large volumes of text, and automated responses to questions on its work. The Library of Congress has experimented with machine learning and AI at least since 2018, and its text analysis capabilities go back at least a decade before that. (We raise this context not to suggest the POPVOX team doesn’t know all of this, but to share it with our readers.)

What these and other projects – including in member and committee offices – lack is coordinative support. We think a most cost-conscious, higher-yield approach would be to build off the existing collaborative architecture of the Congressional Data Task Force and hire a staffer to take on that work. CDTF is the stand-out success for legislative branch technology collaboration and goes back 14 years. We also have a soft spot in our hearts for the House Digital Service, which we would love to see live up to the original proposal from 2017 as a full-fledged Congressional Digital Service.

Ultimately, AI should be in service to the democratic mission of all of Congress. Whatever resources it dedicates to AI adoption should not preclude support for members being responsive to public demands, developing better policy and better law, and making its actions transparent and easily understandable. By that standard, we need to think bigger about a congressional AI office: even bigger than a congressional technology office. But bigger organizationally isn’t necessarily better. We worry not building upon the organizational structures and talent already in place and staying cognizant of the current political moment is to forego an opportunity to build towards something great instead of creating one more silo.

MEMBERS BEHAVING BADLY

Rep. Nancy Mace plans to introduce a privileged resolution on the House floor on Wednesday requiring the House Ethics Committee to release all reports of sexual misconduct or harassment by members and staff. Her motion will take place one day after the Texas primary elections, in which Rep. Tony Gonzales is still running for reelection after it was reported he had sent sexually explicit texts to a staffer with whom he was having an affair. She later lit herself on fire and died.

Mace, along with Reps. Lauren Boebert, Anna Paulina Luna, and Thomas Massie, have called on Gonzales to resign his seat.

Some families of the victims of last January’s midair collision near Reagan National Airport watched in person as House leadership closed a vote on an aviation safety bill that was on the verge of passing. They then witnessed the delegation reverse course on leadership instruction and defeat the bill because of objections from the Pentagon and Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chair Sam Graves.

READING LIST

Lots of good stuff by friends of the newsletter recently.

AEI’s Phillip Wallach salutes the upholding of the separation of powers in the Learning Resources v. Trump tariff decision.

Georgetown’s Matt Glassman plumbs the depths of the decision’s connection to the legislative veto, relying on fellow Hoya Josh Chafetz’s recently-revised law review article on the Chadha decision and the presidency. We liked Matt’s piece enough to link to it up top, too.

“Many legislators have lost the concept of what they are supposed to do, which is to be lawmakers,” writes AEI’s Kevin Kosar in his full-throated defense of Congress as the appropriate font of policy. He double-dips with an interview about the productive “secret Congress” with the New York Times.

Former House Parliamentarian staffer Max Spitzer walks through the powerful and underutilized motion for the previous question, which is a more straightforward way for members to seize back control of debate from leadership than things like discharge petitions.

BPC’s J.D. Rackey summarizes congressional modernization efforts related to constituent engagement.

ODDS & ENDS

CBO transparency. The Congressional Budget Office is going to publish the code for some of its models this year on its GitHub page so the public can better understand its modeling methods.

No surprises. Roll Call’s annual presidential vote studies report found near-complete alignment of support by House and Senate Republicans with presidential positions. 44 of the 53 Republican senators voted with the president 305 out of 305 times. Democratic opposition was similarly lopsided. The report breaks down the top supporters and dissenters in both parties.

Closed rules, open poking. Rules Committee ranking member Jim McGovern distributed stats to Republicans listing the percentage of their own amendments that have been blocked by House leadership’s affinity for closed rules.

Staff pay. Roll Call’s Nina Heller writes about the lack of transparency many staffers find in the pay ranges for positions in the House, rooted in the cumbersome way the House publishes that data. She points to two private sector solutions, but better policies on statements of disbursement data should be a chamber goal.

Mark your calendars. The iLegis International Conference on Legislation and Law Reform will be held in Washington on Oct. 29-30.

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We interviewed Rep. Steny Hoyer shortly after he announced that he would not seek re-election in 2026, making his 23rd term his last in the House of Representatives. He first arrived via special election in 1981 and steadily rose through the ranks of House leadership, becoming Majority Leader first in 2007 through 2011 and again from 2013 through 2019.

Along with his enormous political and legislative impact on the House, Hoyer has been a dedicated institutionalist. During his time, the majority leader’s office became a font of technological innovation for the House. He also championed a long-overdue pay raise for House staff in fiscal year 2022.

We spoke with him about the historical balance of power between Congress the executive branch, the impact of Speaker Newt Gingrich, congressional transparency, his views on structural and procedural reforms, and more. It was a fascinating conversation that we present here in full.

Daniel Schuman: First of all, thank you.

Steny Hoyer: You’re welcome.

Schuman: Thank you for your 60 years of public service. Thank you for your 45 years as a representative. I’ve been a big fan of yours your entire career, and you didn’t even know it, so it is an absolute pleasure.

Hoyer: Well, that’s very nice of you.

Schuman: In your remarks on the floor when you announced your retirement, you had said that the House is not living up to the founder’s goals and that you promised to say more about the way the House has changed during your time. I’m hoping this is the moment.

Hoyer: Well, I said that because I believe it. I think I said a little bit more about the founders. The founders clearly established the House -- the Senate was a deal. But the House of Representatives, elected relatively regularly every two years, was set up to be a sounding board of the people’s voice on the theory that if you have to be elected every two years, you better pay pretty close attention to the people and you ought to be reflective of their voice as a representative, which is what we’re called.

Senators, of course, were a deal, and the senators were set up to represent the states and be ambassadors essentially from the states. We changed that in the early part of the last century.

But it is the House that the founders believed would be the check and balance, both the reflector of what the public wanted in policy and the overseer of its execution. They made us Article One. I think we are not living up to the hope that they had that. First of all, why did we have a revolution? We had a revolution because we wanted to be a democracy. We didn’t want a king. We didn’t want to have oppressive policies sent from on high that were not questionable by the people, so we created this democracy and the House and the Senate. But the House essentially was given very substantial authority to make sure that the executive was a repository of authority, but not the policy maker, and was to carry out what the Congress directed. For many years, the Congress was stronger and the presidents were not as strong.

