Pulling Threads

Catching up with a busy early summer for congressional modernization, plus some thoughts on the centrality of Congress 250 years after declaring independence

CATCHING UP

We admit it, we’ve been dropping some massive newsletters recently. From our perspective, that’s not a bad thing because it shows that Congress is engaging on issues that are important to the institution’s near and long-term future. From an audience engagement perspective, well, it’s not ideal. If you’re catching up on the beach or in the woods this week, here are the threads we’ve been pulling lately.

LEGISLATIVE BRANCH TECHNOLOGICAL MODERNIZATION

The effort to modernize the tools and systems people inside the legislative branch need to do their jobs most effectively has hit an accelerated pace. Legislative branch offices have shared information about testing and deployment of several exciting projects. Some, including the House Clerk’s comparative print suite and the Congressional Research Service’s Text Analysis Program of bill text matching, are leveraging artificial intelligence models developed in-house (reminder: legislative branch offices have been working with forms of AI for well over a decade). These platforms were demonstrated at the latest Congressional Data Task Force Meeting in June, which we covered here.

And more will be coming: Partners in the Congressional Data Task Force also announced the launch of a public version of the legislative branch data map with strengthened metadata, which will make datasets much easier to find for developers and researchers. The House Digital Service, meanwhile, continues to be a proof-of-concept for a Congress-wide development office as it starts on the next four projects authorized out of the Modernization Initiative Account (and would do more if the MIA were fully funded by appropriators).

The use of AI in legislative branch processes took center stage during the Committee on House Administration’s hearing June 25 with CRS Director Karen Donfried. Committee members were curious about how CRS was leveraging AI systems to contend with its enormous workload. They were specifically interested in how AI could provide authoritative summaries for introduced legislation. Donfried raised eyebrows when she relayed the results of a 2024 test of six proprietary AI systems to summarize bills to CRS standards, which met its standards in 3% of cases.

Without more details about the testing methods, it was difficult to evaluate or contextualize this result. Nick Wagner of Learning Journey AI tried his own benchmarking after the hearing and found extremely high accuracy rates on all models mentioned for very low cost. This discrepancy invites further discussion between CRS and civil society.

THE FOREST FOR THE TREES

Although this use case question drew attention, the more interesting and important issue is how legislative branch support offices can foster a culture of innovation both internally and across the institution. These offices, as well as personal and committee offices, should be tapping the expertise of the brilliant people who work within it who have the skills to address specific challenges and navigate institutional politics.

We recently launched a spotlight section in the First Branch Forecast called Maker Space to elevate these very people and those outside Congress contributing to the problem-solving endeavor. Many of our first interviewees have left the Congress but are working on projects addressing the challenges they experienced while there. Look for the Maker Space tag in the newsletter, or visit the Congressional Data Coalition blog to catch up.

The Congressional Data Task Force has been successful so far in strengthening interoffice coordination and collaboration to produce tangible results. As we wrote to CHA last week, CDTF is nevertheless significantly underleveraged for what it could do and needs stronger member support to drive the next stage of office coordination and information sharing, including dedicated staff. We also think that CDTF needs to think comprehensively about the congressional information ecosystem, not just individual offices’ places in it, and utilize user-centered design principles in shaping its collaborative efforts.

This letter was written as submitted testimony for a committee hearing that was postponed when Speaker Mike Johnson sent the House home on recess Tuesday, and we look forward to its reschedulement.

Across the legislative branch offices involved in CDTF, CRS has some of the deepest and longest-term managerial challenges. Donfried’s predecessor, Mary Mazenac, drew criticism for the slow pace of technological adoption and for a stifling managerial climate that intensified workplace risk aversion. As Donfried’s only been on the job about two years, it’s a lot to ask to turn the culture of CRS around so quickly. But understanding how CRS has conceived of its role in serving Congress, how it became entrenched in process-heavy work practices, and how recent history drives its management from keeping targets off its back by members all are essential to the context of its ongoing modernization process. It’s at the root for why it considered AI experimentation with bill summaries a failure.

In the First Branch Forecast and this letter to the committee, we provided that context before the hearing and made suggestions for how CRS should rethink its role in the congressional information environment. We are particularly interested in its own understanding of what and how it should be delivering that information to the congressional user. CRS has done a poor job developing user feedback about its products and services. It’s also too restrictive upon itself in interpreting its mission at times. It could engage more in the international community of parliament support offices working through similar challenges. But there’s no reason it can’t change, and the hearing made clear members of Congress deeply appreciate its mission.

THE BUDGET EATERS

We’ve also taken substantial looks at how Congress’s long-standing spendthrift attitude toward itself is threatening to wreck institutional capacity because of exploding facilities and security costs. Members have not expanded the legislative branch budget envelope to cover all institutional obligations and made matters worse by starving capital-intensive agencies of the funds needed to fulfill their missions. Now the bill is coming due.

