Legislative Branch Appropriations Hearings Shift into High Gear
Two packed days of testimony start Tuesday
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.
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.
Dodging oversight. DHS officials have repeatedly and illegally denied congressional members access to ICE detention facilities. Several weeks ago, they tried a new tactic – before members of Maryland’s delegation arrived at a facility in Baltimore, ICE moved all detainees to Arizona.
Hiring resource. Learning Journey AI has created a new job listings board for legislative branch positions, including House and Senate jobs, that pulls and organizes postings from multiple sources. It’s updated daily.