We need to get back to what the founders want us to do, irrespective of our partisan affiliation with the present administration. Whatever president is [in party affiliation], we need to look at it not so much from a partisan standpoint, but from a constitutional standpoint of whether or not the president is doing what we expect the president to do and not overstepping, which is what happens as the executive becomes stronger and stronger and stronger. Then they tend to then start ignoring the people’s will as it is expressed by the House of Representatives.

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Schuman: Right, that story makes sense. Looking at the 1930s and 1940s, a lot of power was given to the executive branch. I was doing some research about the bank crash: It was a new Congress, and before they passed the rules, before they chose their speaker, they adopted legislation unanimously to empower the president to close the banks down, which you would never see something like that today.

Hoyer: Oh, let’s start with that: Tariffs. The Constitution says we do tariffs. What are we doing? Nothing. So, you say that would not happen today, right? It’s not the bank, but it’s tariffs that have a huge consequence.

Schuman: Right.

Hoyer: Well, and we are silent.

Schuman: Well, the difference is the House passed legislation to empower the president at that time.

Hoyer: The House is not empowering the president. Action is action. And inaction is action, right? They’re doing the same thing in a different way.

Schuman: Right. Then we had the crisis in the ’60s and ’70s with Vietnam and then the Nixon administration and Congress took back its power. It passed the reorganization efforts in 1970 and 1974. There were all the laws that established the inspectors general, that dealt with impoundments, and so on and so forth. You also had a restructuring in the chamber and a move to empower the parties in the leadership at the expense of the committees. You had transparency brought to the chamber; the discharge petition started.

This was the culmination of 15 years’ worth of effort through the Democratic Study Group to go and try to move civil rights, which had been stuck, as you know, for many years.

Hoyer: In the Rules Committee.

Schuman: You had a very strong Congress at that time. The president had overreached and was pushed back with war powers, with a number of provisions. So, what happened? What changed?

Hoyer: The problems grew in complexity and in consequence. Nixon was a strong presence in one sense, and in another sense, he lost his strength because of the scandals and because of the lack of confidence that the Congress had in him. But the executive always tries to accrete to themselves more power. It’s a constant effort by them because from their standpoint, the president believes I’m elected by all the people and this needs to get done. The Congress is an impediment, so I’m going to try to push the envelope. And that’s what they do. Once they push the envelope and there’s not a reaction, they hold on to that. And my point is, the Congress is not pushing back. And in some instances, many instances in the past, we haven’t pushed back.

Right. Now, Congress, both Democrat and Republican, did push back on Carter on a number of instances. Reagan was a stronger president in the sense that he was more able not only to get Republicans, but as you know, in the early 80s with the Boll Weevils he got a significant number of Democrats who passed his budget, passed his tax bill so his economic program was put in place. But I suggest to you that it is only in that first year, in the last seven years of the Reagan presidency, essentially, the Democrats reasserted their power and the Boll Weevils either left or changed parties.

Schuman: Can you talk about how that happened?

Hoyer: First of all, Reagan had accomplished his major objective with his tax bill in his first year. The Congress pushed back on Reagan because of the domestic policies, and we had a good majority.

Now we have the problem that we have a one party [in control] Washington and you have a very strong president in the sense of political support in his party. And you have what I call the [Liz] Cheney syndrome. Cheney said the emperor had no clothes: The emperor hit her back and she was defeated 2 to 1 in Wyoming, a small state that knew the Cheneys well and knew her policies were probably 95% attuned with their policies.

I think it’s continued in this Congress. We don’t spend a lot of time here, purposefully, in my opinion. We’re supposed to be in session today, right? We’re not in session today.

Schuman: Well, this goes back to Gingrich.

Hoyer: Gingrich came in in 1979 and made the declaration that as long as we cooperate with the Democrats and the Congress works, there’s no reason to replace them. So his premise was that what [Republicans] have to do is not work with them, tear them down, tear the institution down to show the American people the institution is corrupt. The extraordinary thing was he kept at it for 16 years and in 1994 pushed Bob Michael out, who was a wonderful, decent, good human being and who was moderately conservative – a Peoria, Illinois Republican, mainstream Republican. Gingrich didn’t want a mainstream Republican. He wanted an angry, confrontational attack Republican. That’s what he created and that’s what we got in ’94.

Schuman: What I want to focus on is the House’s changing response. In the ’70s you had the empowering of caucuses and subcommittees. The 80s you have the speaker starting to gain more power.

Hoyer: I know you talked about the Democratic Study Group. The Democratic Study Group was very influential. It was composed of the more progressive wing of the party, which was large and still is a large wing of the party. But the committees were still powerful: The Dan Rostenkowski’s, and the Tom Foley’s.

Gingrich centralized power, centralized the message in the election with the Contract with America, he centralized the politics, he pursued centralizing the money because he believed that the Congress as a big body really needed strong leadership and [to] move in a direction that was unified in the person of the speakership.

Schuman: But in doing so, he eliminated a third of the support office and agency staff and the Office of Technology Assessment. He cut committee staff by 20 to 30% and started changing other parts of the plumbing. He also said don’t bring your family to live here in D.C. – have your family in the district and fly in.

Hoyer: I think there was another reason that happened. We had been in charge for 40 years, so there wasn’t the requirement to go home because we didn’t have that many threatened members. Nobody thought – including the Republicans – that they were going to take over, so there was not the constant angst to go home and get that extra vote or at be at this event. People spent time in town, they went to movies together. It might so happen that your next-door neighbor might be a Republican member, not a Democratic member. Fine. He’s your neighbor and he’s your friend, and you get to know him as a human being, right?

What happened is that Congress became more competitive, more closely divided, and therefore every weekend was more critically important. It was not just a plan: It was a development politically because there was an opportunity [for the majority] to go back and forth. Members became more attuned to the partisanship that might provide for their victory or their defeat.

Schuman: C-Span was Gingrich’s thing, right? It was what allowed him to talk to the empty rooms, that a million people would watch and he could make into audio cassettes. He was sending his tapes all around the country so people could hear what he had to say. It’s just fascinating how technology changes the way the discourse happens.

Hoyer: C-Span had a big impact because there was more opportunity to go and create theater. I say that somewhat tongue in cheek because Americans do get to see live their democracy being practiced and they can make judgments.

Schuman: Can I press you on the point just a little bit? Because I agree with you, but I get arguments from the other side. There are some people who assert that the more the people see of the Congress, the worse it is. They want a secret Congress, a Congress that goes and does things and you vote based on the outcomes, but you don’t worry about the other stuff.

