Pipelines and Plans

House staff can get direct support building workplace apps and tools

MODERNIZATION

House staff developing tools and applications to address workplace challenges will have direct support from technical experts through a new initiative launched last week by the Subcommittee on Modernization and Innovation of the Committee on House Administration. Chair Stephanie Bice announced the House AI Innovators Pipeline as part of the subcommittee’s commitment “to creating an environment where staff are encouraged and enabled to build state-of-the-art tools that help us work better for our constituents.”

Pipeline participants will gain access to a secure environment to develop their projects and mentorship from experts at the House AI Center. The center was launched in 2024 after a CHA recommendation to the Chief Administrative Officer as a way to foster staff application development responsibly.

Bice noted at the recent subcommittee hearing on legislative data modernization that House staff increasingly have “taken matters into their own hands” and started building their own tools because of the lack of capabilities like real-time alerts in many legislative branch online resources. Because staff “are not going to wait for the House, the Library [of Congress] or CRS to build the tools they need to do their jobs better,” she said, the subcommittee needed to encourage their efforts because they would keep the House technologically current. (ICYMI, I recapped that hearing last week.)

Providing a structure and direct support for staff experimenting with their own projects is a great way to support a culture of innovation and tap into the talent within the House while avoiding potential headaches. We’ve been trying to surface projects that staff have been working on independently, like former intern Sam Cook’s HillDesk scheduler assistant, to contribute to this culture. Having a real-life maker space for AI tools will build a valuable network.

The House AI Center and Modernization Subcommittee already are collaborating on staff project development. House Digital Service intern Akbar Khamidov shared that he presented an automated video transcription and summarization tool he’s been working on at an event hosted in the committee’s hearing room. Khamidov said it accurately counted votes on amendments and labeled remarks by individual hearing participants in a recent test. It’s an internal tool, but we’re eager to learn more.

The Modernization Subcommittee also shared last week that it has made a formal request for Modernization Initiative Account funds for the development of an AI agent linked to House systems and data that can improve how staff locate information and complete essential tasks. The agent is called My Intelligent Assistant, or Mia, and can also “support the development of customized skills and tools that help offices work more efficiently and effectively,” according to the subcommittee.

The subcommittee also secured modernization account funds for PRISM, a database application that will replace the Rules Committee’s system for managing legislation. PRISM will manage data across multiple workflows, process amendment intake, and provide automated document generation among other functions.

STRUCTURAL REFORM

The United States Congress remains an outlier among democracies in retaining its single-member-district, first-past-the-post system for electing representatives. The method entrenches gerrymandering and creates a host of distortions in the representativeness of congressional delegations.

Protect Democracy recently assembled more than 500 academic experts to sign onto a letter to Congress urging it to switch to a system of proportional representation using multi-member districts to allocate seats in the House according to each party’s share of the vote total in a state. They note that Congress codified single-member districts only in 1967 and has the authority to replace that system to render gerrymandering moot. The letter supports a recent report that Protect Democracy published on how proportional representation would mitigate gerrymandering and the geographic sorting of the electorate that leads to an underrepresentation of urban voters.

We’d add that PR isn’t just a proper solution to eliminate gerrymandering, but supports the development of different factional identifications within the two-party system. As electoral politics has become more nationalized, the parties have developed more coherent identities that do not fit every political candidate. Single-member-district elections have pushed factional conflict within that nationalized environment into protracted primary campaigns, where a tiny minority of voters often determine who will win the congressional seat.

Proportional representation would allow these contests to play out in the general election, giving candidates the freedom to develop their own political brand and vision. Ultimately, we think the potential for different types of Republicans and Democrats to run successful campaigns within the same district can lead to more productive factional politics within the chamber as alliances built on shared views on specific issues would be more attainable.

HOUSE REFORMS

A group of former government officials called We The Doers have followed up their diagnosis of what’s driving congressional dysfunction – too much centralization of decision making and a lack of institutional capacity – with ideas about how to “democratize” the House. The group includes former House Parliamentarian’s Office staffer Max Spitzer, whom we talked to about the Speaker’s control of the calendar through House rules.

Their recommendations, which Spitzer helped develop, focus heavily on committees as both producers of legislation and arenas for policy debate. They include changes that would allow committees to have guaranteed pathways to consideration of bills on the House floor without leadership interference and protections against leadership changes to bills committees produce. They advocate returning to the idea of Sen. Robert LaFollette in the mid-1940s of correlating committees with federal departments more clearly, moving away from overly broad and vague jurisdictions. The House also should empower and expand the number of subcommittees, they propose.

They also call for extensive member education so they stop “reinventing the wheel” with proposals for programs that often already exist and so they can execute the fundamentals of shaping appropriations bills, conducting oversight, and engaging with the civil service.

These proposals are responsive to where members are being significantly disempowered by party leaders, including by limiting resources for learning how to do the job of being a representative. They pursue goals that are functional, not political, in that they don’t seek to cultivate gauzy bipartisan compromise but make congressional action contribute to better governance by federal departments. They also are unique in explicitly trying to pull decision-making on federal programs out of Appropriations subcommittees and back into regular oversight and authorization work by the appropriate committees because appropriators often are out of their league on subject matter.

MEMBER CONDUCT

Reps. Teresa Leger Fernández and Kat Cammack have been working for months, with leadership blessing, on a package of reforms to address how the House addresses sexual misconduct. That didn’t stop Rep. Jeff Crank from introducing his own bill restricting members from having relationships with any staff, without consulting either.

Crank’s bigfooting aside, Cammack told Roll Call that the anti-misconduct group she’s co-leading is close to completing the portion of the package on member and staff training. Figuring out effective consequences for sexual misconduct has been more difficult. But as Daniel told Roll Call, the group limiting itself to a House resolution, given the Senate’s lack of interest in the issue, could be effective in changing incentives even if the end result limits the types of punishments that can be administered.

Although there are no allegations of misconduct, Puck’s profile of the management style of Sen. Tim Scott is an eyebrow-raiser, including staff openly competing for the same job on his personal staff and 20 employees leaving the Senate Banking Committee he has chaired for only 18 months.

STAFF REPRESENTATIVENESS

The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies at George Washington University pulled together some rapid-fire analysis of demographic data on Democratic Senate staff the caucus released Friday. Three senators from the Northeast –Sens Angus King, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders – have the highest ranking in the Joint Center’s point of index ranking for staff diversity in the context of state demographics. The most racially diverse staff by number goes to Sen. Brian Schatz (who gets dinged in their index rating because Hawaii is 79% non-white).

Sens Angela Alsobrooks, Maria Cantwell, and John Hickenlooper showed the most improvement in diversity hiring from 2025.

Committee offices are still lagging in minority hiring. Nine Senate committees have no Black minority staff, while only six of the 19 committees have a percentage of staff identifying as people of color over 40%. Of course, Democrats have fewer staff because they are in the minority, so if the majority flips in 2027 it’ll be interesting to see how diversity is reflected in staffing up.

ODDS AND ENDS

Senate earmark tracker: Senators made $46.5 billion in earmark requests in FY 2027, according to analysis by the National Taxpayers Union. New Mexico’s two senators led the chamber, requesting nearly 10% of that figure through almost 600 earmarks. The group published a complete list of more than 13,000 requests in a spreadsheet, a herculean accomplishment.

The Bipartisan Policy Center’s William Hoagland defends Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough as she applies the “Byrd Rule” to the latest round of budget reconciliation effort, particularly in passing the SAVE Act.

Look up: A key feature of an Alexander Calder sculpture in the Hart Senate Office Building soon will be back. TBD if the long-absent clouds will spin again, though.