It had, for example, the marble Speakers Rostrum used by the House of Representatives from 1857 until 1950 – you could just reach out and touch it. This is where speakers presided over major historical events, such as FDR’s “Day of Infamy” speech requesting Congress enter World War II.

But more striking than his rebuilt speakers office, or the capsule containing the first number drawn in the peacetime draft, or sandstone blocks from the Capitol, were insights about our politics today that you could glean from learning about Mr. Sam. For example, he described himself as “a progressive conservative or a conservative progressive.” He understood the role of factionalism and how to manage it at a time when Democrats at the time had strong liberal and conservative wings.

I think of Rayburn also as a legislator. In 1936, four years before becoming Speaker, he authored the Rural Electrification Act, a linchpin of the New Deal that increased the number of farms with electricity from three percent in the 1930s to 90 percent in 1959. His family home didn’t have electricity, and he paid the electric company in 1935 to connect his house to the grid. At that time, he had been serving in the House for 22 years. The experiences of the person serving as speaker matter a tremendous amount for policymaking.

Historians remember Rayburn as a key figure in loosening conservative Southern Democrats’ control of the House of Representatives. Members of the House Rules Committee, the choke-point to the House floor, repeatedly prevented socially liberal legislation from advancing. Although the committee had eight Democrats, its conservative, segregationist chair, “Judge” Howard Smith of Virginia, and conservative southern Democrat William Colmer of Mississippi, joined forces with the four Republican members to deadlock the committee on civil rights bills and economic reforms. House practice at the time was that once appointed, committee members with seniority would be reappointed without question.

In January 1961, two days before John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, Rayburn urged the Democratic caucus to increase the size of the committee by three members (two Democrats and one Republican). In a rare floor speech for a sitting Speaker, he stated, “I think this House should be allowed on great measures to work its will, and it cannot work its will if the Committee on Rules is so constituted as not to allow the House to pass on those things.” After considerable debate, the measure was adopted by the House 217-212 on January 31st, allowing the Democratic party to select two members that would ensure Kennedy’s New Frontier could advance.

I bring up Rayburn because this Wednesday, the House Rules Committee will hold a Member Day hearing on proposed changes for the next Congress. A quirk of 19th century history established the Rules Committee as both the place for considering rules reform and for advancing (most) legislation to the floor. Members will have the opportunity to make their case for reforming the chamber’s operations in light of the very different political situation we see today.

The Rules Committee over the years has been willing to advance incremental, substantive changes to the operations of the chamber. But the hearing itself is unlikely to result in significant change in how power operates inside the House because that would denude the power of the committee. Chamber rules also are only one aspect of what ills the House: the centralization of power in the hands of party leadership and party polarization has weakened it in comparison to the executive branch.

We’re going to talk about how we got here. Next time, we will provide highlights of our recommendations for addressing how power should operate in the House of Representatives. AGI’s focus is making the House a redoubt for democratic rule, a force strong enough to oppose autocracy. Keeping in mind that members almost always act in their short term interest, our recommendations are built around advancing their political power and policymaking priorities.

Intermission

Before we get into House Rules reform, we have a few other items for your attention.

If you’re going to the American Political Science Association conference in Boston this week, come and see Chris and me. We’re hosting a panel discussion entitled Breaking Up to Hold Together: Congressional Faction and Democracy’s Renewal, on Thursday, from 12:00-1:30, location TBA, and will be joined by Molly Reynolds from the Brookings Institution and Ruth Bloch Rubin from the University of Chicago. If you’re at the conference (or in the Boston area) and want to meet up, send us a note.

The House Rules Committee’s Member Day hearing is scheduled for Wednesday at 10 a.m. You probably can’t get into H-313 to attend in person, but it will be webcast. You can probably find a link to the video here.

Mark your calendar for the Congressional Data Task Force meeting, happening virtually only, on Thursday, Sept. 10, from 2-4 p.m. RSVP here. Also save 1-3 p.m. on September 24 for the Congress.gov public forum. When it’s available, RSVP here. (We’re planning on hosting a happy hour later that evening.)

The House Modernization Subcommittee is still soliciting recommendations for modernizing the House; the deadline is today. Guidance on what and how to submit is here. Chris and I submitted 21 ideas for their consideration.

I joined a spicy podcast with the National Academy of Public Administration’s James-Christian Blockwood on rebalancing power and modernizing the First Branch.

We’re watching ongoing litigation regarding whether the speech or debate clause protects Rep. McIver against trumped up charges for exercising her statutorily-protected right to visit an ICE detention facility. (We note the irony that the Supreme Court created immunity for Trump for his official actions.) Also, all former Archivists (i.e., pre Marco Rubio) told a federal court the Trump administration of record laws jeopardizes national security and government continuity.

From our friends: the Congressional Management Foundation published ten questions that can help new Members as they contemplate life in Congress. Coder extraordinaire Ari Hershowitz published a new web resource that makes it easier to read and understand the U.S. Code. The FAI’s Soren Dayton argues Congress Could Just Say What It Delegates. And we’re curious about the CivicHackDC conference on October 3rd on what can be built with federal regulatory comment data. If you’re interested in the use of agentic AI in parliaments, Bussola Tech held a panel discussion.

How We Got Here

Now, back to the House Rules. What Sam Rayburn understood, as have powerful members of the House of Representatives throughout its history, is how to marshal the three major kinds of power in the House of Representatives.

Power in legislative bodies can be reduced to three types: control of who writes the legislation, control over what legislation is voted upon, and control over who is elected to the chamber.

Members of the House have created various bodies and rules to govern the exercise of these powers. Collectively, these rules and decision-making bodies are mechanisms to control how power is exercised and who can pull the levers of power. (They are sufficiently fine-tuned to control who can make things happen, and also who can veto things from happening.)

Which bodies exist, and how they operate, has changed tremendously over the last 250 years. For our purposes, I’d like to suggest that there are five major eras of how power has worked in the House of Representatives, and I believe we are about to enter the sixth.

How power was exercised in each era laid the seeds of its own destruction.

In the first era, the House of Representatives had power dispersed among individual members and regions. At times there were no parties, and at other times there were multiple parties. Eventually the ability of a minority to thwart the body’s operations led to the rise of Thomas Reed, a speaker who literally announced his plans in Century Magazine to arrange the rules “to facilitate the action of the majority.”

His arrangement of those rules, in the second era, led to the nickname “Czar Reed.” His sweeping rules reforms centralized power in his hands and that of the tiny Rules Committee, sweeping away the ability of the minority to obstruct and aggregating to himself the power to decide what bills went to the floor and who wrote the bills. In the hands of his autocratic and imperious successor, Joseph Cannon, progressive Republicans whose policy needs were unmet joined with populist Democrats to overthrow the autocratic speaker model, removing the speaker as chair of the Rules Committee, expanding the size of the committee, allowing for discharge petitions, and making other changes.

In this third era, the consequence of an enlarged Rules Committee combined with a seniority system for committee membership, meant that southern Democrats came to dominate how legislation emerged from committees and were scheduled for floor action. The alliance of southern Democrats and Republicans on the Rules Committee prevented liberal legislation from being reported to the floor; southern Democrats rose to chair many committees, with rules that allowed for autocratic behavior from the chairs, and they worked effectively to bottle up legislation there as well.

As the Democratic party became increasingly liberal, the blockade on civil rights and economic matters prompted members to organize against the conservative Democrats through a para-legislative body known as the Democratic Study Group. First Speaker Rayburn struck a mighty blow against the conservative-controlled Rules Committee when the House expanded its membership by three. A decade later, liberals reformed the chamber, removed many southern bulls from their committee perches, and installed the party as the preeminent governing mechanism. Policy would be made by members of the party, not by the chairs. They pulled power upwards to the party and empowered subcommittees.

This fourth era of party control had a comparatively open process that allowed factional members and Republicans to advance amendments that could receive a vote. At times, socially conservative Democrats and neoliberals (i.e., pro-business Democrats) would peel off and join with the Republicans to advance the Republican agenda. In response, party leaders moved to circumvent an open process, preventing members from taking votes and trying to curb defections. In parallel, hard right Republicans grew dissatisfied with Republican leadership, which they believed were insufficiently willing to engage in smash-mouth politics. They believed the role of Republicans is to oppose Democrats, not engage in co-governing.

The era of party control ended with the rise of Newt Gingrich, who brought Republicans to power and elevated an us-or-them approach where collaboration with the other party was tantamount to treason. He weakened the committees and members, aggregating power at the top. More and more legislation was being written by leadership, with members having less and less voice. He also worked to curb the factions within the parties by destroying their funding model. This approach was perfected by Speaker Pelosi, who aggregated into her hands the ability to control who was appointed to committees, which legislation came to the floor, and who would run for office. Her power was not total, but it was vast and allowed her to arbitrage across factional needs. Her pragmatic alliance with the CBC gave her tremendous room to maneuver.

In Republican hands, far right asymmetric polarization led to movement rightward. The rise of Donald Trump and MAGA was the apotheosis of the far right capturing the party leadership through the use of factional party tactics, dethroning anyone who showed any independence from MAGA and Donald Trump. Trumpism has little legislative agenda beyond tax cuts and moving power to the White House, however.

Some Republican members have begun defecting as demonstrated through the successful advancement of discharge petitions on one hand and floor paralysis on the other. “Moderate” Republicans are insufficiently organized, however, and are going extinct as elected members of Congress. They cannot survive without changing the model by which members of Congress serve in the House and are elected to it; but their unwillingness to work with Democrats to address these problems (and the unwillingness of Democrats to help them survive) means their numbers will dwindle.

There’s also discontent on the Democratic side, as members have little to do except reiterate leadership talking points and vote as directed. Party members may be willing to give Jeffries a chance as speaker, but we can already see organizing to extract concessions from leadership so that members can assert power. If members are smart, they will see the growing weakness of the House and work to change its model of operations.

To what extent they do so will determine whether we are entering a sixth era of power in the House of Representatives. But more is at stake than that. The models the House of Representatives has used since the 1970s – built around party and party leaders – makes Congress increasingly weak when compared to the Executive Branch. The leaders view themselves as co-partisans under the direction of the president, not as the powerful, lawmaking branch of government. Party leaders also seek to avoid issues that could divide the party, which means many issues do not get addressed.

That is where we are now. What should members of the House of Representatives do to reform the House of Representatives and strengthen constitutional democracy?

We have a plan.

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Congress established inspectors general in more than 70 federal agencies through legislation in 1978 in post-Watergate efforts to bolster legislative branch oversight of the executive branch. OIGs report to Congress as well as agency heads when providing their findings from audits and investigations into waste, fraud, and abuse.

The positions are supposed to be independent from the White House, but many are nevertheless appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the Senate (with others appointed by agency heads). Without appointments independent from presidential administrations, they have been vulnerable to President Trump, who has fired or demoted at least 20 during this term. He has replaced them with political operatives, including an author of the Project 2025 campaign proposal report and former Republican congressman Anthony D’Esposito. Congress should take steps to reinforce IG independence and insulate these offices from politicization.

The New York Times and NOTUS published stories last week about the chilling effect on IG offices, noting a study by the Partnership for Public Service that found 6% fewer OIG audits and 25% fewer investigative reports than average this year compared to recent years. Staffing is down by nearly 20%.

Some in Congress are contributing to the unraveling of the IG system: the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform reported out Rep. Clay Higgins’s bill to shutter the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) in late July. The bill would shift CIGIE’s role in creating IG training standards to the Office of Management and Budget. The Trump Administration withheld funds for CIGIE at the start of the 2026 fiscal year, but restored them after pushback from Sens. Charles Grassley and Susan Collins.

In the legislative branch, IG-related news is more positive. The U.S. Capitol Police’s Office of Inspector General has a new website all its own. It includes an archive of IG reports stretching back to 2007 and updates when reports that have been backlogged for release are posted. The website also accepts complaints that can be made anonymously. An independent IG website is a best practice because it allows IGs to speak directly to the public without agency interference—transparency is a strong accountability mechanism—and if accompanied by independent IT systems, can insulate the IG against being spied upon by their agencies, which unfortunately does happen.

AI in CONGRESS

Drafting legislative text is a unique technical skill that is distinct from what attorneys typically learn in law school. That’s why the House Office of Legislative Counsel exists: to turn bill ideas developed in member offices into legislation that changes law and policy as intended with language that can work with Senate process and stand up to judicial scrutiny. When Daniel and I interviewed former HOLC head Wade Ballou, he told us it takes about five years for attorneys working there to develop the experience to be competent at drafting legislation. Thus, it’s usually best for House staff to work cooperatively with HOLC in the predrafting process rather than submit whole bill drafts.

Unfortunately, some House staff and interest groups have enough confidence in generative AI platforms that they’re using them to submit fully drafted bills to HOLC. As Daniel told Politico’s Owen Dahlkamp last week, these systems lack the precision and legal understanding to write law. They certainly take a lot less time than consulting HOLC, however, so the office is being inundated with the congressional version of AI slop. AI-generated bills actually are taking longer to fix than they would have just to write from scratch, according to someone quoted for the story.

A frustrating part of this story is that HOLC saw this coming, but had limited options to prevent it. Legislative Counsel Warren Burke told the Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee in March that the office was “bracing for AI to expand our workload,” warning bills “produced by outside entities, whether a human or a computer, often take significantly longer to review and revise as necessary to ensure the text accomplishes the sponsor’s intended policy goals.”

The House has developed its own AI tools, as Dahlkamp points out, that work well in a legislative environment and solve specific problems, particularly the Comparative Print Suite that HOLC assisted in developing. Another would be CRS’s bill comparison tool, TAP. When we talked to him, Ballou suggested HOLC could even develop its own bot to guide staff to make a better request of its attorneys for assistance.

Stories like these, therefore, are not a case of AI being incompatible with congressional work, or Congress being behind the technological times, but staff making poor choices in tools when picking up the phone or writing an email would be better approaches.

FACTION

State Rep. Angie Nixon won the Florida Democratic Senate primary last week despite being outspent 19-1 by her opponent, former national security aide Alex Vindman. The upset marked another victory for democratic socialist-aligned Democrats in primaries against the types of candidates the party’s leadership has long favored for being hawkish on national defense and fairly conservative on fiscal policies.

Nixon quickly heard from state leaders in Florida, with whom she got in a phone argument about her DSA membership and the impact it may have in parts of the Democratic coalition. Nixon, however, seems to be exploring a different angle of coalition building we’ve discussed before, winning against Vindman with the support of labor, urbanites, and minority voters. This is the old-school “progressive” coalition and a natural one for Nixon, who was an organizer for SEIU. Nixon only joined DSA in June and wasn’t endorsed by it, so she’s following Abdul El-Sayed’s piggybacking on democratic socialist energy to find primary voters. Like El-Sayed, she’s walked back any ideological connection to actual socialism.