Hoyer: I doubt you get very few citizens to say they want less accountability and less attention, even if they don’t pay attention and don’t hold people accountable. But I agree there are some things that are tough to do but have to be done, and the more light that has and the more criticism it brings, the less likely people are to take tough votes.

Schuman: The inverse of the story, which they don’t tell, is that when you couldn’t see what was happening in the hearing rooms, you had the committee chairs acting in ways that were overly powerful, and you had all sorts of corruption and other issues that the transparency addressed by making it harder to engage in those other ways.

Hoyer: But Congress has become better in some ways in the sense that members can now independently get their messages out. For instance, in big cities, there used to be big machines, and the people who came to Congress were people they wanted to get rid of. The mayors and the state senators and the delegates were the power centers. The Congress in Washington, talking about what we’re going to do in Yugoslavia? Who cares about that?

The parties have now become to some degree more effective because they are the money raising apparatus. Although members raise a lot of money, in some of the very tough races very few members have the ability to raise the kind of money it takes. The parties come in with these independent organizations and spend millions of dollars in very tough races. That has strengthened the party but not necessarily weakened the member because the member still has something that the party needs and that’s a vote. Because of social media and TV everybody knows how you vote, so you have to go home and answer to the people. Ultimately, the people elect you, not the party. I think there’s been some salutary effect on the strengthening of the parties while not making the members automatons of the party.

Broad national fundraising efforts focus on the challenged. You may have 25, maybe have 30 really challenged people, and the party raises money all over the country to be focused on those individuals. The objective of which you want is to make sure the policies of the party are supported

Chris Nehls: Can I ask you about that? Because one of the things we’re curious about is how there are differences in caucuses. There are the progressives and there’s still a few Blue Dogs.

Steny Hoyer: Not many.

Nehls: Not too many.

Hoyer: We need to grow the Blue Dogs very substantially.

Nehls: There used to be different partnerships or sometimes it still happens where some group of members from the Republican side partner with Democrats on a specific issue. But it’s pretty rare nowadays. What do you think about that?

Hoyer: Major bipartisan efforts are much rarer than they used to be. They still exist. For instance, I’m a big supporter of Ukraine. We’re having trouble getting the Republicans to put their head above water. We’ve been trying to get a bill and the Speaker won’t put it on the floor because Trump doesn’t want it on the floor. The speaker is very, very attuned to what Trump wants. I think that’s the major impetus he has for doing things or not doing things.

If you had seven parties, eight parties that may be in a parliamentary system much more definitive. If you’re this, you’re probably this. If you’re a New [Democrat], you can be this and that and that. It’s a pro-growth pro-business small business large business group. Some are liberal, some are moderate, some are conservatives in the New Dems, but they share in common the business perspective and the growth perspective. The Progressives are not as definitive or constraining to ideological groups as you might think. The Blue Dogs cared about fiscal responsibility and about growth. When we passed the Affordable Care Act, we had 52 Blue Dogs in the House.

Schuman: And that changed the nature of the way the bill was written and what could make it.

Hoyer: We wouldn’t have passed it without them. Right now, we probably would have if we’d had the majority. Without the Blue Dogs, we probably would have had a public option.

Schuman: At different times in history, these factions were more or less visible. In the ’40s and ’50s, the Dixiecrat label was a meaningful label. There were times in the 19th century where you had other parties or the factions inside the parties were more visible to voters. Some political scientists say that this was helpful for voters. When you’re fighting it out in the primary system you know kind of what you’re getting. Now it’s harder because candidates smudge what they stand for a little bit.

The second part of this is that there are natural partnering elements that exist within these partisan factions. The progressives and the Freedom Caucus are skeptical of mass surveillance, whereas the more moderate factions within the parties have been more comfortable with the government having the authority to surveil more widely. You end up with these unusual coalitions, but those seem like they’re harder to form.

How would things change if you had more identification with a faction in addition to being identified with one party or the other?

Hoyer: I’d have to think about it. I’m not sure of what difference that would make because, frankly, why is a Blue Dog a Blue Dog? Because they have a philosophy, right? And then secondly, they believe that philosophy is what their district wants, so they sell that philosophy. Or some people are progressives and New Dems.

We’re not a parliamentary system where you may have ten, 12, 15, 30 members out of 170 members of the Folketing in Denmark and the largest party is like 40 people.

Schuman: When you look at the different approaches to modeling the chamber, we’ve seen four or five different models of control. And the model of control that we have right now is a very strong speaker model where the speaker dominates the Rules Committee, sets the agenda for the party, and doesn’t really negotiate with the other side all that much. Can you talk about how that works in practice in terms of balancing the different interests inside the party?

Hoyer: You can look at it two ways: you say we have a very strong speaker model. Most of the Congress, Republican and Democrat, think the speaker does what Trump wants him to do. That’s not a particularly strong speaker. Yes, it is a person who has centralized authority because he is Trump’s representative and he gets his votes because Trump works them. I would not describe that as a strong speaker.

I’d say a strong speaker is someone who the president calls up and says, look, I know I can’t get this done without you: what do you think? I think that [Nancy] Pelosi was a strong speaker. The president asked her, Nancy can we do this? Do you think we can do that, as opposed to saying Nancy, this is what I want you to do.

Schuman: That inversion is what’s very interesting. One of our theories is that if you over-centralize power into the speakership, you end up with a weaker chamber than if you have a little bit more friction.

Although the current speaker sets the agenda, he’s weak in respect that he does what Trump wants. He has no independent authority of his own.

Hoyer: He has made a determination that whatever strength he has, he is using not on behalf of his agenda, but on behalf of the president’s agenda.

Schuman: That’s right. And the concern that we have is that when you end up with this inversion that we have now, it makes the Congress a nullity.

Hoyer: It does what I said in my speech. The Congress is less than the founders wanted it to be. It is not carrying out its role of being a check and balance. It’s not carrying out its role as a policy maker. That’s what I meant in my speech, when I describe the Congress as less than the sum of its parts.

Schuman: We have a speaker now who’s aligned with the directives of the White House. Madison wanted interest balanced against interest. We have the interest of the chamber is being drawn into alignment with the interests of the White House, which is basically letting them do whatever they want. Is there a different structure that we could create so that the speaker is more in alignment with the needs of the Congress than that of the White House?