We covered the illuminating CHA hearing with Architect of the Capitol Thomas Austin on the problems with Rayburn House Office Building and deferred maintenance. Before the hearing, we urged the committee to push the AOC on its long-range planning capacity, which it has lacked during recent tenures of poor leadership. We also connected the building maintenance issue to the deeper problem of how Congress resources itself. We detailed these issues in a letter to CHA that urged sustained communication between AOC and the variety of stakeholders with interest in how the Capitol campus is renovated.

The need to meet growing security demands for members and staff is also exploding the legislative branch budget. Daniel and I sat down with U.S. Capitol Police Chief Michael Sullivan to get a better understanding of how the department manages the current threat environment and the resource-intensive nature of its mission.

FACTION

Intraparty factional politics within Congress, and the productive role they can play in legislating, continue to be poorly understood. The misinterpretation of factional in-fighting as a sign of party leadership weakness and little more, unfortunately, is likely to get worse after a few Democratic Socialist candidates won primaries this summer against Democratic Party incumbents (I’ll have more to say about that specific topic next week).

Daniel and I had an entertaining and informative conversation with the Foundation for American Innovation’s Soren Dayton and James Walner on the history and contemporary usefulness of Congressional factionalism. Long story short, as Wallner said, if you like the status quo, you’re going to be anti-faction because insurgent groups are trying to change something.

Factions can act similarly to minor parties as long as their political branding remains useful for individual members. In the United Kingdom, where minor parties have emerged despite a first-past-the-post, single-member district system that disadvantages them, the potential new prime minister Andy Burnham is supporting a shift to multimember districts with proportional representation to make minor parties more viable over the long-term and force the two major parties into more constructive governing behavior. We think reform driven by elected officials themselves is the most promising avenue for similar change on this side of the Pond, too.

THE 250TH

When the 13 colonies declared their independence from the British Empire 250 years ago, they did so through the collective voice of their ad hoc deliberative body – Congress (“In Congress,” not “We the People” are the first words of the Declaration). They spoke through this weak governing instrument because the Crown had co-opted some of their existing political channels, revoking colonial charters, interfering with and dissolving colonial assemblies, and replacing governors with appointees. Members of the Continental Congress believed they had the right to constitute this new governing organization because of 27 grievances they enumerated in their declaration of independence, which, as Binghamton University professor (and my graduate school classmate) Robert Parkinson explains in his most recent book, encompassed abuses of executive and judicial power that still concern contemporary Americans. Even before the war began, colonists witnessed military units and royal agents policing the streets, forced deportations, politicized judicial proceedings, nullified laws, imposed immigration restrictions, and election interference, and, of course, import duties levied without popular consent.

When this Congress, which would lead the emergent nation through a protracted war and the early years of independence, sputtered as a governing body, it reconstituted itself in a much stronger form under the Constitution. As it had in rebellion, Congress stood as a separate and independent power source for popular sovereignty to protect against despotic power from the seat of government and the judicial bench. The framers of the Constitution inverted the relationship between Parliament and Crown, designing the presidency to be the executor of Congress’s will rather than a legitimizer of the head of state’s prerogatives.

As much as the United States has changed in 250 years, Congress remains the through-line in the nation’s history. If unitary executive theory, or the simple will to power, do not sever this line, it is essential that the reforms necessary to respond to executive and judicial usurpation of congressional prerogatives do more than make the attempt more difficult or costly the next time. Much stronger improvements of Watergate-era reforms are not enough: we need a renewed conception of governing rooted in congressional power.

Doing so will require Congress to take back what it has gladly outsourced to the other two branches over the decades. It will need not only stronger institutional capacity – more expertise, seamless information sharing from executive departments, greater oversight ability, etc. – but more organizational power. Executive offices have proven untrustworthy in faithfully executing the law Congress establishes, with the judiciary endorsing much of the resulting usurpation of congressional authority and intent. The only satisfactory response will be re-centering a conception of state power in Congress.

This is an enormous political undertaking: but it is the exact one the signers of the Declaration launched. If they could conceive of a nation governed by laws in a world defined by monarchy, certainly we can approach reconstructing our current system with full honesty and open imaginations. If we take one thing from 1776, it is that you can just decide to do things.

ODDS & ENDS

Whistleblower appreciation. The House Office of the Whistleblower Ombuds will hold a lunch and learn session in honor of National Whistleblower Appreciation Day on July 20 from 11:30 to 1:00 PM in Rayburn HOB 2044. It will feature FBI whistleblower Mike Zummer, Todd Tatelman from the House Office of General Counsel, and CAO Coaches Director Daniel Chao. RSVP for the event.

Harassment payouts. The House Tuesday approved (420-0) Rep. Thomas Massie’s resolution for the House Ethics Committee to release a list of payouts for sexual harassment settlements. The committee, however, responded that it doesn’t handle such cases and requested the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights to release such information.

Isn’t that special. James Wallner explains how the mechanics of special rules with tiny majorities in the House give Rep. Anna Paulina Luna the ability to paralyze the House.