Factions retain institutional power even after their principal members leave the arena. Politico counts about 50 former staffers of Nancy Pelosi working in Hill offices, including in leadership offices and on key committees.

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MAKER SPACE

For more than a decade, Shaun Brown has been building tech tools inside the House, first for Democratic leadership staff and then with House Digital Service. He shares responsibility for building innovative apps like DomeWatch and LegiDex.

Recently, he launched a new external product called Apogee to apply AI agents and algorithms to connect disparate streams of official legislative branch, federal election, and lobbyist disclosure data into more than 60 specific capabilities for advocates, nonprofits, policy wonks, and congressional staff. Instead of dashboards or search commands featured in legacy legislative tracking and intelligence services to access public data in a gated environment, Apogee pairs with leading agentic AI platforms to allow users to ask questions that release agents to find information within official datasets. Asking “tell me everything about this bill” returns not only congressional action, but information on hearings, lobbying activity, news coverage, and advocacy groups’ positions. Agents can be set to watch topics as legislation advances or Congress takes up specific issues and provide users with updates automatically.

Apogee also generates knowledge graphs that can identify members’ political networks and influence, voting blocs and potential unusual voting alliances, interest group influence, and bill similarity, among other capabilities.

Brown sees AI’s role in dramatically reducing the difficulty in accessing and using public datasets to generate clear awareness of what’s happening in federal policy (he’s also building out state-level capacity). Applying existing AI models to official data from a variety of sources essentially levels the playing field for those working outside of well-resourced advocacy shops by producing reliable deliverables quickly and cheaply. Its cheapest plan starts at about $350, which fits neatly in member office tech budgets.

The value for congressional staff, Brown told me, is in the ability to generate the standard short reports, backgrounders, and one-pagers quickly and with information pulled directly from sources that can be verified by staff for accuracy. Its ability to track issues as well as members’ positions and legislative activity over time, meanwhile, can solve for some of the institutional memory challenges in member offices given high staff turnover.

Much of what Brown has done with Apogee could be built by Congress using its own data. House Clerk and Library of Congress staff discussed the potential of using semantic search to make Congress.gov more user-friendly in a recent CHA Modernization & Innovation Subcommittee hearing, so ideas are circulating within the legislative branch. For now, those on the outside continue to fill the gaps.

CALENDAR

The Trachtenberg School at George Washington University has opened registration for its Symposium on Government Oversight & Accountability on September 2 at 12:00 PM. The event can be attended in person or online.

Also on September 2, Daniel and I will be on a discussion panel with University of Chicago’s Ruth Bloch Rubin and Brookings Institution’s Molly Reynolds to explore congressional factions and their productive impact at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Boston at 12:00 PM. Drop us a line if you want to meet up.

McCain Institute American Democracy and Technology Initiative Fellow Candace Moix and her co-founder of MyCapitol Julie Lin will host a one-day tabletop exercise examining how foreign actors shape U.S. legislation on September 8 from 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM at Arizona State University’s McCain Institute office, 1800 I (Eye) St. NW. The event is open to anyone interested in investigative reporting and research and it includes lunch. Register at this link.

Registration is open to attend the Library of Congress’s annual public forum for Congress.gov, either in person or online. The forum will be on September 24 from 1:00 to 3:00 PM in the Mumford Room of the James Madison Building (6th floor). The Library is beginning a major overhaul of the website, so there’s even more incentive to attend.

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For this episode, I spoke with two experts in appropriations law who have worked in and out of government — Cerin Lindgrensavage of Protect Democracy and Christie Wentworth of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington — about White House attempts to appropriate funds as it sees fit, not as Congress has directed, and the legal and political means available for Congress and civil society to push back.

Lindgrensavage is counsel at Protect Democracy and previously worked at the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and for Senator Barbara Boxer. She also clerked at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Wentworth is a senior policy counsel at CREW and previously served as an attorney at the Government Accountability Office and as counsel for the House Budget Committee.

Chris Nehls: Hi, this is Chris Nehls with the American Governance Institute. I’m here with Cerin Lindgrensavage and of Protect Democracy and Christie Wentworth of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. We’ll do our best to put all of that on the title card of this podcast. We’re here to talk today about appropriations and appropriations law and how when Congress approves appropriations, how does the federal government spend it? And what’s been going on in this administration that’s made it kind of unusual. So, thanks for joining me today.

Christie Wentworth: Thanks for having us.

Cerin Lindgrensavage: Yeah, happy to be here.

Nehls: We have 12 appropriations bills a year, theoretically, that Congress approves. Sometimes, it doesn’t get there and does a continuing resolution, but there’s still the money it gets out to the federal agencies to spend. Well, how does that work after these bills move from the president’s desk to the agencies.

Wentworth: A great question to start with. I’m going to take us back a second and just emphasize at the top here, because Cerin and I are both very power of the purse friendly individuals in that Congress does have the power of the purse, which is why they are the ones that are in charge of actually figuring out how much money the federal government has to spend. So that’s based in the Constitution. And as you mentioned, Chris, that usually results in 12 different bills appropriating funds for the federal government, including all three branches.

After those funds are appropriated, they go through a process called apportionment at OMB. This is a responsibility that Congress gave to the president back in the day because agencies were blowing through their appropriations. They would enter into contracts, they would promise to spend money, and then they’d say, well, Congress, you know, we already said we’re going to spend this stuff. I know that you only gave us $10 and we spent $100, but we’re obligated now, and you have to give us this money. Congress said to the president, do a better job managing these funds and gave the president the responsibility to say, okay, agencies, you’re going to get 25% of your funding in quarter one for salaries and expenses, and then you’ll get another 25% in quarter two and so on and so forth. So, OMB now has that responsibility pursuant to a delegation from the president and they can apportion funds by time. They can apportion funds by program and they can do it through a combination of those two things. The purpose of that is still to make sure that the agencies aren’t spending funds too quickly so that they have to go back to Congress and ask for a deficiency appropriation. So that is the general framework for apportionments.

I will say when I worked at GAO, we spent two and a half days teaching appropriations law principles to folks at agencies, so doing this in 2 to 3 minutes is a challenge. But that’s the apportionment process.

I’m going to briefly share some of the components that we see in appropriations acts that agencies have to look for when they’re actually spending the funds. And then, Cerin, I’ll kick it to you to talk a little bit about the Impoundment Control Act and how Congress can act to actually claw back some of that money if it agrees with the president that it should. In the appropriations acts, the three things that agencies are looking for are the purpose, time, and amount of the appropriation: So, what they can spend this on, how much they can spend and how long they have to spend it. And there have always been disagreements between Congress and the executive about what exactly falls into each of these buckets, especially with respect to purpose. But those are the three general things that you’re looking for and that the agencies have to comply with when they’re spending these funds. So Cerin, do you want to talk about the Impoundment Control Act?

Lindgrensavage: Sure. One thing of interest to know about the apportionment process is that it has at some various points in history been abused. And that’s important because it’s the mechanism that OMB and past presidents have used essentially to rob Congress of its power of the purse to steal some of that power for the president, the White House, in this case, the Office of Management and Budget. If you went back and looked at the hearings in 1972 and three over the Nixon era impoundments, what you will find is actually page after page of accounts where they’ve used the apportionment process in some cases to actually affect delay to what they did at the time, called creating a reserve. And there was a provision in law that was a little bit squishy, a little bit of a choose your own adventure for the president and his budget officers to try and say, oh, well, we’re just creating a reserve for this sort of broad purpose.

Nehls: So, what was Nixon actually trying to trying to do there?

Lindgrensavage: What he was trying to do was actually say, hey, I don’t want to spend these funds. Congress passed the money, but I don’t want to. And he was trying to just essentially assert his power not to spend the funds.

As you can imagine, Congress reacted poorly to this assertion of the executive authority. And the law that they passed was both a remaking of the budget process that really put foundationally in place the fiscal years and steps as we know them today, and also what we call the Impoundment Control Act. That passed in 1974 and essentially said, no, we’re, we’re erasing that provision that made you think that you could just hold on to money for whatever purpose you wish to. And now you have three options: you can defer; you can delay spending the money -- but then you have to tell Congress, and Congress has a chance to tell you not to through a resolution they can pass. You can propose a rescission, but that only goes into effect if Congress passes a law rescinding the appropriations that were previously passed in a law. And the third option is you can spend the money. Those are the three options contemplated by the Impoundment Control Act.

Here are some things that are not contemplated in the Impoundment Control Act: unjustified delays for programmatic review -- the entire category of programmatic delay invented in the early ‘70s -- none of that is contemplated in the act. The act contemplates those three options: deferral, rescission, spending the money. It also left three different purposes that OMB can use to establish reserves, but they’re narrower. It’s to provide for contingencies to achieve savings or as specifically provided by law. So if you have a law that you can point to that says, okay, you can hold on this money for these purposes, that’s okay, but it has to be specific in the law. It really did ground and narrow OMB’s ability to screw around with money using the apportionment process or any other process because it doesn’t just bind OMB, it also binds folks at the agency level as well.

Nehls: Well, we’ve had a couple of rescissions bills, this Congress and, and there have been some in the past. So how has that how has that worked generally since the passage of the Impoundment Control Act as a congressional tool?

Lindgrensavage: I would say that your mileage may vary. There’s been some hiccups in the road. I think one of the things that’s happened more recently is that deferrals haven’t been reported in this century. We’re going on our 26th year of the administration not using the deferral provision. If you look at OMB management of funds, there are arguably a bunch of things that probably would or should qualify and be reported as a deferral, but I wouldn’t hold your breath on that happening anytime soon.

One of the things that’s happened is but I think that entire third of the sort of statute of the scheme has been rendered inoperable in a really significant way. And for whatever reason, Congress and GAO haven’t come back at OMB or the administrations across Democratic or Republican administrations for not for not adhering to that part of the statute. And the other thing that went awry is that OMB has interpreted the rescissions provision in a way that at least the current OMB has said what gives them the authority to essentially cancel funds unilaterally. And Christie, do you want to walk through the mechanics of how that rescission gone awry can happen?

Wentworth: Sure. In the law, it says that funds can be proposed for rescission, and it doesn’t provide a specific time frame for which those funds can be proposed for rescission. What that means is, we talked earlier about how funds have certain time limitations. And some funds might expire at the end of the fiscal year. Some funds might be available for multiple years and some funds might be available forever. They might be no-year funds. For those funds that expire at the end of the fiscal year, you have this problem where under the Impoundment Control Act, while a rescission proposal is pending, the president is authorized to withhold those funds.

You can see the practical reason for this, right? If the president says, okay, you gave me $100 for DoD for this year -- just bear with me on that -- give me $100 for DoD for this year, I only need 50 of it, and so they propose $50 for rescission. You don’t want the agency to have to continue to spend that $50 while Congress is considering the rescission proposal because if they end up clawing back that money by law, then you have DoD in a position where maybe they spent more than they were allowed to because now they only have $50 and that money is now gone. And so it gives Congress time to actually give good faith consideration to a rescission proposal. And then the ICA prescribes a 45-day period for that temporary withholding, the funds have to be released. That is how much time Congress has for these expedited procedures. I think Cerin mentioned this earlier, but again, you only need a simple majority under the ICA to actually pass the rescission bill that that cancels these funds. That’s generally how the process works.

So, if you have a rescission proposal that comes in near the expiration date of those funds -- let’s operate on a fiscal year basis that ends September 30th. If you have a rescission proposal that comes on September 1st, then that withholding period in a very technical sense will span past the expiration date of those funds. And so, in theory, the president could withhold the funds for 45 days going into October 15th. The funds will have expired. They can no longer be used for obligation, and so they’re effectively unilaterally canceled.

Now, the reason that that is not allowed under the ICA is because the ICA says that the funds have to be made available for obligation after 45 days. And you just can’t do that if you withhold for the 45-day period. There are several folks, the GAO included, who believe that that is how the law should be interpreted.

The executive branch has taken a different view. And so last year, we saw this happen near the end of the fiscal year with a proposal to rescind billions of dollars in foreign aid funding. We got past October 1st, and the administration was still withholding the funds and they expired and were effectively unilaterally canceled. So that is a new use of the ICA. I will say it’s an abuse of the ICA. We are at August 12th right now, so we can see this timeline coming forward again at this time in the fiscal year. So that is one way in which this process has, has been abused. Go ahead Cerin.

Lindgrensavage: I will say that like there are folks at OMB who have pointed at a literal handful of historical examples from just after the passage of the Impoundment Control Act to say like, hey, Ford did it. Hey, Carter did it. This is like just a normal thing that people have done. But if you actually go and take a look at those examples -- and I absolutely did -- you find a lot of breadcrumbs to understand why this is a world apart from what those examples were. First, in response to several of those attempts, Congress actually passed laws forcing the administration to spend the funds. In response to that initial encroachment on Congress’s authority laid out in the Impoundment Control Act, when the administration put in a late rescissions request, Congress said no, thank you, and then they actually reappropriated the funds. They had a follow-up hearing. They looked the political appointee who had not spent the funds in the eye, and they said, you saw that we appropriated those, right? And they’re like, yes. And you’re going to spend it this time, right? And he said, yes. I think it’s important to unpack that history because if you just look at the fact that the request went in and you don’t look at how Congress responded, you might read it as sort of this initial grant of permission they try to claim and it’s really not. And so that’s one thing to put in context.

I think the other thing to pause and reflect on is how alone OMB is [on pocket rescissions]. Former appropriations and OMB staff have gone on the record saying that this is an impermissible interpretation of the law. A variety of law professors who are expert in appropriations laws have gone on the record saying that this is an impermissible interpretation of the law. Like literally the only folks familiar with these laws that are comfortable with this interpretation are the folks who are actively using that misinterpretation at OMB right now.

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Nehls: This Congress hasn’t really taken up this issue, have they? You’ve been tracking this probably more closely than I have. How has the Congress 119th responded then?

Wentworth: So I’ll give an example from back in, oh, I’m going to forget the exact year, but I think it was 2018 or 2019. At that time, the Office of Management and Budget had implemented two different things. Number one was what they refer to as brief withholding of funds, while agencies provided an accounting of how much money was left in their accounts. This was supposedly so that they could get information to figure out how much money to propose for rescission. And this was in August of that fiscal year. So again, pretty close to the end of the fiscal year. That year, the president ultimately did not send up a rescission proposal, but they had paused this foreign aid funding for a certain period of time and then after that pause had started trickling out funding for foreign aid. So typically, that funding it depends on the account, how it’s apportioned, but typically it’s not given in one day, one week or one month increments because that is really hard for program implementation.