Hoyer: You may think this is not answering your question: but people ask me, when are you going to make common sense and work together and all that sort of stuff? And I say, as soon as you do. They look at me quizzically.

As soon as the country elects a Congress that is collegial, cooperative, and wants to hold the president liable or accountable. Democracy works. It’s like capitalism. You know, if you sell a product that people want, they’ll buy it. If you sell a product they don’t want, you go bankrupt.

Schuman: I want to push on this metaphor. The free market works so long as you don’t have monopolies, so long as it’s properly regulated, right? When you look at the political system, you’re the archetype of the kind of person I would want in Congress. I’ve met a lot of members of Congress: You’re not the only one who is like you, and there are a lot of good and decent people here who want to do the right thing.

Hoyer: Remember I said the Congress is less than the sum of its parts.

Schuman: But they don’t. There is a collective action problem. There is some sort of a problem that is preventing the members from doing what I think they would do naturally. I think that some of that has to do with the way that you set up the chamber and that you can make different decisions about how power is distributed. You can empower the committees; you can empower the factional groups; you can change the route of the rules committee. You can do all sorts of things to change the way that the chamber operates.

Hoyer: I think where you and I differ is you believe that there’s a possibility procedurally in fixing it. I think you have to politically fix it. I think it’s not the process, because a bad process can work with good people, and a good process will not make good people.

Schuman: No, but a bad process can create bad incentives for good people to do bad things.

Hoyer: It’s not a simple this or that because it’s human beings and we’re very complicated. I think my premise is, for instance, the appropriation process is broken. It’s not broken because of process: It’s broken because we don’t follow the process. It’s broken because we procrastinate. It’s broken because we don’t want to make tough decisions. It’s broken because we don’t agree on the decisions we want to make.

I think we have a country of which the Congress is now reflective. The country is getting less because people are getting more upset about what this process has produced. I think they’re going to – particularly in the House – change it next [election]. Will that make everything better? It won’t make everything better, but it will make it somewhat different. And the larger the majority we have, the more likely it is that Republicans will work with us.

Schuman: Imagine you have a Democratic House, 300 members. What’s the response of the Trump Administration to a Republican Senate or even an evenly split Senate and a Democratic House? Is it to follow the constraints of the appropriations bills and the laws that emerge, or is it to double-down on what they’re doing?

Hoyer: I think it’s a little bit like Gingrich’s response to Clinton the other way. What was one of the things that conservatives got most angry at him for? He made a fiscal year ’98 deal. He said, look, the public elected some Democrats and Republicans and they expect us to work together. Of course, he had respect for Clinton’s intellect. I think Clinton was one of the few people he thought was as smart as he was. And as a result of that, he dealt with it and he came up with his budget. They balanced the budget because Clinton wouldn’t let them lower taxes and they wouldn’t let him spend too much.

Schuman: Gingrich had a political reality that was forced upon him. And he also had a counterpart that he respected for his politics, political savvy and for his intellect. That is not the circumstance now with the president he does not respect.

Hoyer: But look at what’s happening. He’s gotten himself into a box. He’s destroying our relations with the rest of the world. I just read an article about how the Europeans are trying to figure out how they can be more independent and do less trading with us. Well, we need to be less rough – he said that to an interviewer yesterday. You know, that’s not Trump. That is Trump responding to the external realities that his advisers are telling him that he’s confronting. What is affecting Trump is the prospect of doing the same thing in 2018 where the people reject Trump more than they elected us.

Schuman: What I’m afraid of is I was told coming in schedule F what happened today. We’ve seen rescissions. We’ve seen impoundments. We’re seeing the searching of people’s communications without going to court. We’re seeing the deployment of troops and the desire at some point to invoke the Insurrection Act and a number of other of these dangerous tools that we’ve left around for for the president to make use of. So my concern is not that you see a moderation in behavior: Rather, you see an acceleration of behavior.

Hoyer: Well, you’ve certainly seen that. We haven’t talked about the third branch, which has been critical and is going to be critical. I think we’re going to win on the Federal Reserve, but we ought to win on the FCC, SEC, not just the Federal Reserve. It’s ironic, we set up generally five person boards and the Congress sets it up so that you have two minority people so both perspectives can be. And now with the Supreme Court giving a tip of the hat to it Trump can fire them.

Russell Vought is a major danger to our democracy. He and [Stephen] Miller are very, very dangerous people to our democracy. That has nothing to do with the Congress per se, except we are not overseeing or stopping them. Where I think the majority of Congress knows they are not doing what is consistent with the Constitution, the laws of our country, because they’re intimidated. It’s the Cheney syndrome.

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Schuman: What can we do about that?

Hoyer: You’re a voter.

Schuman: Yes.

Hoyer: That’s what we can do. I know it sounds simplistic, and we need some sort of process reform, but that process will only work if people follow them. It’s really in the final analysis [of] democracy, the voter has said, no, I don’t want that. That’s what they did in ’18 and they do it a lot. They were not happy with Biden, they were not happy with the economy, they were not happy with the immigration. They weren’t happy and they did something about it. And they chose somebody who had demonstrably indicated he didn’t care about the law and he was not a small “d” democrat. He was going to overthrow the Congress, and they voted for him anyway because they were frustrated and angry and hurting.

If you’re talking about process, the Senate was a deal. I mentioned Wyoming. Wyoming has two senators. California has 40 million people and two senators. How the hell can you justify a body like that? Well, now we’ll never change it.

Schuman: But even on the House side, the vast majority of seats are not competitive. And with the redistricting games that are happening now, there are even fewer seats. So, most people when they vote, as a practical matter, have one option.

Hoyer: That’s a demographic issue. And we are tribalizing ourselves. We are all moving to areas where people are just like us. You’ve heard of the Villages? My former pastor lives in the Villages. He’s a strong Democrat. His wife’s a strong Democrat. They are a significant minority. And in the counties around the country, you find clusters of the same thinking people because they’re comfortable there. What we’ve done is we have tribalized ourselves, shooting at one another verbally.

It exacerbates the Senate because the Senate represents so many of the areas where people are so overrepresented. A person in Wyoming has 80 times the influence in the United States Senate, that a Californian does.

Nehls: One of the weird things about American democracy is we have these geographic based districts. Most countries don’t have them. What do you think about going to a multi-member system for the House, where maybe there’s two districts in a populous state for 4 or 5 seats?