But that is exactly what OMB did: They said, okay, you’re going to get a certain percentage of funding every day from now until the end of the fiscal year. For anybody who’s ever implemented a grant program, you will know that that makes it pretty much impossible to get the funding out the door by September 30th. So, the agencies went back to OMB and said, can you please give us more money? OMB said, okay, you can have a weekly rate. And it made it really hard for that funding to get out the door.

At the same time, we saw that there was funding withheld for Ukraine. In that situation, the Office of Management and Budget had put a footnote on Ukraine funding that said, this is not available for a certain period of time. I think we’re all familiar with the facts of that, so I won’t go into that particular example [It led to Trump’s first impeachment]. But in that situation, the agency was not able to get all the funding out the door by the end of the year, even though OMB ended up giving it access to all the funds at a certain point. Congress went back and reappropriated that funding that had expired in the next fiscal year. They recognized that this had been a violation of the law, as we saw in the impeachment proceedings and then said, you know what? We still want the agency to execute this program, so they reappropriated the money. And so, it’s not an example of a pocket rescission per se, but it is a way, an analogy by which funding expired at the end of the fiscal year and then Congress took action to say, we disagree with how you did this and we’re going to re-appropriate this money to make sure that you can actually do this thing.

I think the question about the current Congress and how it’s responded is much more challenging, because we haven’t seen that same kind of response, bipartisan response to the actions from last year. But it doesn’t mean that across the board, Congress is acquiescing or agreeing that this is a lawful use of the Impoundment Control Act. We have seen some responses from some of the appropriations leadership. There was an initial version of I think what used to be the state foreign ops bill, but is now, I think the national security appropriations bill that would have put in a restriction against these kinds of rescissions proposals, particularly for those foreign aid funds, which were the ones that were subject to the pocket rescissions proposal last year. Now that came out when the bill went up to the full committee, but I think it was incredibly telling that was the subcommittee that even under majority leadership of the bill on the House side contemplated making that kind of movement.

Even though that one didn’t go forward, there are a lot of other places that if you’re looking at the details of the appropriations bills, you can see appropriators working to tighten the language and reduce the discretion that OMB has. For example, one of the things they did in the Labor, Health and Human Services bill, where there’s a lot of discrepancies between what Congress has funded and what the administration asked Congress to fund was, they started incorporating several of the tables that lay out specific funding amounts for specific programs within an appropriation or within an account into the text of the law. They made them binding on OMB and binding on the agency in a new way. Now, I think, again, the mileage is varied on how much those decisions were respected by both OMB and the agencies, but it was an initial attempt. And the thing that Congress has going for it is that it’s an iterative player in this back and forth with the administration. So, if that method doesn’t work, the Appropriations Committee in the Congress as a whole is going to have another chance in fiscal year ‘27 to take a bite at the apple that could actually constrain OMB and the agencies more effectively.

Nehls: Outside of a rescissions message or just the announcement, we’ve seen a lot of announcements of canceling of grants and things like that coming out of the white House. How can Congress kind of understand or if you’re, if you’re on the Appropriations Committee, how can you track what’s going on with spending and make sure that OMB is following the law.

Lindgrensavage: In 2022, Congress passed a wonderful law requiring the Office of Management and Budget to post apportionments online, including the footnotes. And they were very specific about it. And so, in 2022, OMB started doing that. Congress made the law permanent in ‘23, and we got to look at what apportionments looked like for the first time as the public. Then at the beginning of the current administration in 2025, they took the website dark. I think it gives you an idea of their preference that they would like to be able to manipulate this process without the sunlight of public scrutiny or congressional scrutiny on their day to day.

Christie and my organization sued OMB and secured an injunction requiring them to put that information back on the internet. And PD is actually supported what’s called OpenOMB.org, which is a site that you can go to, search and browse apportionments and you can subscribe to updates. For example, if you wanted to follow the money on the White House ballroom, you could actually put in White House as a search and just subscribe to updates. Every time there’s a new apportionment giving the ballroom more ballroom money, you can find out at the same time as the [Washington] Post and Congress and everybody else. Those are actually done on a two-business day delay, so it’s not real time, but it’s pretty great. It can give members of Congress and also like folks like you and me, advocates, reporters, whoever needs to know a lot more visibility into at least that one part of the process where OMB is deciding whether or not to push the button or not to move money out to make it available for agencies to spend.

Nehls: That’s great.

Wentworth: I think I’ll provide one example that was pretty extreme about how the availability of this information allowed public civil society members of Congress to push back on an OMB apportionment action. So back in, I guess it was almost a year ago, the end of September 2025, right before the beginning of fiscal year 2026, Congress got a letter from the from the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, also known as CIGIE, that said, OMB has made a policy decision to not apportion any funds for us for the entirety of fiscal year 2026.

I’m going to pause for a second to flag another provision that Congress has included an annual appropriations acts every year that encourages that kind of communication with Congress and can flag when issues arise so that folks can go to places like OpenOMB and look to see what’s actually happening. I almost said behind closed doors, but it’s not behind closed doors anymore because of this law. Right? You can actually see what OMB is doing with the money.

There is there’s a rider in the in one of the appropriations acts every year -- and this is relatively new, but it requires agencies to tell Congress when OMB is not apportioning funds in the way that it should. We refer to this as the tattle provision and would love for that to go viral if we can make that happen. But typically, it’s section 749 of the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act, and this requires agencies, not OMB, to tell the Appropriations and Budget Committees if an apportionment is not made in the time required, if it [OMB] conditions the ability, the availability of the appropriation on additional action, or if it would hinder what we refer to as the prudent obligation of funds. So basically, can you get this out the door in a way that is responsible and that actually furthers the intent of the appropriation? And so instead of having OMB say, oh, we’re not going to apportion these funds, it’s actually on the agency that is affected by those apportionment actions to go to Congress and say, mom or dad is not giving us the money that we asked for.

Nehls: Now, do they have to do this in like a public letter, or is this an agency had to have to put their name on this, or is this done anonymously?

Wentworth: One of the flaws of the law is that it does not require that the letter be public, it just has to go to these particular committees. We on the outside do not know how often agencies are using this. My Spidey sense is that it is not as much as they should be based on all of the apportionment abuses that we are seeing at the moment. But the letter became public -- and I should caveat that the letter itself does not cite those provisions, so we don’t know that that’s why they sent it, but it lines up pretty well with the requirements of this provision and also gave us those particular committees the information that they needed to say what is going on OMB. We saw responses from Congress to OMB saying, why are you withholding this money? When do you plan to make it available? What is your legal justification for this? And asking all of the questions that you would want Congress to ask in an oversight capacity.

One of the beautiful things about OpenOMB and the requirement that this information be made public is that you can also go and see what’s not there. The apportionment statute requires that apportionments be made within certain time frames of when an appropriation is enacted or when or the availability of funds. If you’re wondering like, oh, usually I apply for a grant through this particular program. I wonder how much money they’ve gotten -- you can go and see, has there been an apportionment? How much is it for? Are there any conditions on it? And you can actually go there and look.

I’m saying OpenOMB because that is the only place that I go for this information. But you could technically go to OMB less user-friendly website as well, but you can go to OpenOMB, you can go to an apportionment and you can see how much money they got in prior years. You can see that typically they get a big lump sum at the at the beginning of the fiscal year that allows them to use their funding for the whole year, and that that did not happen this year, so it allowed for that oversight.

So, the story there is that CIGIE had to shut down, right? They did not get an apportionment because apportionments are legally binding and an agency needs one to be able to spend money they could not operate. They had to send all their staff home, they had to shut down all of their programs, all of their supports that they give to inspectors general. And for about a month and a half, they were totally shut down. Now eventually, they got a little tiny apportionment -- I’ll call it a pittance -- through January 30th that was available for salaries and expenses for legally required expenses while OMB conducted a programmatic review. So, they did get some money and that was on Open OMB. You could go you could look you could see how much money they got. And then when they later got an apportionment for the rest of quarter two, you could see how much money they got. You could compare that to prior years, and that allows you to see what is actually happening with these agencies and how much money they’re getting on this really piecemeal basis as OMB drags them along.

Now, one additional part of that that I’ll flag is that there is another public database that unfortunately, Protect Democracy has not made a more user-friendly version for yet.

Lindgrensavage: I’m going to try to do it someday. It’s on my list.

Wentworth: But you can look at SF 133, and this is a very comprehensive resource that that shows you obligation and expenditure data. You can see if you pull up cities’ SF 133 for example, that as they got fewer funds apportioned during this fiscal year, they’ve also spent a lot less. You can see that by the end of January in in prior years, they had obligated more than $8.8 million, and in this year they had only obligated $3.2 million.

Nehls: Inspectors general are the people that are investigating agencies themselves internally investigating agencies for all sorts of things, including waste, fraud and abuse. And they’re under kind of a slow shutdown.

Wentworth: So yeah. And CIGIE does more than that, right? They support those entities by providing trainings and providing facilitating peer reviews, but they also are the watchdog of those watchdogs, right? They run the integrity committee and facilitate those investigations so that if an IG is itself committing wrongdoing or fraud, waste and abuse, you have somebody else that’s checking that. With fewer funds and fewer staff now and in a lessened ability to do that, how can they effectively do that work? So, that’s one example of how you can see both apportionments, which are SF 132 and SF 133, and use that data together to see how this again, like hamstringing of the funding that was supposed to go to CIGIE that had been appropriated is affecting its actual ability to get the funds out the door.

Nehls: Let’s say you’re a public health or you’re a state and you have block grant programs, or you’re a hospital, you’re waiting for federal funds for something, and you’re not quite sure where the money is. This is beyond a Congress problem: civil society is probably in the same boat. So what can people do about that when their state program is delayed because of a delayed grant or what have you?

Lindgrensavage: Well, the first thing you can do is go look up your money on open OMB, and you can subscribe for updates. You can look it up and if it hasn’t come out, you can hit that little subscribe button, and the next time there is an apportionment, it will email you if you’re waiting for your money and you haven’t gotten it and you’re going to get an update. Especially if it’s causing heartburn, you should reach out to your member of Congress and complain because there’s a lot that members of Congress can do in response to these kinds of delays.

There’re two things that I’ve seen move funds after there’s a delay at the agency or OMB level. One of them is in particular bipartisan outrage. If there’s a bipartisan group of members who raise concerns, I’ve seen that really effectively overcome delays. Last summer, there was an announcement that there were concerns that OMB was holding up NIH funds, and there was a bipartisan group of members of Congress who raised concerns about that. You can actually see in the apportionment data, because we got a release after that, the apportionment was redone about four days later to remove the footnote that was holding things up. So, you can literally see the effect that that kind of opposition has. And you should absolutely advocate with your members of Congress. If you’re a member or their staff, you should be working together to get the folks that you need to weigh in with the agency or OMB leadership to make clear with them that Congress is paying attention and they’re concerned.

The other thing, unfortunately, that I’ve seen move money is litigation. That there are a number of folks who’ve taken a difficult step in a lot of cases to bring litigation. It’s time consuming. It’s resource consuming. It also causes, I think, a lot of heartburn for folks who really don’t want to be in the position of suing but did everything else right to engage with programs that serve their communities and their missions. I think, really unfortunate that now it’s not enough to advocate with Congress to get the appropriations at the committee level to get the appropriations law passed by Congress, but that you have this whole new sort of area of work that’s starting to open up to have to advocate to get the law implemented, which is crazy to me, but that is what’s happening right now.

Wentworth: I would plus one to all of that and just double plus one the squeaky wheel gets the grease aspect of this. There are so many different important government programs that have different constituencies that rely on them and either receive the funding directly or benefit from it as just people in this country who are relying on those services. Making sure that your member of Congress knows about that is incredibly helpful because figuring out what is being withheld is really hard.

There are a couple of reasons for that. Part of it is not everything is going to be in the public data. We have the data that we have, which is great, but there are sometimes legitimate delays in in program execution. If you look at GAO’s impoundment decisions from before 2016, for example, there aren’t many in this century at least, but you’ll see that there have been situations where there are legitimate reasons that funds aren’t going out the door. So, it’s not somebody sitting there saying, we have a policy disagreement with this appropriation, we have an issue with this program in general, but we don’t have -- let’s see, I was going to say something about not having enough staff, but that is a totally different issue that I don’t want to get into right now. But as an example, if an agency is trying to hire and nobody is applying, then that might be a reason that there aren’t as many salaries and expenses funds going out the door. If they are trying to implement a grant program and there aren’t applications, that might be a legitimate reason why they haven’t actually awarded the grants yet because they are waiting for better applicants. So, there are a couple of things that we’ve seen in the past that might legitimately delay funds.

Figuring out whether there are legitimate delays behind closed doors or whether this is part of a process that is not lawful and is not consistent with the appropriations acts, with the Impoundment Control Act, is something that it’s really hard to get information on. Making sure that you are raising these issues so that members of Congress can do that oversight and reach out and get that information that isn’t always public is just so it’s so important. I can’t emphasize that enough because without information, we don’t have anything to go off of, right? So again, it’s also really important to keep in mind lawmaking is not the only tool that members of Congress have. Like all these different incidents we’re talking about, it’s not like they passed a new spending law that’s like, hey, we really mean it. I mean, they can do that, but a lot of these cases, it was members raising things outside of the formal legislative process.

I’ll give you another example: There was a series of apportionments for Smithsonian funds that were on their face like a straight up impoundment. The president had asked for a lower amount of money, Congress had passed a higher number of money that provided the funds that the agency had had the last year, plus enough to account for inflation, and the apportionment literally said only take the amount that the president requested. Don’t touch any of the money that Congress gave you above that. And they re-upped it, I think, about 4 or 5 times until Senator Merkley asked in a question for the record, in Mr. [Hal] Duncan’s recent nominations hearing [for Deputy Director of OMB], hey, what are you doing? This doesn’t seem legal. And OMB defended the legality. They’re like, oh, it’s just an apportionment. That’s just us using our apportionment process. But the next apportionment did not have that language. And I found that like a really instructive example that even raising things in this method that’s not necessarily in the public eye, but is in the permanent record, can be effective in that back and forth between Congress and the agencies and OMB.

Nehls: That’s a great example. Let’s just say hypothetically or maybe, maybe semi hypothetically, that a presidential administration is ideologically against spending money on X, something it doesn’t like it, doesn’t want to spend money on and Congress appropriates it and they just refuse. What, consequences are there legally? What would happen to you basically if you just never spent the money? If you’re the director of the OMB. You’re both smiling and laughing at me like I just asked a question that you either ...

Wentworth: I guess let’s start by talking about the only appropriations law that has any teeth on its own. We probably should have started with this in the framework because I know we’ve referred to it without actually it’s the elephant in the room, right? So, the Antideficiency Act is a law that.

Nehls: Yes, of course we forgot the Antideficiency Act.

Wentworth: Well, we didn’t forget because we know that we know that our listeners know exactly what this is. But for those who would like to talk more about it specifically says that agencies cannot spend more than Congress appropriates. They can’t spend money before Congress appropriates it. Also, they can’t spend more than OMB, than the president apportions. And so, they have these limits, and if an agency goes over those limits, then an official shall be subject to administrative penalties and may be subject to criminal penalties. That could be jail time, it could be up to $5,000, which has never been adjusted for inflation. So, there are penalties associated with the Antideficiency Act.

Now I’ll share a couple of practical limits on that. Number one, nobody has ever been prosecuted under the Antideficiency Act. And you might be surprised to hear that the Department of Justice has never prosecuted somebody in the executive branch, but perhaps you are not surprised by that.

Nehls: Shocked.

Wentworth: Second, GAO collects and compiles Antideficiency Act reports from agencies. So, another quote-unquote consequence of the ADA is that agencies have to report these violations to the president with a copy to GAO and GAO takes these and puts them all together and gives them to Congress. If you read through them, when the agency is identifying the responsible official, they’ll say, oh, you know, Jan did this, but Jan retired last year. It’s all it’s very frequently somebody who is no longer with the agency who conveniently retired. When you think about the effectiveness of these administrative penalties, they’re not necessarily the strongest.

We do see a lot of times agencies make really good faith mistakes that result in ADA violations. It might be a systemic issue. It might be somebody put in a zero. It might be that funds were apportioned and were rounded to a certain number, and so they went over by $0.20 because they didn’t realize that they actually had been apportioned fewer funds than they could spend. And so that might result in an additional training for staff. It might result in in better systems in making sure that they’re actually working. So, there are ways in which the ADA has positive consequences and also deterrent effects because nobody wants to have the threat of criminal prosecution hanging over them. None of that exists, flaws and all, for the Impoundment Control Act.

In recent years, Congress has required in the annual appropriations acts that agencies report ICA violations in the same way that they report ADA violations. But the administrative penalties and the criminal penalties have not carried over to the Impoundment Control Act. As far as what consequences there are, as far as what’s in the law there, there isn’t much there. I do think that because impoundments have an effect on people in a way that some other funding violations don’t -- for example, if I am relying on a service that is provided by a nonprofit who typically gets a grant from the federal government, and I no longer get that service, I feel that, right? I feel that withholding as somebody who is directly connected to the federal government in that way. There might be political consequences, right, if you can make those connections. But as far as consequences in the law, I don’t really see any. Cerin, have you thought of any consequences that might come from Impoundment Control Act violations?

Lindgrensavage: Well, no, I think it’s an area for improvement. I think it’s an area where absolutely like we would be looking to, if not this Congress, then the next Congress to really dig in on ways to improve it. And I think it’s going to be a difficult conversation to have, but one that’s necessary if Congress is going to guard its prerogatives over the purse.

The one thing that is a benefit of this is that we do have years of experience that are now, I think, making it quite clear that there is this need for a middle ground between the penalties that are too weak on the administrative side and the criminal penalties that are strong, but because they’re so severe, they’re so rarely used. And so, what that middle ground exactly looks like, I think there’s folks who have good ideas, but the thing that they really need is a bipartisan group of members who are willing to take on the project of pushing something like that forward.

I think there’s a few other things too that that Congress could come together on, but in the meantime, there’s also stuff on the books that they could use to combat this kind of stuff. There’s a provision that David [Super, Georgetown Law professor] and I wrote a piece in the Hill about section 739 of the government wide general provisions of the FSGG Appropriations Act that actually says that there are no funds provided for the administration to make effective cuts proposed by the president that were rejected by Congress. In each of the instances that you’re talking about, if they try and put through a pocket rescission, if, say, the OMB director puts through a pocket rescission, and it was a cut that was proposed by the president’s budget that the Congress rejected by providing the funding anyway, he could be held responsible, actually, under the Antideficiency Act, for any act that he took. There’s no de minimis requirement for these provisions.

There’s actually a really great Department of Transportation provision where they violated a rider on an appropriations bill by retweeting something and even something as small as hitting that retweet button on something you shouldn’t can trigger a no funds provision. So apportioning funds to withhold them in a way that can absolutely trigger it. The act doesn’t have to be huge. It doesn’t have to use a ton of government resources to trigger consequences.

And it’s really important to keep that provision in mind because there are a bunch of places where the president’s budget proposed cuts -- and we see in the data that Christie and I sued to make public that they’re actually using abusing this authority to make them. There’s actually a remedy that Congress has already given itself to start holding them responsible: they have only to use it. They can send letters to those people who are making those apportionments to put them on notice that if they continue that behavior, they could see a criminal referral. And while the criminal penalties haven’t been used very much, they do have a five-year statute of limitations, so you’re really making a bet on who’s going to be sitting at the DOJ in the next five years if you keep on doubling down on that kind of misbehavior.

Nehls: It seems to me, just as somebody kind of new this issue like that the worry because government seems to be primed to act that you assume that the bad actors are going to be spending more money on stuff that underneath the radar, right. And you’re not maybe it just didn’t -- aside from the Nixonian abuses that just didn’t want to spend money on a certain social safety program -- maybe people didn’t theorize that enough an administration that just didn’t want to help the people that were getting the grants right?

Lindgrensavage: It took it took 100 years for Congress -- year after year, Congress, after Congress of agencies blowing through their budgets too quick. It wasn’t until 1870 that Congress is finally like, okay, okay, we think that, when somebody shows up the way they’re going to show up, you gotta believe them about themselves. It’s been 100 years. We’ve finally learned about you. You are incapable of sticking to your own budgets. I kind of feel like we’re maybe now, just now coming up on the 100 years since impoundments kind of started becoming a thing.

Honestly, we did this retrospective called “The Myth of Presidential Impoundment Power,” and the person who has the longest section of the appendix is FDR. Whatever is 100 years from FDR, I feel like that’s about maybe when Congress might be ready to come back around and say, okay, we believe you. Impoundments are the shape of the risk we’re dealing with to the constitutional structure.

Wentworth: And I would also say that just because we are talking a lot about impoundments doesn’t mean that we don’t also see ADA violations left and right. So, I don’t want to take that off the table. When we think about different kinds of spending violations that folks should be looking out for, it’s also what type of thing you’re allowed to spend money on and how you’re spending it.

So as we see, for example, private donations coming into the government and kind of being shuttled around through different mechanisms, that is, if you’re looking to issue spot and think about what kinds of things might be working might be worth looking into as, as a congressional staffer, that that is one red flag that I would encourage folks to look into because the federal government cannot accept and keep gifts unless Congress gives it specific authority to do so. When it does so, it typically says when you take money in, you either have to give it to Treasury or here are the specific things that you can use it for. There are pretty much always going to be some kind of specific purpose limitation on those funds, so that is something to look out for. Obviously, we have seen during recent very, very long shutdowns, lots of programs that kept running that we did not think should keep running. So that is another red flag that I would say folks should look out for. That’s, that is not something that we’re sleeping on, but obviously, because impoundments have not always been the hot topic of the day, it is important to think about where we are now and what kind of reforms we think could elevate that issue to make sure that it’s something that we’re addressing.

Lindgrensavage: The ballroom funds actually provide an example. First of all, I could not agree more with what Christie said, but the ballroom funds provide an example of both of those issues that she raised about both the purpose violations and the gifts, because they’re actually combining both of those to find the funds they need for the ballroom. I think the purpose violations are particularly important to pause on because that also means that they’re robbing funds from something Congress did provide money for and taking it away to something that Congress didn’t.

At the same time that there was a conversation where the White House was asking Congress to provide funds in the second reconciliation bill for the ballroom, and there weren’t the votes for it, Congress effectively said no to the request. They repurposed like $400 million from Secret Service funds passed as part of the first reconciliation bill, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, to White House security measures and transfer the money to the repair and restoration account they’re using for ballroom construction. At the same time, the Congress said, oh, no, thank you, not for us, the White House helped themselves. And they could because the flexibility and the reconciliations laws provide them some latitude to do that. And also, sometimes they’re just running roughshod over the guardrails that do exist to make those kinds of decisions. And then to the extent that that money wasn’t enough for the ballroom, they’re buttressing it with the gifts that they get from the National Park Service Gift Authority.

Nehls: Right, right. Well, I mean, the drones on the roof aren’t going to pay for themselves, right? So you gotta shake down some more folks.

Lindgrensavage: There is a whole different drone repurposed violation for Senator Cruz got his $170 million in the reconciliation bill for maritime domain awareness and they used that money for monitoring the World Cup games for security purposes.

Nehls: Oh goodness.

Lindgrensavage: So, purpose violations abound for all Chris.

Nehls: So we’ve got a lot of problems: where do we start on trying to bring this under some kind of order with some kind of reforms? What’s at the top of your list for things that either the next Congress or future Congresses should be thinking of? I should clarify if the goal is for the money that Congress appropriates to be -- with all caveats that, yes, it’s complicated to spend money sometimes -- that the money that it’s appropriating gets spent as the way that Congress has designed the programs and appropriated the funds.

Lindgrensavage: I think I would just plus one a lot of the suggestions Christie’s already made. And I’ll just sort of tick through them a little bit because we’ve been like, weaving them in something that prevents pocket rescissions that forces the administration to spend funds, even if they’ve been proposed for rescission before they expire. Again, that’s what we understand the law to require now, but clearly there is this difference reading by the current OMB, so buttoning it up to make it even more clear would be wonderful. A middle ground of penalties for the Antideficiency Act to make the act more effective and imposing penalties on Impoundment Control Act violations to prevent impoundments. And then I think guardrails on the gift authorities to provide some limits. And I think to make those guardrails, Congress is going to need some more information about how agencies are actually using these gift authorities. So initially some accounting of, okay, who’s taking in gifts and what for? And how much money are talking about? And where is it coming from? Which, let’s just pause, is probably answers to questions that Congress should have already been asking and should have already been getting, but better late than never to start doing that now.

Wentworth: I think on that, Cerin, I 100% agree with you. What I would urge Congress to do is to not hold all the information itself. One of the most powerful things about the apportionment transparency law is that it required that the information be made public. What that does is it allows groups like ours, the media litigators, members of Congress, anybody can go in there, look at the information and analyze it. And that’s really powerful to have so many people that can go in and do that. And I know, Chris, you all focus so much on Congress’s institutional capacity. It’s helpful to Congress to have groups like ours be able to go and look at the data and figure out what’s there, what’s not. What kind of trends that we’re seeing. To the extent that Congress is putting in new requirements in law that require agencies to provide information or data to Congress, make that to the public, there, there is very little risk in doing that. And there’s a ton of reward to getting others to be able to look at and evaluate this information.

And then something else that I would add coming from an organization where we file a lot of FOIA requests, is that FOIA is an incredible information law. And for those unfamiliar, it’s the Freedom of Information Act. But requests filed under FOIA require somebody to make the effort to make the request. They do not always comply with the statutory timelines. In fact, they frequently do not. It might take years to get information back. Particularly in the funding context, when you’re thinking about impoundments that are happening now or other funding abuses that are happening now, circling back to what we talked about at the top about the time availability of funds, appropriations related issues are inherently urgent. Getting information as quickly as possible to as many people as possible is important. As we’re thinking about reporting requirements or sending information to Congress, I would urge Congress to consider making those requirements public, whether it’s on a public website or having the agency disclose it otherwise, but that that is a really a really critical accountability measure.

Lindgrensavage: Two, I would also urge Congress to think about the schedule for updating. I think one of the reasons this information is so meaningful is because it comes out only two business days after it’s done. And so that means that it’s not real time, but like pretty close. It’s certainly actionable information when the public and when Congress gets it. Imagine how much more useful the Plum act database would be -- the database of all the political appointees across the federal government that was passed in law several years ago. Imagine how much more useful that information would be if it was updated every time a new person came on board in their next pay period or something like that instead of agencies updating the database once a year, so that actually multiple people could have held the job in different capacities over that period of time and nobody will have any visibility into that unless you have a tighter requirement for that reporting.

Are agencies going to be happy about reporting that information? No, of course there’s going to be some burden. But the opposite choice is to burden everybody else who’s trying to do business with those agencies with the ignorance of not having the information about who’s running our government. I think like questions about burden should be approached by understanding who the burden is falling on and the absence of the data and the absence of the data about apportionments, the burden is falling on, as Christie said, everybody who’s on the wrong end of an empowerment.

Nehls: I totally agree with you on obviously on the on the public angle, on the political pressure angle of the public being able to know things as it’s as it’s happening, as you said, pretty close to a daily accounting. And we just kind of stumbled upon this story on the Washington Post picked it up. This professor, Matthew Dull, was doing some research on the appropriations oversight capacity and there was actually a team of investigators they could hire detailees from the FBI and GAO and other agencies to go and do these stealthy fiscal investigations of big spending programs. It was started in the middle of World War II, so particularly on defense projects and programs. And it basically got starved for resources and winnowed down and shut down a couple of years ago. But, that’s another way that maybe Congress can take back some of its own power is reinvesting in some of its own capacity. I’m just kind of curious what you guys think about that.

Lindgrensavage: I would obviously be very happy to sign up for that kind of enterprise. In some ways, that is the kind of work that we spend at least some of our time doing now is we’re flagging apportionments that are at risk for withholding funds. And so to Christie’s point, one of the benefits of sharing information publicly is that even though you don’t have a staff of people doing that, in some sense, you’ve deputized everybody who has capacity to engage in the exercise to help you doing it. I think it would be great if there was a more regular form of cooperation and communication by folks who could use that information within Congress and the people who are generating that information outside of Congress. To the extent that there’s a mechanism to formalize that, I think that would be hugely useful. And so literally, call any time, please. But I think that Congress has a lot of capacity constraints and a lot of things that they could be putting resources towards. I think it will depend on their ability to do that. I would certainly be fascinated to see these records. But by and large, that’s true of most legislative records as well. And I just shout out to the legislative archives, the National Archives building for being really willing to entertain requests about appropriations and other laws that we’ve been digging into.

Nehls: Amazing. Any last thoughts or words?

Wentworth: If anyone’s if anyone’s still, still listening, I’d love to scream into the void about things that things that we can be doing. I guess what I would say as we wrap up here is power of the purse issues have historically, they have really great history of bipartisan support because it is an institutional concern. Members of Congress want their constituents to be supported and they want a federal government that that operates effectively and that does the things that Congress wants. And the money runs the world, right? And so this is the most powerful tool that that the legislative branch has to give money to the executive branch to make it do things, and to keep money from the executive branch to prevent it from doing things. There has been a lot of really positive engagement in this area in the past. I hope it continues into the future.