Hoyer: That’s an interesting proposal. I haven’t thought a lot about it. We have that in Maryland because we have three members in a district with a state senator. We used to have when I was first elected to the state senate in ’66, there were two member districts and six member delegates elected at large, which is what you’re suggesting.

Of course, in redistricting, we’re talking about making Maryland eight zero. If you had a statewide election, it would be eight zero, no doubt about it.

I’m not a big fan, by the way, of ranked choice voting because I think it’s a little bit of a throw of the dice of who you’re going to get. I think a better solution is a runoff than ranked choice voting.

But that’s not really on point when you’re saying. It’s the Senate which we will never change because the small states are clearly not going to diminish their authority and the Senate would be too large if you tried to do it the other way. But the Senate and the Electoral College undermine our democracy and do not reflect the public will. It reflects the minority. Will 40% of the American people elect the majority of the United States Senate? And then the filibuster exacerbates that, right?

I am very worried about the House not doing what it’s doing. We’re not here enough – now, that’s process. – and this speaker is more inclined to get us out of town than into town. A, he doesn’t have much of an agenda left, and B, he doesn’t want us here centralized so we can talk to the press and this and that and the other and it is a real problem. But also, during the 45 days we were out, he didn’t allow the Appropriations Committee to do work that it should have done.

Schuman: And he can recess you because of a change in the rules anytime he wants for as long as he wants.

Hoyer: Of course, we had that rule too. One side or the other side was abusing the use of time. We were the victims of it for a long period of time, so we put in a rule and said, okay, we can recess. And we’re now hoisted on that petard. You know, once you do it yourself, it’s inevitably going to be done to you. But I frankly think that’s not one of the worst rules that we have.

We don’t have nearly enough oversight. That’s absurd. The Founding Fathers would say, what do you mean, that’s one of your major responsibilities.? We have never in probably 20 years really done what we ought to do on oversight. We think we’re doing oversight when we do the appropriations process, when we ask people, did you spend money correctly or that you need money for this? We think we’re doing what we ought to be doing: Do the appropriations process, have that take six months, eight months at most, and spend the other four months seeing how things are being done.

On my committee, we haven’t had an oversight hearing. We’ve had a couple of information hearings, at my request. I think we had more hearings than almost any other subcommittee and it’s one of the smallest subcommittees. That’s really where I think the Congress is falling down on the job, oversight.

Schuman: We’ll wrap here. Thank you for your time – so appreciate the conversation.

Hoyer: You’re very welcome. It is a pleasure.

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“I don’t have to,” is how President Trump responded to a question about working with Congress to pass new tariffs after his defeat at the Supreme Court Friday. True to his word, he immediately imposed a 10% global import surcharge via Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974.

This decision may require Trump finally to turn to Congress as duties levied under Section 122 expire after 150 days and require congressional approval to extend. Even in that case, Cato’s Clark Packard notes that the administration could just thumb its nose at the separation of powers and make a fresh declaration of balance-of-payments deficits. If he doesn’t, it’ll be an interesting vote close to Election Day.

It’s also likely this move will drag the administration back into court, as the law concerns international monetary situations that were outdated even before the act’s passage and not trade deficits. If this move is struck down, the president could turn to part of the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930 and invoke 50% tariffs against countries that discriminate against U.S. commerce. Like Section 122, it’s never been used by a presidential administration, so we don’t know how the courts will act.

All of this is to say there are plenty of major questions doctrine cases remaining before Congress will need to codify the tariffs. Justice Neil Gorsuch reminded disappointed MAGAites that the legislative route always is the preferable one constitutionally in his decision on the IEEPA tariffs. Although legislating is hard and time-consuming, “the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design,” he writes.

It’s a lovely paean to Article I, but also a bit of a poke. He warned during the arguments in the IEEPA case that the administration was creating a “one-way ratchet” of delegated authorities that would be “veto-proof,” because the congressional options for pulling them back are unworkable. Take away the ratchet and force Congress to take positive action on tariffs, and Trump doesn’t have the votes, as demonstrated by the recent vote to end an emergency declaration over trade with Canada.

Through the legislative process, Gorsuch continues, “the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man.” The tariffs, of course, were the idea of one man. They’ve had a negative economic impact. They’re also an enormous break from previous Republican positions. The House has not had the opportunity to contribute to combined wisdom. In fact, members have been prevented until this month by rule from doing that very thing. Outside of the faction most devoted to Trump, how many actually have conviction behind their support of tariff policy? Without the one-way ratchet, poor policy ideas would confront majority rule and fail.

Legislative branch observers have focused on how congressional delegation of authority to the executive branch has been particularly problematic during a personalist administration like this one. We should remember that Trump has appeared during a weird time in congressional history when narrow electoral margins have created strong political drive for partisan cohesion and teamsmanship. Behind Gorsuch’s critique of congressional failures is a lack of collective action among those in the majority party that disagree with the charted course. To do so would be to challenge the prevailing partisan political common values (in both parties) that put loyalty first. That loyalty is directed at the co-partisan president. Those values reflect choices, however, made by the collective. Right now, they are difficult to move because of the electoral incentives connected to them. Many members chafing under the demands of loyalty have simply quit.

If electoral incentives start to change because of the unpopularity of executive branch policies for which Congress will be held responsible, members and would-be members should prepare to make different choices that value differentiation and diversity of thought. That’s the missing part of getting back to what Gorsuch is describing in his hopes for a deliberative legislative branch that replaces rule by executive fiat.

POWER OF THE PURSE

IS ICE AN “ARMY”?

The current government shutdown, it’s been widely observed, has little impact on immigration enforcement agencies because the reconciliation bill provided $170 billion for the next four years. Budget experts Scott Levy and Kevin McNellis argue that this appropriation violates the Constitution’s limitation on funding standing armies for only two years at a time. To them, ICE and CBP represent a permanent coercive force with nationwide deployment controlled by the executive branch, which meets the founders’ understanding of an army.

“It does not follow that the Constitution permits Congress to entrench a functionally equivalent force under a different name simply because it is housed in a civil department,” they write. They urge Congress to create an explicit two-year limit by adopting a rule prohibiting funding for DHS immigration enforcement agencies requiring it and enforcing it through points of order on the House or Senate floor. Waiving the rule would require a two-thirds majority.

DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

The administration intends to continue dismantling the Department of Education even though Congress prohibited shifting funds to other departments in the FY2026 spending bill, the Federal News Network reports. Appropriators added the language to the package that provides $79 billion for the department, rejecting the White House budget’s proposed $12 billion in cuts. Nevertheless, department officials say they will proceed with interagency agreements signed last year to transfer programs elsewhere, mainly to the Department of Labor, as proof of concept for the reorganizations. They then will try to receive congressional approval for larger transfers of funds. “Break the law a little bit first and see if it works” is an interesting approach to congressional relations.

Although the administration has targeted a variety of higher education programs, congressional appropriators continue to direct earmarks successfully to specific universities.

NASA

The White House’s FY2026 budget proposed slashing or eliminating funding for more than a dozen NASA science missions. Congress restored the $6 billion in funds in the Commerce, Justice and Science Appropriations bill signed into law. In turn, the Office of Management and Budget has placed a pause on those missions’ funds through last week and may extend it.

Some of the missions involve space-based global warming monitoring and other Earth-focused research which the administration opposes for ideological reasons. The Chandra X-ray Observatory, however, is also caught up in the OMB order.

BIG PICTURE THINKING

Gabe Fleisher in his “Wake Up to Politics” newsletter took an impressively comprehensive look at how the Trump Administration’s attempts to slash federal programs through the combination of DOGE and budget proposals failed. It’s actually a spectacular failure as Fleisher zooms out: Congress rejected 44 of the 46 program eliminations proposed in the White House budget and the only lasting impact of DOGE so far is at USAID. Congress even restored foreign aid significantly for FY2026.

The conclusion Fleischer draws from these failures is that process still really matters in governing, whether it be in generating congressional support for cuts and eliminations or in being able to understand how agency programs work in the first place when seeking waste, fraud, and abuse. The Trump Administration tried to blunt force everything and fell on its face. The takeaway for future presidential administrations, he posits, is to work the system, including Congress, to achieve lasting results.

We agree that staying between constitutional guardrails is the right way to go. Congressional Republicans’ meager appetite for spending cuts, however, is exactly why Russell Vought has tried to supersede those processes. As we’ve noted, Vought has indicted Congress for shirking their deliberative duties by overdelegating its governing responsibilities to agency bureaucrats, who then make decisions preferred by congressional leadership. He understands he doesn’t have the votes in Congress to reverse what he sees (it’s the same frustration many Freedom Caucus members have expressed about their colleagues’ votes on spending packages over the years, leading to procedural shenanigans to try to force them). Therefore, Vought is attempting a radical break from Congress’s majoritarian nature by taking decisions about the executive branch out of congressional hands. His project is not reducing the size of the federal government but installing dictatorial powers in the presidency. We should keep that danger front and center.

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OVERSIGHT

Bill and Hillary Clinton are scheduled to participate in separate depositions about the Jeffrey Epstein case with House Oversight this week. The committee initially subpoenaed the Clintons back in August, but they first rescheduled and then failed to appear for previous attempts. Members of both parties on the committee voted to hold them in contempt in late January for refusing to comply. Receiving their depositions would be a good win for the committee and Congress.

The House Office of the Whistleblower Ombuds has released a new guide focused on healthcare-related issues in the private and public sectors for House staff, highlighting relevant laws for whistleblowing.

TARGETS

The federal prosecutors who led the attempted indictments of six Democratic members of Congress could not name a federal statute they had violated when they met with Rep. Elissa Slotkin’s lawyer, the New Republic reported, making it sound like they were under direct political pressure to pursue the cases.

Rep. Robert Garcia shared with NOTUS’s Reese Gorman what it’s like to be openly gay and deal with members who are openly biased against LGBTQ people. The way he sees people treat colleague Sarah McBride, “drives me insane,” he says.

THREATS

A young man from Georgia thankfully was stopped and disarmed by Capitol Police on the lower stairs of the West Front of the Capitol. He was armed with a shotgun and was wearing tactical gear and ran quite a distance from the Botanic Garden to the stairs before being stopped. He told officers he “was just there to talk” to a member.

A total of 21 people were criminally charged with threatening members of Congress in 2025, according to data gathered and analyzed by the University of Nebraska at Omaha and CBS News. As the report states, that figure is out of the roughly 15,000 threats investigated by USCP last year, which suggests that behavior that crosses the line remains rare.

A recent study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in Great Britain suggests the same. Researchers put roughly 800,000 posts collected between the fall of 2021 and 2025 through Large Language Models trained to detect threatening and violent rhetoric directed at 26 U.S. government officials, including President Trump. The LLMs identified about 8,500 instances of violent threat out of that sample, about half of which were directed at Trump.

Like the USCP, the study found that threats have increased over time. But do the arithmetic: that’s 1% of posts, classified by a careful methodology using powerful AI tools. Recall, too, that USCP started using new monitoring tools scanning global traffic last year.

Again, this is not to diminish the psychological impact of being threatened online or the pressure to distinguish the serious threat from the flippant remark (or foreign bot). It’s simply very hard to understand the managerial effectiveness expressed between top-line threat numbers and criminal prosecutions.

ODDS & ENDS

AI Event. The American Historical Association will hold a briefing titled “The History of Artificial Intelligence, Privacy, & Security” on February 27 at 9AM in Rayburn House Office Building Room 2075. This event was rescheduled because of the government shutdown in October.

Pardon amendment. Rep. Don Bacon became the first Republican to cosponsor Rep. Johnny Olszewski’s constitutional amendment creating a system for congressional nullification of presidential pardons.

Procedure lessons. I really enjoyed Matt Glassman’s use of the Congressional Record as a teaching tool for understanding the specifics of House rules and procedure on a typical day. Actually, two days.

Perfecting democracy: The Danish Parliament recently commissioned a study by more than 200 academic researchers into how Danish democracy is working, the challenges it faces, and potential actions for leaders to take. Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, have done similar studies previously. Liberal Currents talks to one of the lead researchers on the project.

Lobby boom. More registrants have filed as foreign lobbyists than during the last seven presidential administrations, according to the Free Press. More than 380 registrations have been processed by the Department of Justice since Trump’s second election.

Life comes at you fast. President Yoon Suk Yeol, now facing a life sentence in South Korea, addressed a joint session of Congress in 2023.