But I would just hammer home a couple of the top lines that that we’ve talked about today, which are number one, public pressure really matters. Number two, a lot of the work that folks are doing now to conduct oversight to investigate these issues is creating a historical record so that, as Cerin mentioned, as these 100 years keep passing, we can look back in ten years when there’s some new issue that we’re dealing with and say, you know, impoundments is something that we should still consider tightening up if this becomes an issue in the future. Building that historical record is incredibly important.

And then lastly, there are a lot of resources out there right now that that members can be using to both evaluate existing data and conduct that oversight, so use what’s out there now. Obviously, we are always happy to talk about potential reforms, way to make ways to make that data more accessible, more useful, other kind of information that in our list of dreams we would want to ask for. But there is a lot out there now that can allow members to really dig into what’s happening in the executive branch.

Nehls: Great. Thanks so much, both of you. This was a very illuminating conversation, and I’m sure folks are going to really enjoy. Thanks again for your time.

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MODERNIZATION

The next public meeting of the Congressional Data Task Force will be held on September 10 from 2:00 to 4:00 PM ET. No information about an in-person location is available at this time, but check the Legislative Branch Innovation Hub for an update and registration link for online participation, as well as records of previous meetings.

The last CDTF meeting in June included a notable number of demos and product introductions for tools behind the congressional firewall. This time, expect updates on the revamps of Congress.gov and the Senate’s website that are in the works. Speaking of, the next annual public forum for Congress.gov with the Library of Congress will be September 24, which will be another opportunity for providing input on the next version of the website.

MORE ON MIA PROJECTS

The Committee on House Administration’s Modernization & Innovation Subcommittee announced at the end of July it had secured funding from the Modernization Initiatives Account for a Rules Committee project and requested support for another. I can share a bit more detail on those projects:

The House Rules Committee’s PRISM project will be a replacement for the system the committee has used to manage amendments and floor rules digitally for about 20 years. It has begun to fail, threatening to bring work on the House floor to a halt. Over the last year, House stakeholders have scoped the project and selected a contractor, so the MIA funds will go straight to development of a system built for the current legislative branch data environment. Eventually, PRISM will integrate with the House Clerk’s Office and Congress.gov, which will be long-awaited enhancements, and also with member offices.

The My Intelligent Assistant (MIA, a play on the account funding it) project was developed based on ideas surfaced at the subcommittee’s hearing on constituent engagement modernization late last year. The constituency in question here, though, is House staff. MIA will be a chatbot to help staff find specific resources within the myriad of offerings inside HouseNet for things like office workplace training materials, how-tos, and templates from sources like the Congressional Staff Academy. Some of this material may only be found currently in specific training modules or resource pages for lessons, making finding them without previous knowledge of their existence very difficult. Rollout should be next year.

The deadline for the subcommittee’s call for ideas to help it develop a new set of modernization recommendations for coming years is August 31. The call is open to submissions from inside and outside the legislative branch and can be made on this portal.

CONSTITUENT ENGAGEMENT

Once a ritual of August recess, member town halls are dwindling. Only 11 members have them scheduled for constituents through the end of the month, which Axios attributes to rising vitriol at the events leading to the NRCC directing its members to stop holding them.

Although facing local crowds is a form of accountability worth saluting, the traditional open-format, in-person town halls are not great forums for effective or satisfying constituent engagement. Ohio State University professor Michael Neblo, one of the witnesses at the aforementioned CHA Modernization & Innovation Subcommittee hearing last December, has studied the positive results for constituents and members in shifting these meetings to an online format that allows collective deliberation on specific topics. Based on initial research published in his book with fellow researchers Kevin Esterling and David Lazer, Neblo and colleague Amy Lee designed a deliberative town hall model at OSU’s Institute for Democratic Engagement and Accountability.

Their research on the impact of the deliberative model on participants found that the format increased trust and approval of the members involved by double digits and boosted trust in Congress generally. It also produced strong depolarizing effects among participants in terms of hostility felt toward the opposing side. Our old colleague Anne Meeker interviewed Neblo and Lee on their program last November for more information.

AI actually can improve upon the model. At Democracy Fund, I supported development of an early experimental platform that Kevin Esterling developed to use AI to sort and organize incoming questions for similar content, balance audience perspectives, and moderate out disruptive or hostile comments. Technology has come light-years since, and the potential for further experimentation with online deliberative models is immense.

It may be that members don’t hold in-person town halls any more because they don’t feel safe, but the format is inferior for engaging substantively and productively with constituents and for building trust between representative and voter. We don’t need to be nostalgic about it.

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ODDS & ENDS

See you at APSA. Daniel and I will be attending the American Political Science Association’s annual meeting from Sept. 3-6 in Boston. On Thursday, from 12:00-1:30, we’re organizing a panel discussion “Breaking Up to Hold Together: Congressional Faction and Democracy’s Renewal,” with Molly Reynolds and Ruth Bloch Rubin. Come by and say hi, or drop us a note to meet up for coffee.

Guard changing: Fourteen-term Rep. John Larson, whose health has been in question in recent years, lost his primary last Tuesday. He was in line to chair a Ways and Means subcommittee if Democrats retake the House in November, creating one opening for the caucus that is starting a public discussion about how it prioritizes seniority for leadership posts. At least one senior member, Bill Foster, endorses secret ballot elections for committee gavels.

Multiparty coalitions: Recent Harvard Law graduate Alexander Siegel argues in the Journal of Law & Politics that although Congress has organized itself around two-party rules and norms, its underlying structures could accommodate genuine multi-party governance if third parties consolidate into a unified majority coalition.

Proportional representation in congressional elections, meanwhile, has the support of about half of respondents in a new poll from Fix Our House and New America.

Summer enrichment: There’s still time to earn a certification from the Office of the Whistleblower Ombuds curriculum, which includes on-demand training.

Government Accountability: George Washington University’s Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration has announced a fall symposia on government oversight and accountability across all three branches of government. The first session is September 2, with monthly sessions following through December 2.

Multilingual: A team at Harvard’s Dataverse has translated 3.5 million parliamentary speeches made by legislators in seven European countries over at least two decades into English. Wowzers.

Do you remember your President Nixon? The Levin Center’s Linda Gustitus looks back at the lessons from Watergate for Congress.

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The American Governance Institute organized more than 250 organizations and individuals to send a letter last week to committee leadership requesting immediate steps be taken to secure and transfer S&I archival materials to the Clerk of the House for processing to the National Archives, as is required by federal law and House rules. Otherwise, important historical insight into federal activity, particularly Cold War-era defense programs and environmental policies, will be lost.

S&I records on display in the Ford Office Building in 2024. Photo provided by Matthew Dull

We only know about S&I because of the work of Virginia Tech public policy professor Matthew Dull, who has researched the program through records scattered across other archives, private paper collections, and libraries. He has identified about 2,000 missing reports that appropriators requested, requests that were fortunately made in writing by both chair and ranking member of the full committee and appropriate subcommittee. Some of the records the committee still retained were kept under lock and key in the Ford House Office Building when S&I shut down. Dull discovered that they had been removed, however, shortly afterward.

Committee chair Clarence Cannon set the policy of bipartisan signoff when starting the program in 1943, during the explosion of wartime federal spending. Cannon thought depoliticizing review could keep investigations under the radar and not tip off agency heads to the work, providing important supplementary knowledge to regular oversight. S&I’s emphasis on unbiased and nonpartisan work remained, former staffers told the Washington Post, into its final decades.

At its height in the 1960s and ’70s, according to Dull’s research, S&I consumed about 40% of the committee’s budget, making it a key contributor to the decision-making of House appropriators. “The tasking directives, resulting reports, and supporting materials together constitute a distinctive institutional record of how the committee has exercised oversight over time,” the coalition letter notes. “These materials therefore hold enduring historical and institutional value,” and need to be recovered, particularly as guides to future oversight initiatives as once again defense spending accelerates.

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MODERNIZATION

The Committee on House Administration’s Modernization and Innovation Subcommittee has a two-track role of implementing the recommendations of the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress left from last Congress and taking on new and emerging topics like AI in governance. Having run through most of the remaining open recommendations of ModCom, the subcommittee is turning its remaining time this Congress to horizon scanning.

Last week, it made an open call for “actionable ideas” on how to modernize House or legislative branch operations. Submissions must describe specific problems with an implementation plan and evaluate the feasibility of the effort in several ways. They also need to be nonpartisan/bipartisan and avoid electoral or political advocacy subjects. They also need to fit into the CHA’s jurisdictional scope, so no budget reform.

Submissions are due by August 31 and can be made directly on the subcommittee website. CHA also shared a sample submission for guidance.

When House offices spend money on generative AI platforms, they almost exclusively spend it on ChatGPT, recent statements of disbursement analyzed by CNBC show. OpenAI garnered about 90% of the money that member offices, committees, and institutional accounts spent on AI tools through March 31. Democratic offices spent more than three times as much on AI than Republican.

The House CAO also is paying for 6,000 licenses for Microsoft Copilot for House offices, but has not disclosed the cost of the deal or how many are active.

POWER OF THE PURSE

TARIFFS: The Senate Friday passed a Russian sanctions bill that grants the President powers not only to apply punitive tariffs on Russian imports but gives away some congressional control of the power of the purse. The version the Senate approved allows the President to impose punishing tariffs not only on Russia, but on major importers of the country’s oil and natural gas and those that help Russia evade sanctions. The bill’s vague language leaves it to the Administration to determine which are the top five countries facilitating oil sanctions evasions over the last 12-month period.

Senators defeated an amendment offered by Ron Wyden and Rand Paul stripping this part of the bill. They and critics of the bill’s language argued President Trump could use the provision as pretext to issue new tariffs after the Supreme Court found the administration misused national security provisions of other tariff laws to impose new levies.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Gregory Meeks and Joint Economic Committee senior Democrat Don Beyer issued a joint statement against this part of the bill, noting Trump could “weaponize with abandon” the new authorities, “as he has repeatedly done in the past.”

IMPOUNDMENTS: Beyer also introduced legislation Tuesday that would provide new legal options in the case of improper withholding of federal funds by the White House. It would amend the Impoundment Control Act to allow private parties to sue in federal court to receive funds illegally held back. It also would allow members of Congress to compel the House to sue to recover funds if the Comptroller General does not, as is authorized by the ICA (and which the CG has not done for decades).

OMB: A compromise Senate agreement blocking a proposed Office of Management and Budget rule to allow political appointees to review and cancel any federal grant seems to be more smoke and mirrors than actual reassertion of congressional power. Sens. Susan Collins and Patty Murray’s agreement moving forward on a continuing resolution through December 11 blocks implementation of the rule, but does nothing about similar activities the White House is doing anyway. And as NOTUS notes, agencies also are implementing post-DOGE political reviews of programs. One former National Science Foundation official quoted in the piece speculated that the main winner in all of this is Susan Collins’s reelection effort, not congressional power.

FACTIONS

A party gatekeeper’s work is never done. Days after several progressive candidates won congressional primaries in Michigan, Third Way president Jonathan Cowan went to the New York Times to respond that his corporate-connected group is “preparing for the next war that is coming,” with future challengers not by bolstering support for the organization’s preferred candidates, but joining the latest Red Scare. Cowan announced to the Times what for now is a notional $15 million discreditation campaign against the Democratic Socialists of America for some local members’ interest in congressional primaries.

It’s worth noting that the National DSA campaign arm has endorsed only six congressional candidates, one of whom (Cori Bush) lost and another (Oliver Larkin in FL-25 against Jared Moskowitz) is later this month. It didn’t endorse any candidates in the New York congressional primaries and only two in Michigan – incumbent member Rashida Tlaib and Donavan McKinney.

It’s also worth noting that nearly 97% of Democratic incumbents have won their primaries.

Nevertheless, DSA is filling the role of organizational boogeyman for the results in Michigan for corporate-friendly Democrats. But DSA typically focuses on local organizing, not electioneering at the federal level, and its connections to the winners in Michigan are tenuous at best. Only state representative McKinney, is a current member. In addition to local and national DSA endorsement against Rep. Shri Thanedar, he also was endorsed by the major labor unions of Michigan, and the hotbed of Marxist radicalism that is … the Sierra Club. Sunrise Movement co-founder Will Lawrence let his DSA membership lapse during his winning campaign for the 7th Michigan district nomination and actively pushed himself away from its platform and toward Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Abdul El-Sayed simply tapped into DSA-member voters’ energy in his insurgent campaign against Haley Stevens, Senator Chuck Schumer’s preferred choice. He ran, as former defense hawk Democratic congressman Tom Malinowski pointed out, as a normie progressive. Malinowski even gave El-Sayed credit for holding Arab dictators to the same standards as Israel on human rights and his support of Ukrainian resistance. El-Sayed told the New Yorker’s David Remnick “I’m a capitalist who reads about capitalism,” meaning he has concerns about monopoly power. “I’m just not a socialist,” he said.

LABEL MAKING AND REMAKING

I think what we’re seeing is a sharpening of the “progressive” label after drift from its initial intent. The Congressional Progressive Caucus, as I explored a few weeks ago, was founded in the early 1990s by a similar cadre of democratic socialist-aligned House members looking to create an alternative to the party’s hard turn toward neoliberalism in the 1970s, sustained by groups like the Democratic Leadership Council. Bernie Sanders and Ron Dellums weren’t looking to pull down capitalism, but return the party to the project of broadening the social safety net on a Rooseveltian scale and a wind down of Cold War defense spending. Its efforts to build a multiracial coalition also were more focused on uniting around common problems within the political economy.

After slogging through 16 years of neoliberal Democratic administrations, the caucus has been ascendant as an internal party brand. The CPC now has more than 100 members, including Rep. Thanedar, as well as Reps. Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat, who were also defeated by Sanders-aligned challengers. If “progressive” is becoming a nebulous catch-all, or if the caucus has a free rider problem, candidates physically reaching back on the campaign trail to its contemporary originator is a useful political clarification for candidates hostile to corporate power and disappointed in the party’s current foreign policy positions.

Something somewhat similar happened, as we discussed with James Wallner and Soren Dayton, on the Republican side when the Republican Study Group grew beyond its original purpose of being a home for members to the right of the Reaganite wing of the party to become something almost every Republican House member joined to claim the mantle “conservative.” Freedom Caucus members split off to recapture a position of ideological critique against the caucus mainstream. (Speaking of the Freedom Caucus, who’s going to serve as its chair next Congress is again an open question as potential choice, Andy Ogles, lost his primary.)

One of the major contributions parties make to the American political system is to give voters shorthand understanding of who’s who and what’s what in electoral politics. It’s only natural that the people inside those parties argue with each other about what that shorthand should be. The establishment neoliberal wing of the party has had a home-field advantage through the idea that their candidates are better suited for the general election. But today’s progressives, recapturing the original critique of corporate power and American empire that the term initially invoked as an Americanized version of democratic socialism, are winning the argument more frequently than in the past among primary voters. The “extreme” candidate penalty in congressional elections (for both parties) also seems to have dissipated.

It’s not for us to get into the electability debate or opine on the proper direction of the Democratic Party. We do agree it would make more sense if progressives like Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, El-Sayed, etc. were in their own party in a coalitional multiparty system. That’s not what we have, though. Within a two-party system, progressives’ best option is pushing through to maximize factional impact within the Democratic Party. Undercutting this effort through discrediting the DSA as a wacky Marxist foreign body that has infected the party and is leading it astray is saying one shouldn’t be forced to compete within the party on ideas, even though that’s currently the only option for anyone left-of-center.

We’re more interested in how rebooted progressives organize in the next Congress factionally. If they stick together on issues where they have strong differences with the party establishment, they bring the legislative branch closer to a de facto multiparty structure. Putting any political outcomes aside, we think that more members arguing for different ideas that reflect the sentiment of their constituents is how a representative body should work. That process needs structure, but progressives should push back on the establishment tilting it in their favor. That $15 million would be better spent bringing factional coherence to the types of members Third Way prefers and then seeing where the chips fall.

ETHICS

Rep. Chuck Edwards will not run for reelection after the House Ethics Committee released its report on his sexual misconduct toward two young female staffers. As ridiculous and embarrassing the details in the report are, the committee cut it short out of concern for the victims. Edwards’s decision gives his party at least a fighting chance in a swing district trending the other way and, of course, preserves the current six-seat majority Republicans hold in the House.

What does Edwards get out of this? The suggested penalty from the Ethics Committee is censure. Once a serious mark of institutional displeasure that strongly suggested a member resign, the impact of censure is rapidly diminishing as its use increases. We would assume Edwards sticks around, even though he would be only the third member censured (if it happens) for sexual misconduct in the history of the House of Representatives (the other two involved the page program if you need to know where the bar is). Why wouldn’t he? He can use the time until January to look for his next job. (Retiring Senator Gary Peters apparently has been doing the same since June.) Maybe his office becomes a ghost ship for its constituents, as it did after Edwards defeated Madison Cawthorn in the 2022 Republican primary.

Rep. Max Miller, meanwhile, has dug in amid the depressing details of spousal and child abuse allegations that continue to trickle out. The one notable Republican calling for his resignation other than his ex-father-in-law Sen. Bernie Moreno is fellow Ohioan Senator Jon Husted, who is in a challenging reelection campaign, while Speaker Mike Johnson avoided even addressing the allegations directly. The deadline for his withdrawal in time for an alternative candidate to file technically is today, but appears to have lapsed Saturday, which suggests Republicans have more faith in Miller winning reelection than a replacement and they are fine with that outcome.

These are just the latest examples from this Congress of the need to create at least some separation between the enforcement of a member’s code of conduct and chamber politics. We’ve almost belabored this topic this term, but the current system cannot cope when the principle of personal accountability for today’s leaders has to compete with political incentives pushing in the other direction. It is a complicated process to disentangle those motivations, but unfit or frankly dangerous people shouldn’t be able to remain members of Congress simply because of partisan seat distribution.

MAKER SPACE

We’re going to share a project that’s a much larger scale than our previous entries this week to introduce Civic’s Revere, a new CRM going through the approval process with the House. Civic co-founder Jon Kokot recently explained to me that much of the product is designed around the pain points of current systems, which he heard about from his contacts serving as a naval congressional liaison. The major culprit in current CRMs was staff having to manually extract data from a tidal wave of inbound information to make it usable. He drew from examples of the recent explosion of AI-enabled fintech products as a comparative point for the congressional market, where the automation of data processing from a range of sources can free staff to focus on higher-level tasks, which in the congressional case is legislative efforts and casework .

Revere operates closed AI models running locally to streamline processing constituent correspondence and casework management in a secure environment. Because it’s built on fresh distributed architecture, it can run multiple high-volume tasks at once without affecting performance. Models take inbound communications, apply office tags, batch them topically, and compile the constituent record. They also move casework out of a ticketing system, adding data and documents as a case heads through an agency’s process for centralized management. Kokot believes the system can cut down on casework delays ultimately if both congressional and agency staff interact through Revere.

The platform also allows member offices to run queries against the data in their CRM to support the trendspotting and review they routinely perform much more efficiently. Looking across the data, an AI knowledge manager assistant can perform sentiment analysis on issues constituents wrote in on, identify emerging policy concerns, and identify agency sticking points.

Modern communications technology has been a paradox for government, creating new inefficiencies in workflows when efficient communications methods create greater and greater scale. We’ve been hopeful that new innovations could break this paradox for some time, usually by layering on a specific fix to legacy systems. Civic is making more of a fresh start, which is long overdue and now much more feasible through AI.

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Today the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted 8-5 to favorably report a resolution holding Dr. Fauci in contempt of Congress.

While the stakes for Dr. Fauci are enormous, there are huge implications for the ability of Congress to obtain the information it needs from witnesses. Moreover, the success of this process has significant implications for Trump Administration officials should they be hauled before a future Congress after receiving pardons from the President. There are also implications for Pres. Trump himself, who now enjoys the Supreme Court’s recently invented (and quite dubious) immunity from prosecution for official acts.

Fauci’s Legal Issues

HSGAC’s resolution holding Fauci in contempt, in relevant part, states:

Resolved, That pursuant to sections 102 and 104 of the Revised Statutes (2 U.S.C. 192, 194), the President of the Senate shall certify the report of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs of the Senate, detailing the refusal of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci to answer questions pertinent to the subject under inquiry, to the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, to the end that Dr. Fauci be proceeded against in the manner and form provided by law.

The cited statute, 2 U.S.C. §192, makes any person who refuses to answer any question pertinent to the subject under inquiry “deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of not more than $1,000 nor less than $100 and imprisonment in a common jail for not less than one month nor more than twelve months.” According to CRS, the fine can be up to $100,000.

2. U.S.C. §194 authorizes the President of the Senate to certify the Committee’s statement of facts to the appropriate United States Attorney, whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action. Per CRS, congressional practice is that approval by the full Senate is necessary.

Should the Senate pass the resolution, federal prosecutors would have discretion on whether to convene a grand jury and seek an indictment. (This is a contested issue to which we will return.) If the grand jury returns an indictment, the next step would be a criminal trial.

At issue, in legal theory, is whether Dr. Fauci could rely on the Fifth Amendment to decline to answer questions from HSGAC because he had previously received a pardon from Pres. Biden. The Fifth Amendment is not a shield against testifying before a committee or providing the records it requested. Rather, in normal circumstances, as congressional expert Mort Rosenberg wrote in his seminal work When Congress Comes Calling, a committee can override a witness’s claim of the privilege against self-incrimination if the committee grants the witness immunity. There is a process that must be followed:

The scope of the immunity that is granted and the procedure to be employed are outlined in 18 U.S.C. §§ 6002, 6005. If a witness before the House, Senate, or a committee or subcommittee of either body asserts this privilege, or if a witness who has not yet been called is expected to assert this privilege, an authorized representative of the relevant house or committee may apply to a federal district court for an order directing the individual to testify or provide other information sought by Congress. If the testimony is to be before the full House or Senate, the request for the court order must be approved by a majority of the members present. If the testimony is to be given before a committee or subcommittee, the request for the order must be approved by an affirmative vote of two-thirds of the members of the full committee.

At least ten days prior to applying to the court, Congress must notify the Attorney General of its intent to seek the order, and issuance of the order will be delayed by the court for as much as 20 additional days at the request of the Attorney General. Notice to the Attorney General is required so that he or she can identify any information in Justice Department files that would provide an independent basis for prosecuting the witness and place that information under seal. The Attorney General does not have a right to veto a committee’s application for immunity.

HSGAC did not follow this process to grant Dr. Fauci immunity. Had it done so, and the Trump administration or a state prosecutor later decided to prosecute Dr. Fauci, “the burden is on the prosecutor to establish that the case was not based on the witness’s previous testimony or evidence derived therefrom.” Thus the legal question arises of whether the presidential pardon is functionally equivalent to this process.

While it is possible the committee’s and Senate’s votes will turn on the legal issue of whether Fifth Amendment immunity is synonymous with a presidential pardon, most likely they will not. Furthermore, while in theory a prosecutor would choose to forgo a prosecution that is on a constitutionally suspect basis, the acting Attorney General, who was also Pres. Trump’s criminal defense attorney, intimated his views that the President can direct prosecutions.

We have thousands of ongoing investigations and prosecutions going on in this country right now. It is true that some of them involve men, women and entities that the president in the ​past has had issues with and believes should be investigated. That is his right and indeed it is his duty to do that, meaning to lead this country.

Fauci’s Political Troubles

What’s really at issue is politics. HSGAC Chair Paul wishes to criminally punish Dr. Fauci. Now that he serves as chair of HSGAC, he was able to set up a circumstance where he could do so. There are many examples of Chair Paul’s animus for Dr. Fauci. In 2021, Sen. Paul said Dr. Fauci lied to Congress and called for the Attorney General to investigate whether Fauci’s testimony before the HELP Committee violated the federal false-statements statute. In December 2021, Paul said “Fauci should go to prison for five years for lying to Congress.”

It was on the basis of that animus that Dr. Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right. “Given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this Committee is to get me to say something, anything that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars.’”

Many on the political right have sought to shift blame to Dr. Fauci for the creation of the virus. Pres. Biden’s pardon of Fauci severely limited the Trump administration’s ability to prosecute him. The Executive Grant of Clemency provided “a full and unconditional pardon for any offenses against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2024 through the date of this pardon arising from or in any manner related to his service as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force or the White House COVID-19 Response Team, or as Chief Medical Advisor to the President.”

Notably, it does not cover acts after January 19, 2025, and would not cover contempt of Congress after that day.

Sen. Paul creatively devised a way to get at Dr. Fauci. If Dr. Fauci refused to testify, Sen. Paul could push a resolution to hold him in contempt of Congress. If Dr. Fauci testified, Sen. Paul could advance a resolution saying he had lied to Congress, and that could open the door for prosecution on other bases.

What’s Wrong with the Contempt Process?

For many people, Sen. Paul’s apparent vendetta against Dr. Fauci is most unsavory. However, Congress has broad investigatory power and it must be able to get information from current and former government officials, including White House officials. Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the terrorist attack in Benghazi are just a few examples of which Congress needed to exercise its might.

As Rosenberg describes, there are three mechanisms by which the House or Senate can hold an individual in contempt: inherent contempt, statutory civil contempt, and statutory criminal contempt. None of them work well.

Inherent contempt is a power possessed by parliaments to investigate and legislate effectively and was recognized by the Supreme Court in 1821 as a power held by the U.S. Congress. Per Rosenberg, under inherent contempt, “the individual is brought before the House or Senate by the Sergeant-at-Arms, tried in the House or Senate chamber, and then can be imprisoned upon conviction. The purpose of the imprisonment or other sanction may be either punitive or coercive.”

Inherent contempt could result in imprisonment or the imposition of a fine. Its greatest virtue is that it does not require the executive or judicial branches to enforce, which means they cannot thwart the enforcement of this power. Its greatest weaknesses are that it has not been used since 1935, it is cumbersome to implement, and the executive branch has claimed that it can be trumped by the fairly recent innovation of executive privilege.

Good government groups have proposed reviving inherent contempt, with the capability of imposing fines, as a way of vindicating Congress’s oversight powers and getting around the problems with statutory contempt.

I’m going to focus on criminal statutory contempt and discuss it along with civil contempt. There are significant differences, but we will elide that for our purposes. As Rosenberg explains, statutory criminal contempt was rarely used until the twentieth century, but, starting in 1935, it has become “essentially the exclusive vehicle for punishment of contemptuous conduct.” The greatest problem with statutory contempt as currently constructed lies in the prosecution of contempt.

Once the House or Senate has passed a resolution holding an individual in contempt, the statute directs a U.S. Attorney to bring charges. However, the Department of Justice has claimed that it has discretion as to whether to do so. In circumstances where executive branch officials are the subject of the contempt finding, the DOJ has at times refused to bring charges before a grand jury. Moreover, the Justice Department has asserted that executive privilege overrides Congress’s right to know.

This is an obviously untenable situation because it undermines Congress’s ability to perform its constitutional duties. Moreover, as the current administration views the Justice Department as an arm of presidential authority, at Trump’s beck and call, it is highly unlikely the Justice Department would effectuate a prosecution at Congress’s direction – unless, of course, a contempt finding is aimed at one of the president’s enemies. Dr. Fauci, unfortunately for him, falls in this little-foreseen category.

It may be possible to rewrite statutory contempt powers to protect Congress’s interests. The Justice Department could be directed to bring suit, but in light of recent Supreme Court rulings, that appears to be an unavailing approach. Another entity, such as an independent prosecutor, could be established to prosecute in circumstances where the House or Senate votes to hold an individual in contempt. This approach is reasonable, but in light of the Supreme Court’s collapsing of independent agencies inside the executive branch, it is unclear how such an office could be constructed. The appointment would have to come from outside the executive branch, such as by a federal judge or by Congress. Passing a statute to do this would likely face a presidential veto and would have to be packaged in must-pass legislation by a determined Congress.

The strongest card that Congress has is inherent contempt. It is worth advancing proposals to revitalize the power.

What About Dr. Fauci

Let’s assume, counter-factually, that the Senate passed an inherent contempt resolution instead of a statutory contempt resolution. Should the Senate use inherent contempt, Dr. Fauci would be at risk of incarceration (or payment of a fine) after the completion of Senate proceedings, which would entail a trial in the Senate. If convicted, he would have some recourse in the courts through a habeas corpus petition, but it would be expensive, stressful, and he might not prevail.

The limiting factor on the Senate would be that they’re playing with live ammo. Would a majority of senators really vote to hold him in contempt if their fingers are on the trigger? They might. We’ve seen other infringements by Congress before, such as with the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Sen. McCarthy himself was chair of the Senate Government Operations Committee and its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, a predecessor of the current Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which Sen. Paul Chairs.

Engaging in such shenanigans right before an election may fire up the base, but it may not sit well with retiring Republican senators and may give some senators up for reelection pause.

On the other hand, it seems likely that many Trump administration officials have committed high and petty crimes. It also is highly likely that Pres. Trump will pardon everyone around him prior to leaving office. He also may rely on the Supreme Court’s grant of immunity for his actions as president, and may further pardon himself. Should a future Congress be able to force members of the Trump administration to truthfully answer questions about their criminal activities and hold them in contempt for lying or refusing to provide information?