Last words. The Greenfield Reporter last week published the last column former Rep. Lee Hamilton wrote for the paper, written shortly before his death. He’d written more than 2,000 commentaries for it since joining Congress. The title: “Will Congress assert itself this year?”

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News reports of the House these days often refer to Speaker Mike Johnson’s narrow majority. When the 119^th Congress began, there were 219 Republicans and 215 Democrats (with one vacancy occasioned by Rep. Matt Gaetz declining to take his seat). The numbers have fluctuated slightly over the past year, and the current Republican majority stands at 218 to 214 with 3 vacancies. It is not out of the realm of possibility that some combination of deaths, resignations, and results of special elections turns a narrow Republican majority into a narrow Democratic majority.

This article attempts to walk through the various procedural steps that a new majority would likely take in the event that party control of the chamber switches mid-Congress.

Officers of the House

Most likely, the first action that a new majority party would take would be to elect one of its own as Speaker of the House. Replacing officers of the House is the type of organizational business that has long been recognized as qualifying as a “question of privilege” under House Rule IX, meaning it can be brought up at virtually any time. Step one would be to offer a resolution declaring the speakership vacant, i.e. removing Speaker Johnson from his post. At the beginning of the 119^th Congress, Republicans added a qualification to Rule IX that any resolution causing a vacancy in the speakership: (1) can only be offered by a member of the majority party; and (2) must be cosponsored by eight other majority party members. A straightforward reading of this provision would allow Democrats, who would now have a majority of seats, to meet this requirement easily.

It’s worth noting, however, that the House at an institutional level does not have any formal procedures for determining which party constitutes a majority. At the beginning of a Congress, it accepts the traditional declarations from representatives of each party that certain individuals have been elected (by the parties) as Majority Leader and Minority Leader. The rules and precedents thereafter confer certain privileges of those floor leaders, and members’ declared party affiliations identify them as being members of the majority or the minority for certain purposes (e.g. alternating recognition for debate between the majority and minority sides). It is an open question how the House would interpret these rules in the case of a multi-party House where no single party could rightfully claim to be “the majority party.”

Given this new requirement that only majority party members can bring a resolution to vacate the speakership, it might be prudent for the new majority to take the initial step of formally announcing to the House that it has elected a member as Majority Leader – thus allowing the House to take cognizance of the fact that a different party now controls a majority. Could that declaration be challenged by the old majority party insisting that the House already has a Majority Leader? Even assuming such an objection could be made, it would ultimately be resolved by a majority vote, in which case the new majority party would simply reject the challenge.

Upon adoption of the resolution declaring the speakership vacant, a member of the old majority (pre-selected by Speaker Johnson) would take the gavel pursuant to clause 8 of Rule I. That Speaker Pro Tempore would follow the precedents established when Speaker Kevin McCarthy was removed from office and assume only those authorities of the speakership necessary to elect a new Speaker. In the McCarthy case, it was the same party that continued to hold the majority, so Speaker Pro Tempore McHenry interpreted his authority as encompassing the Speaker’s authority to declare a recess allowing the majority party to hold caucus votes formally nominating a replacement Speaker.

In the scenario contemplated here, Democrats have taken the majority from the Republicans and would presumably be ready with their nominee without needing a recess. It is again an open question what the House would do if the Speaker Pro Tempore leveraged the recess authority and declared an indefinite recess to thwart the new majority from taking control. This is one of the many unilateral powers of the speakership that could be exploited by rogue Speakers to defy the will of the House (more on that below).

Assuming the Speaker Pro Tempore did not engage in any bad faith machinations, the House would proceed to the election of a new Speaker. The conduct of the election would be the same as that occurring at the beginning of the Congress, with each party nominating an individual and all members voting by roll call vote. The new majority would thus be able to elect one of its own members as Speaker, who would then take the gavel.

After installing a new Speaker, the new majority would probably elect new individuals to fill the other officer positions in the House, i.e. the Clerk, the Sergeant-at-Arms, and the Chief Administrative Officer. These positions are often held by long-time staff affiliated with the majority party and who have some experience in administrative or security matters. The resolution to elect new officers is privileged and requires only a simple majority. The Chaplain of the House is also an elected officer, but it is a position traditionally held by a religious official agreed upon jointly by the two parties. Therefore, the new majority may simply allow the current chaplain to continue in that role.

With the election of a new Speaker and new officers, the majority party would then have control of all of the ministerial and administrative functions of the House. For the most part, these responsibilities are entirely apolitical and largely involve processing the tremendous amount of paperwork required by the legislative process. But the Speaker also has broad authority over the House side of the Capitol Building, including the assignment of rooms and offices. I would imagine that a new majority would utilize these prerogatives to evict the former majority from certain desirable spaces in the Capitol.

Rules and Committees

Unlike at the beginning of a Congress, a mid-Congress change in the majority would take place in the context of existing standing rules and there would be no need to adopt new ones. However, each new majority tends to tweak the rules to their liking, often to address some perceived political problem (the conditions on vacating the speakership in Rule IX being a prime example). Conceivably, the new majority may propose rules changes. Their proposals would have to go through the Rules Committee (see below) because the required resolution would amend the standing rules rather than adopt rules for the first time.

The status of committees would be the next item for the new majority to address. When the new majority takes over, committees of the House already will have been populated and their chairs and ranking minority members established by formal resolution. None of those committee assignments would be vacated automatically: it would take new privileged resolutions to remove committee members and replace them with new slates of members.

Committees are one of the few areas where the House rules do take cognizance of a members’ party affiliation; Members must be officially “sponsored” by a party caucus in order to claim a committee seat. However, the size of each committee, and the ratio of majority Members to minority Members, is not established by House rules. Instead, the leaderships of the two parties negotiate appropriate sizes for each committee, and the number of seats that will be given to each party. The ratio of majority to minority members will generally follow the overall ratio in the House, i.e. if the majority party holds 60% of the seats in the House, it would expect to fill roughly 60% of the seats on each committee.

Each party uses internal caucus procedures to fill all of the seats that they have been allocated on the various standing committees. The parties then draft resolutions that list the members to be assigned to each committee, in the order of seniority (with the first majority party member designated as chair of the committee and the first minority party member designated as ranking minority member). These resolutions are privileged. Although theoretically, the majority party has the votes to veto the selections of the minority, the general practice for over a century has been that each party is allowed to fill committee seats as they see fit.