Republicans in the House have recently advanced inherent contempt resolutions. In 2024, Rep. Luna’s H. Res. 1344 sought to fine Merrick Garland for defying a subpoena. It failed by a vote of 204-210, with 204 Republicans in support and four opposed.

Should the House flip in November, that question moves from theoretical to practical.

In 2020, Reps. Lieu, Cicilline, Demings, Raskin, and Neguse called on the House to pass the Congressional Inherent Contempt Resolution, which “would enable the House to independently enforce subpoenas and other Congressional actions by directly levying penalties against those refusing to comply.” Similar legislation was reintroduced by Cicilline, Raskin, Dean, Demings, and Neguse in 2022. It came up during 2020 Member Day testimony before the House Rules Committee, when Rep. Lieu testified and Reps. McGovern and Woodall agreed with the general idea of inherent contempt so long as the system is workable and fair.

Should Democrats retake the House, Rep. McGovern most likely will return as Chair of the House Rules Committee, and Rep. Raskin would return as chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

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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.

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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.

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SOME CONTEXT

The growth in the amount of information available is because of the significant progress legislative branch offices have made in adopting common structured data standards that now feed different systems and platforms. Although the Library of Congress launched Congress.gov in 2012, uniting internally-accessible data with a public-facing website to replace the old THOMAS.gov, users still could not download data that was technically public information on their own. Following public pressure, House appropriators authorized the creation of the Bulk Data Task Force that same year, bringing together the House Clerk, Congressional Research Service (which manages Congress.gov), the Government Publishing Office and other relevant offices to coordinate on making their data available via bulk download. Just as importantly, the task force began holding open quarterly meetings with members of the public so they could engage with legislative branch stakeholders.

The first major milestone for this public-private feedback mechanism came in 2014, when Senate offices relented and agreed to join the bulk data effort. With cross-chamber cooperation established, and public engagement continuing with relevant committees, Congress finally began to provide information about the status of bills as bulk data the following year. More data progressively became available through the years, and in 2022 the task force was renamed the Congressional Data Task Force to mark the progress.

Ultimately, public stakeholders succeeded in pushing the Library to provide a public API for Congress.gov data that launched in the fall of 2022. Demand certainly was there for it, as the Library shared that the API had received 1.3 billion requests at the Congressional Hackathon last September. It also has progressively added more information resources to the website, including some Congressional Research Reports, committee videos, and other content requested through public engagement with the task force.

LEGISLATIVE BRANCH DATA IN THE AGE OF AI

Artificial intelligence platforms are scrambling the public availability situation again. AI agents increasingly are scraping Congress.gov because it is the best reliable source of legislative branch information on the internet. It’s becoming too much of a good thing for the Library’s IT infrastructure. At the hearing, Library of Congress Deputy Chief Information Officer John Rutledge related that on June 16, AI bot traffic increased to the point the website started to crash and the Library had to institute human verification to maintain service. When it did so, 98% of the traffic dropped off. But non-human traffic is coming from people trying to build AI-powered tools to make the underlying data more accessible to people trying to understand congressional activity, so it’s not malicious.

The problem Rutledge relayed to the subcommittee is complicated because although there’s a reasonable sense that human eyeballs should get priority over scrapers, Congress should want AI models to use authoritative legislative branch data. Part of it is that the Library has not completed migrating Congress.gov to the cloud, because of tight resources. (That move is all the more essential given the exploding costs of servers, as Rutledge noted.) But most legislative branch entities are still thinking in terms of websites, which the House Clerk Office’s Kirsten Gullickson (who is also the Congressional Data Task Force coordinator) noted in her oral testimony needs to evolve to acknowledge “we are publishing information into a digital ecosystem” being shaped by emergent tech. Charlotte Lee of the Customer Experience Leadership Institute emphasized the importance of well-structured data and well-documented APIs as keys to keeping AI from gumming up the human user experience.

Some parts of the legislative branch are building out that digital ecosystem to meet changing technology. Late last year, the Government Publishing Office announced it was launching a Model Context Protocol server to help AI platforms keep up to date on federal government activity via the authoritative repository of documents.

Although it is creating challenges for Congress.gov at the moment, AI also holds some potential to solve a massive user experience problem for the Library and by extension the legislative branch. Congress.gov has so much information that it’s unwieldy even for those well versed in congressional operations and procedure. Searches return giant lists of hyperlinks. Typing the URL into a web browser isn’t even the way that the vast majority of users arrive at Congress.gov: Rutledge said that 95% of the site’s traffic is directed from an outside source as people are clicking on links surfaced by a search engine to find bills. More than 70% of congressional users of the site also come via search.

As Ranking Member Norma Torres noted, legislative data’s prioritization of accuracy, using the exact title or bill number in listing a piece of legislation, is not the way most people who come across something they want to look it up. They’re searching based on its content or issue area, which is exceedingly difficult without an interpretive layer to help identify what a user really is looking for and pointing them to the right source. Gullickson suggested additional use of semantic search as a solution. This challenge is heightened for legislative tracking, however, when a piece of legislation is included in a different bill. In the current version of Congress.gov, it essentially disappears from the user.

Bill tracking is something folks have been working on for awhile, though. Our Daniel Schuman built an open-source prototype called BillMap some years ago. Within the Library, CRS has developed a new version of a bill text analysis tool of its own, which it demonstrated at the last CDTF meeting. The Library doesn’t think it is properly “authoritative” enough, however, to release to the public yet. That’s ultimately a user experience decision, and Lee (who was part of the BillMap project) suggested it could be approached differently. She recalled working on the Clerk’s comparative print suite project, which prompted human users to verify changes in law that the system could not compute. The Library could set the parameters for users to make their own decisions with the information returned. These design decisions are necessary and something offices should be comfortable making because, as Lee noted, 100% accuracy with AI systems is impossible.

The Library has begun a major overhaul of Congress.gov, starting with two user interview sessions with 15 participants each. Rutledge said the goal is to have the redesign completed next year, with the ability to provide “personalized experience” based on different users’ needs. The next comment opportunity for this process will be on September 24 when the Library holds its annual Congress.gov public forum.

BEYOND CONGRESS.GOV

Of course, Congress.gov is only one of many congressional websites with public-facing resources – Torres noted there were 625 with a house.gov domain alone. Gullickson called for more online “wayfinding” to guide users to the appropriate digital resource. This principle is particularly important because the legislative branch is complex. She recommended that house.gov provide that role in helping people find authoritative information without first needing to understand the structure of the chamber.

Lee told the subcommittee that the legislative branch should develop its own AI layers not only to provide data analysis, but to be a responsive guide to the myriad of user types coming to its online resources. “The digital infrastructure should guide each along their path with clarity and context at every step to speak, be the primary, trusted source of truth wherever dialogue is happening,” she said. That includes “neutral explanation layers” built on the legislative branch’s authoritative sources that can provide better answers than AI models pulling from opinionated internet content. It’s a question of equal access to public information as high-priced subscription services provide information synthesis and analysis that the general public cannot access.

Ultimately, Lee concluded, Congress needed to be thinking about using legislative data to give itself a “voice” in AI-enabled public discovery and discussion of its activity because without it, the institution is silent and others fill in the blanks. Currently, it puts that activity – bill text, amendments, spending, votes – up on websites and hopes people visit and find them. This is all the more problematic when more people are only reading the AI summary at the head of their Google search and not clicking through, leaving Gemini to stand for Congress’s voice. Lee mentioned the United Kingdom’s Parliament even has a communications office.

These transformations are readily attainable and can be done with a lot of the talent the House already has in its offices. Even without them, Bice noted, staff are trying their own projects to create resources out of disparate data sources. But a major theme of the hearing was it will take additional resources to spin up innovation cycles. Gullickson spoke of a lack of dedicated staff capacity to collect the good ideas from legislative branch staff and route them to the right development team. (AGI submitted testimony to Legislative Branch Appropriations requesting CDTF be given funding to hire exactly this type of coordinator). The Library of Congress needs additional funds to complete the cloud transfer for Congress.gov and develop its own in-house AI model to assist with data analysis projects in a closed environment. The user experience research Lee championed takes resources and people. The hearing was a strong step in making the case for these types of investments, which the current version of the FY 2027 Legislative Branch Appropriations bill mostly leaves out.

GOING META

I would have liked to have attended the hearing but couldn’t because of a scheduling conflict. Experienced government information researcher Charlie Amiot also tried watching the hearing online as she lives on the West Coast. On her substack, she turned the experience into a meta-narrative about legislative data access for a hearing on this very topic, which is very illuminating and also a very different experience than mine. How two people looking for the same thing can go down two different paths because of different decisions on where to look felt like we were playing Zork.

To keep tabs on upcoming hearings, I regularly visit docs.house.gov and look at its weekly calendar. I also go to the committee website to see if they’ve posted a hearing notice – sometimes after what appears from the Clerk. I know that committee websites are maintained by the majority party in the House or Senate. The minority has a totally different website, the link to which is usually buried at the bottom. It’s up to majority staff to post committee records, documents, and alerts.

I want to watch the livestream of the hearing for a bit before I have to stop, so I go to the (majority) committee page, click on the title of the hearing, and load this page.

The link to the livestream is on the word “here.” Do you see it? For a time Wednesday, it either wasn’t posted yet or I forgot where to look and I got a little frustrated. But it took me directly to YouTube and the feed of the hearing. It also will serve as an unedited record of the hearing along with the video posted on Congress.gov with the caveat, “availability of video proceedings varies by committee.”

I wanted to have a transcript of the hearing to write this summary. The House doesn’t have a rapid transcription service available yet. I know there will be an official transcription at some point on Congress.gov, but it takes awhile to produce. I have to put out a newsletter for Monday, so I copy the link into a transcriber service AGI pays for. Now, I’m ready to write.

Amiot’s user experience starts with her decision to find the hearing video via CHA’s YouTube channel. I didn’t even know that existed to be honest with you. Thus begins her user odyssey with just trying to find what part of YouTube has the livestream. The committee channel is cluttered with clips and other hearings and livestreams don’t appear under the “video” tab.

She, too, wanted a full transcript, but was blocked by her tool because it thought the content was restricted. So she had to transcribe nine different clips from the YouTube channel. Those clips, however, were produced by the majority committee staff, who again are in charge of committee website content. Because the committee website is the voice of the majority party, all of the clips are questions from Chair Bice. (Some other channel clips are members’ interviews on cable TV.) Amiot has to watch the full hearing video to hear from Ranking Member Torres.

Amiot posted this experience on her substack that alerts people to new CRS report releases (and she’s on the Depository Library Council) so she is hardly a novice with legislative information. Nevertheless, we had totally different user experiences for the same information based on different mental maps about congressional committees. Unfortunately, hers was a lot more time consuming. And be sure to read her summary for things I may have left out.

SORTING OUT MANDATED REPORTS

After a decade-long effort, Congress enacted the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act requiring agencies to provide a duplicate copy of many of the reports they submit to Congress to the Government Publishing Office, which maintains them in an open repository. Although it is a victory for government transparency, the recordkeeping system behind mandated reports makes it challenging to know which reports are missing and how they link up to specific congressional requests.

To help sort things out until Congress makes fixes to ACMRA, the American Governance Institute has launched a technology project with government data and tech expert Dave Zvenyach to experiment with methods for sorting out the report collection and identifying what’s missing. Zvenyach presented preliminary findings of the project at the Congressional Data Task Force meeting in June, and he and Daniel recorded a more in-depth conversation about it recently that is posted on the Congressional Data Coalition blog.

Among Dave’s findings:

It is technologically possible to create a crosswalk between the reports identified in the Clerk’s report and those received by GPO.

Of the nearly 3,300 mandated reports, GPO has received less than 1/3, or approximately 1,060 filings.

GPO has received reports from agencies that are not in the Clerk’s list, approximately 400 reports so far.

MEMBER TRADING

The saga of forbidding members of Congress from trading stocks almost certainly is over for this session. After multiple bipartisan bills from the rank-and-file and a discharge petition pushed a ban into potential legislative reality, House leadership in both parties have stepped in to steer the issue back to their preferred position of allowing trading to continue. Democratic leadership acted first, adding bans on the President and Vice President to their members’ effort to spike Republican support. Last week, Republican leadership added their voter ID bill that has been DOA in the Senate to the Stop Insider Trading Act. It passed, garnering 13 Democratic votes.

Rep. Thomas Massie broke it down as only he can.

Senator Cynthia Lummis has reintroduced a bill that would ban federal officials, including members of Congress, from issuing or sponsoring digital assets. But the ban would start on inauguration day for the next administration.

TENURE

A group of younger, more conservative Democrats have proposed adopting term limits for committee leaders in the next Congress, citing the age of many current ranking members and the eight Democratic members who have died since 2023. Majority Democrats, which has 18 congressional members, released a short video proposing the rules change that featured recently deceased Agriculture ranking member David Scott prominently for struggling in his role. It also noted the political blowback younger members receive in challenging elder leaders, even if they are in physical and mental decline.

Generational turnover certainly is not happening in many committees, although the Democrat with the longest tenure serving as a chair or ranking member, Nydia Velazquez, is retiring after this term. She has been at the head of the House Small Business Committee for an astonishing 27.5 years. Five other House Democrats have been the party’s lead on committees for at least 11 years. Their average age is 75.8 years.

This long-term tenure is attributable to several factors. The Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Hispanic Caucus historically have opposed caucus term limits because their members faced advancement barriers earlier in their careers. From a realist perspective, committee leadership positions are a form of power for these caucuses, and power is rarely given up voluntarily in Congress. But Rep. Nancy Mace’s ridiculous new resolution abolishing all affinity group caucuses (except, of course, the Anti-Woke Caucus) is indicative of the continuing concern that remains for non-white members that they will be shut out of leadership opportunities.

The Republican Conference rules do limit members to three consecutive terms as chair or ranking member. Arguably, these limits have accelerated the retirement of more senior members once reached. They do, however, provide regular turnover of gavels, which is a point of contrast with House Democrats, whose long-tenured chairs reflect a deeper tradition of allowing senior members to control committees for decades.

Daniel did some preliminary research on Democratic committee tenure over the last 40 years with the assistance of ChatGPT. It pulled from legislative branch data sources we would have used to create this graphic, but we have not had time to fact check it. It’s notable that the Small Business Committee has had only two Democratic leaders since 1987, while Energy and Commerce has had three. Rep. John Conyers held the Judiciary leadership position from 1995 until he finally resigned from Congress in 2017 after sexual harassment and hush money allegations.