If a new majority were to take over mid-Congress, I would expect there to be a new round of negotiations between the parties as to the number of committee seats and potentially a simple resolution declaring all prior assignments vacated. The committees would then be repopulated by privileged resolutions offered by each party. The Rules Committee is somewhat unique in that both party caucuses provide special prerogatives to the Speaker to choose its members. Finalizing the assignments to the Rules Committee would be done through the adoption of a privileged resolution on the floor as well.

In the modern House, control of the Rules Committee is effectively control of the House itself. Virtually all business is done through “special rules” promulgated by the committee. The new majority would want to make sure that it has control of the Rules Committee as soon as possible. The other major procedural route, usually used for less controversial measures, is suspension of the rules procedures. The new majority would control this procedure as soon as they elect a Speaker, because under Rule XV, motions to suspend are entirely within the discretion of the Speaker.

Shenanigans

What could the former majority party (now reduced to minority status) do to interfere with this transition? Arguably, very little, for the simple reason that the House is a majoritarian institution and the new majority party will therefore have the votes to prevent any bad faith maneuvers by the minority.

To take one example: suppose the Speaker rules that the resolution causing a vacancy in the speakership must be offered by someone with the same party affiliation as the Speaker because they interpret “member of the majority party” to mean “a member affiliated with the party that nominated the Speaker.” This is not a logical reading of the plain text of the rule, but there is an argument to be made that the purpose of the restriction was to prevent one party from trying to depose a Speaker chosen by the other party. If such an interpretation were to prevail, the new majority would not be able to oust the old Speaker.

But such a ruling by the old Speaker would be subject to appeal since virtually every procedural ruling by the Speaker can be appealed to the full House for its decision. In such a case, the new majority would simply overrule the Speaker’s interpretation, present their resolution under Rule IX, and remove the Speaker.

Could the Speaker delay the consideration of the resolution to vacate the speakership? Under some circumstances, the Speaker has discretion under Rule IX to schedule a qualifying resolution any time within a two-legislative-day window. Last year, Speaker Johnson used his “district work period” authorities to adjourn the House unilaterally in order to close a similar two-legislative-day window provided in the discharge rule, effectively cutting off consideration of Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s parental proxy voting plan. Could he do something similar with a resolution to remove him from office?

In this case, he could not, because Rule IX’s two-legislative-day window provisions only apply to rank-and-file members. Rule IX resolutions offered by either the Majority Leader or the Minority Leader are privileged for immediate consideration. Even if the new majority did not announce its selection of a new Majority Leader, they would still have an acknowledged Minority Leader who could offer the resolution, and under those circumstances, the Speaker does not have the discretion to postpone that vote.

Could the Speaker unilaterally adjourn the House in order to prevent consideration of the resolution declaring the speakership vacant? Theoretically, yes. As described earlier, at the beginning of this Congress the House codified the Speaker’s authority to unilaterally declare “district work periods” and hold pro forma sessions of the House until members were ready to return for legislative business. One of the accompanying authorities is the ability of the Speaker to unilaterally adjourn the House any time during that district work period. So in theory, when a member attempts to bring up the vacating resolution, the Speaker could declare the start of a district work period, unilaterally adjourn the House, and hold pro forma sessions indefinitely. There are no guardrails on this authority, and it’s not clear from a parliamentary perspective what members could do to bring the House back into session if the Speaker abused this authority.

Similarly, the House long ago gave the Speaker unilateral recess authority, the ability to take the chamber out of session for a short period whenever there is no question pending. In the face of a member attempting to raise the resolution removing the Speaker, the Speaker could instead deny recognition for that purpose and declare a recess. The “short time” requirement in the recess rule has been stretched on various occasions, but if the House is in recess, there is no way to formally challenge what the Speaker is doing.

Could the Speaker prevent new Members from being sworn in? Let’s say that the results of two special elections flip party control in the House from a one-seat majority for one party to a one-seat majority for the other party. The new majority would only come into existence when those two new Members are sworn in. Does the Speaker have any discretion to prevent or postpone the swearing-in of those Members-elect?

All House rules, precedents, and traditions strongly dispute the notion that the Speaker has any discretionary authority to delay or prevent the administration of the oath of office to any new Member-elect. Swearing in a new Member is of the highest privilege and the oath has been taken at times when other parliamentary activities are generally not permitted (for instance, during the conduct of a vote). This kind of organizational business easily qualifies as a question of privilege, and a resolution directing the Speaker to administer the oath can be brought up at virtually any time. Speaker Johnson’s invention of bogus protocols to delay the swearing-in of Rep. Adelita Grijalva last year, claiming he couldn’t swear in a member during a pro forma session, was certainly a disturbing development, but once the House returned to normal legislative activity, the Speaker relented.

A more serious case would arise if not merely the Speaker but the House itself decided that certain members-elect should not be seated. Taking the same scenario above, the two new members-elect arrive in D.C. with their certificates of election. Could the old majority simply reject those members-elect? Actually, the answer is yes. Only the House has the constitutional authority to determine who has been properly elected to its membership. One can easily envision a scenario where claims of fraud are made, the House refuses to swear in either of the new members, and instead refers the case to the Committee on House Administration, which has jurisdiction over contested elections. That process would be accomplished via privileged resolutions that require only a simple majority. And without those two new members, the old majority would have the votes to prevent their seating.

Conclusion

Every two years, the House of Representatives reconstitutes itself into a new legislative body. Its entire membership turns over, it elects new officers, adopts new rules, and makes new committee assignments. These same basic organizational steps would be taken if majority control of the chamber switched from one party to the other. In theory, with the House so familiar with the process of starting over, the transition from one majority to another mid-Congress should be relatively smooth.

A rogue Speaker or a former majority party desperate to cling to power, however, has options to try to thwart the new majority from taking control. The Speaker has been given a tremendous amount of discretionary power in the modern House, especially in bringing the House in and out of session. These authorities could be abused (and Speaker Johnson has already shown a willingness to abuse them) to try to defy the will of the House majority. A potentially more serious threat is an old majority refusing to seat newly-elected Members whose swearing-in would cause party control to flip. We can only hope that cooler heads would prevail in that scenario, and that the right of the people to have their representatives seated in Congress would supersede any partisan considerations.

Max Spitzer recently left the House Parliamentarian’s Office after nearly 20 years of service. During the last five years he authored the official procedural guidebook for the House of Representatives. He also served as a legal researcher and editor and assistant parliamentarian.

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