We’ll dig into this topic more with additional research. Although we do not think term limits are the best reform to do so, some change is needed for the Democratic Caucus to change committees from personal fiefdoms and hold chairs and ranking members more accountable for their performance in leadership. It also would be an improvement institutionally if members with relevant subject-matter expertise or policy positions that reflected a majority of the caucus had better shots at ascending to committee leadership. Of course, that’s a question about how much control caucus leadership is permitted to hold and thus part of a more involved reform conversation not only for Democrats, but the entire House.

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Daniel interviewed the Foundation for American Innovation fellow James Wallner about how Senate Republicans appoint members to committees. The process is governed by Rule 24 of the Senate standing rules and Rule 5 of the Republican Conference rules, with appointments made through a "Committee on Committees" led by the Republican leader.

The discussion covered how committee assignments work at the start of each Congress. They also examined a specific example involving Lindsey Graham's absence from the Budget Committee and Appropriations Committee, where his sister needed to be appointed to replace him.

They also discussed how Democrats could potentially use procedural tactics to gain control of committees like Appropriations during this transition period. James noted that while procedural hardball is possible, party leaders typically resist such actions because they prioritize party unity and election strategy over immediate legislative action.

The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity

Daniel Schuman: I’m here today with James Wallner, and we’re going to talk about how Senate Republicans appoint members of committees. James, thank you for joining me. How do Senate Republicans appoint people to their committees?

James Wallner: So there’s a magical, storied mountain, at the top of which are a group of people in robes. They got some chicken bones and there’s a smoldering cauldron. And they just do some chants. And then the smoke rises. And then it’s this person shall be on the committee.

No, it’s not far off of that, to be honest with you. It is a very interesting process and it is a very insular and closed process. It’s hard to get a peek into. Right. There’s two kinds of governing authorities here. One is the standing rules of the Senate. Rule 24 governs the appointment of committees. The way this works is that the Senate shall approve a resolution, and that resolution will name the chairman of each committee or a committee, and it will also include the members on that committee.

So if we work backwards, you have a committee and it’s got a chairman and members. The way they get there is that the Senate takes action on the Senate floor. They approve a resolution that says, like the Energy Committee. And at the top there’s a chairman, and then there’s the Republican and Democratic members of the Energy Committee underneath that. And once the Senate approves that, those members are now on that committee.

The Democratic and Republican parties have different internal party rules that govern that process, and the Republican rules are written down. You can find them online. And rule five of the Senate Republican Conference really spells out that appointment process, where the party, in essence, is making a recommendation to the full Senate, saying, these are the members that we want on these committees.

Schuman: The Senate, unlike the House, considers itself a continuing body. So its committees continue on from Congress to Congress. So for the Senate, you have the committee, and then you’re just moving people around from chair to ranking member or moving people on the committee and off the committee. Is that right? Is that what the organizing resolution does?

Wallner: Yeah, more or less. Look, the Senate is a continuing body in the sense that only one third of its members are up for election at any given time. Now, in practice, committees in the organizing resolution are going to be populated at the beginning of each Congress. But the reality of the situation is, if you’re on a committee, you’re going to keep that committee for the most part. And the parties have their own rules. They don’t have to follow the seniority process. But for the most part, once you get a committee assignment, not always and not on every committee, but once you get a committee assignment, that’s your committee moving forward.

The Republican conference rules spell this out. Rule five says, except as otherwise provided by this rule, once selected and confirmed, no member of any committee shall be deprived of his assignment or his rank on a committee, except by the conference. It just makes a lot of sense that they, in essence, retain their committee seats.

Schuman: Let’s talk about what happens at the change of the Congress. How does the Senate put people onto these committees? What needs to be done specifically to make that happen or to move people around if they’re changing committees? The example that I want to get to is Senator Graham passed on July 12th, and his sister was sworn in on the 14th. He was the chair of the Budget Committee. He was a member of other committees, including the Appropriations Committee. So both of those committees now have vacancies. And she’s a new senator, but she doesn’t have any committee assignments. And this has implications for the way the Senate operates. Let’s just start with it’s the start of a new Congress.

Wallner: This gets back to how do you populate those committee rosters on either side in either party before you make that recommendation to the full Senate? For all intents and purposes, the Senate is going to approve that, although you can filibuster the resolution.

One of my favorite white whales was to filibuster the organizing resolution that populates the committees, but then also divide it. And this is getting farther afield. But you can divide that resolution by that. You can say you can force votes on each individual member, if you want, of each committee, and you can also amend it. Right. And so you can move people around, you can do all kinds of stuff you could do.

But working back from that, the Republican conference has what they call, and this is all spelled out in rule five of the conference rules, the process they use to populate their committees or recommend to the full Senate. The Republicans that want to serve on those committees are governed by what they call a committee on committees. And the Committee on Committees has a chairman. The Committee on Committees is, for all intents and purposes, one person working with the Secretary for in this case, the majority, the top kind of floor staffer for the Republican Party. And they basically, within the confines of the conference rules, are going to make these lists, and they’re going to solicit input from the rank and file members. Conference rules say you can retain certain committees over others. They’re going to work within that. Members will come and say, hey, I really want this spot or that spot. And going by seniority, they’ll work through the conference and basically putting people on these different committees.

The other thing that makes this a little bit more complicated is that you have what they call committees, and then you’ve got B committees, right? And so the Republicans many years ago decided, I think it started the in 108th Congress maybe, but they said that every Republican senator is going to be given A committee slots in order of seniority. And so your A committees are like your Energy or your Environmental and Public Works committees, Appropriations, like all of those committees. And each committee is going to be given two slots on two different committees in order of seniority, working down the list. Remember, you retain your committee seat, so you’re really just taking the vacancies that happen. And then they’re allowed to retain one B committee.

What’s interesting here is that the Republican Party has empowered the Republican leader to basically name half the A committee spots in all of the B committee spots without going through the order of seniority. And so you have this kind of convoluted process. So in this case, Lindsey Graham’s committees, they’re going to the A committee slots are going to be filled by the leader because there’s only one. Right. If you had two the leader would offer one fill one. And then the kind of committee on committee would work through the seniority process to fill the other one. But in this case, that’s not happening. So it’s just the leader. And then for the budget committee, which is a B committee, the leader is going to make that appointment as well.

Schuman: You said they follow seniority, but when I was looking at the Republican conference rules, it says that you don’t always have to follow seniority, that there have been instances, I think with foreign, foreign, I can’t remember if it’s foreign relations with foreign affairs, but it was with Lugar became chair of that committee instead of Helms. So they don’t have to do the appointments necessarily by seniority.

Wallner: But that’s regarding the top spot, right? Yeah. And that’s a slightly different process, right. So once you populate a committee, those committee members, according to the conference rules are going to meet and they’re going to select one of them to be the chairman. And the conference rules explicitly say that they don’t have to be governed by seniority. And conference rules also say, and I found it here, effective in the 108th Congress, all Republican Conference members shall be offered two A committee slots in order of seniority. There’s something similar with Warner as well.

‘I think the most recent is when Jim DeMint was still serving in the Senate. He wanted a slot on the Finance Committee. And McConnell at the time, who’s not best buds with DeMint. They don’t always get along. And there was a vacancy on the Finance Committee, but there was only one. And so McConnell got to name the Republican senator to sit on the Finance Committee. Jim DeMint made it very clear and known that he wanted that spot. And the conservative movement was really agitating for DeMint to get that spot. It put McConnell in an awkward position, because he’s trying to show people that he is a conservative and he doesn’t hate conservatives. But now he’s got to name his nemesis to this committee. Right. Because he’s the one who gets to make the pick or he has to, or he has to say, I don’t like DeMint, and I’m not going to put you on this committee. And he doesn’t want to do either one of those things. Right. And so he basically convinces Burr to give up one of his committees, because Burr was the only senator who was senior to DeMint who could get that spot. And then McConnell can put Burr on that spot and say to the world, I’m just following seniority. Right. But he had to convince him to give up a committee to take that spot. And so it shows you this kind of it’s a weird, convoluted process, but the basic outlines of it are pretty well set.

Schuman: So let’s play it out for a little bit. Lindsey Graham was the chair of the Senate Budget Committee. He is obviously no longer able to serve in that role. The Budget Committee is down one Republican. The Budget Committee doesn’t have a chair. Republicans want to do reconciliation. You need a chair of the budget committee, presumably to make that process work. Right? There isn’t as far as I can. There isn’t an acting chair. There’s either a chair or not a chair. So someone has to get that role, which means the Senate needs to pass a resolution which requires 60 votes if the Democrats are willing to filibuster. Like how? Like, how does that play out? Or does that play out?

Wallner: Just to start with an interesting aside, if the Democrats tried to filibuster an organizing resolution or not an organizing resolution, but a resolution to put somebody on a committee amid Congress? It’s pretty remarkable how little tolerance Thune and Senate Republicans will have for that. And you will see very readily how little the Senate rules empower senators, much less a minority of senators, to stop a majority. But when you juxtapose it to the talking filibuster debate and the Save America Act, it’s remarkable. They’re like, we can’t do anything. We want to do something. They just do it.

Schuman: Senator Schumer has said in the past he wants to get rid of the filibuster. And other Democrats have said this as well. This is a chance to chip away at parts of that. Right? You could give Schumer a win win. He could, on one hand, try to stop reconciliation or extract a concession from Republicans saying, we’re not going to do reconciliation 3.0. If you want to do it, your chair has to agree to not do this right. Or, on the other hand, go ahead, go nuclear. This seems like it’s a win-win from at least what he said publicly.

Wallner: It’s also a way to, regardless of how successful it is, to show action to your base, to get excitement, to raise money, all that kind of stuff. But the reality of the situation is that even if Republicans were unable to get the Senate to approve a new member of the Budget Committee to give them the votes to name a new chairman. They don’t need to in this instance. Look, the House can pass a budget resolution. Budget resolution could come to the Senate. The Senate can put it on the floor and vote on it. They don’t have to go through the committee process.

Schuman: Although it’s unlikely that the Senate is going to accept whatever budget resolution comes from the House. Right.

Wallner: And they can change it on the floor. And then if that does open up reconciliation, in essence, what happens then is that the House can pass a reconciliation bill. It can come to the Senate. We’ve seen this, the last reconciliation bill, and it doesn’t have to go to committee, and it doesn’t have to go to the Budget Committee. And in fact, if it only ends in one committee, the Budget Committee by law, is not involved in that process either. There’s avenues procedurally to having the Senate act, even if the Budget Committee is, in essence, defunct.

What I find very interesting is that when the Democrats have more votes on certain panels now, it’s remarkable. The Senate rules are very clear and committee rules are very clear. Majorities on committees have a lot of power. Certainly since the 70s, to call hearings, to schedule markups, to take action with or without the chairman’s permission. And it is remarkable when the Democrats are in these positions, how little they actually are trying to do anything. If you really want to do something to save the world, it seems to me you’re going to spring at any moment you can to take advantage of any advantage you have. But they don’t.

Schuman: Yeah. So let’s talk about that specifically. So the Senate Appropriations Committee. Senator Graham was a member of the Appropriations Committee, and now he’s not. Senator McConnell is ill and he’s not coming back anytime soon, as far as we can tell. And the Senate’s going to go into recess soon enough. And the appropriations process had been they’ve nixed all of their markups that were scheduled to happen. But the Democrats at the moment have a functional majority on the Appropriations Committee, and they could convene proceedings. They could move legislation if they were to want to. Is there anything that’s stopping them from acting?

Wallner: I think when I worked in the House and Senate, I started there were three parties on Capitol Hill, right? You had the Democrats, Republicans and appropriators. The appropriators, even to this day, conduct their work in a bipartisan way. I think that the first hurdle to the Democrats doing that would be the Democrats on the Appropriations Committee. My guess is that they would be very resistant to that kind of hardball on top of that. I think that the temperament of appropriators typically doesn’t, setting aside the bipartisan stuff, they’re just not the type of people who are going to press every procedural advantage. And if they’re not the ones leading the charge on this, the party’s kind of out of luck because it’s the committee members themselves that have to do it.

The other thing is appropriators are like a lot of the other committees – we saw appropriators this Congress, at least Republican appropriators, go along with the reconciliation process that basically takes their jurisdiction out of their hands and puts them into these other committees. You see the House this week, it’s remarkable. They’re considering a CR, right? They’re not even waiting until September.

Schuman: The House appropriations process, as far as I can tell, is totally broken down from an institutionalist perspective. The Republican leadership there is happy to go on with impoundments. They’re happy to go along with pocket rescissions. They’re happy to go along with multi-year funding in ways that would have never been permissible before. But the Senate, there is an opportunity right now if they wanted to make at least a political point where either they could put forward a proposal that Collins would say that she would support, and then they would actually.

James Wallner: They want to create distinction, but they also don’t act on a lot of stuff. But, you know, I think it’s very simple. You don’t try to hijack a plane that is falling out of the sky, right? You don’t, it’s just like you wouldn’t do it. You’re like, this plane’s a waste of time. And I think when you think about the Appropriations Committee and the appropriations process today, I think there’s lots of reasons why Democrats aren’t going to do that. But at the end of the day, why, if the committee is basically moribund, why on earth would you play procedural hardball and press the envelope and do things that you know, maybe the other side might also do? It’s like, what’s the point?

Schuman: So if you were a Democratic member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, you suggest limitations on ICE and CBP to act in places like border states like Maine.

Wallner: Well, sure, but they could also be offering these amendments on the floor without playing procedural hardball. And they haven’t been doing that right. I think it is a very telling thing to identify the procedural possibilities that members have at their disposal, because what that does is it exposes the gap between their rhetoric and their action, or lack thereof. And I think that is a very telling thing. But look, yes, can they do all this stuff right now and take advantage of this moment of 100%? But the kind of people that would do that are also the kind of people who would literally just offer an amendment, right? They’re the kind of people who would take all of these other steps before you get to that point, right? But they’re not doing that.

And so I think it’s I think that the most telling thing is the fact that a completely inactive Senate does not take itself seriously, does not see itself as a serious place where things of consequence happen. And when that is the case, people are going to spend a lot of effort to try to take over that place outside of the electoral process, precisely because what’s the point, right? And so they haven’t been.

Schuman: The context of the Senate, for example. There’s a lot of presidential nominees, right? There’s a lot of people that Democrats, in theory, would want to block, which it’s not going to go through Budget. There’s not a lot that goes through appropriations, but appropriations could limit things. There may be other committees that Senator Graham was on. I didn’t look at his other committee assignments that maybe they can’t move nominations as a consequence.

Senator Schumer, for example, has come under a tremendous amount of criticism for not being willing to fight. Right. The shutdown that happened, in part, was a consequence of the exposure of his unwillingness to fight, and he wanted to demonstrate that he was willing to do something for a period of time. And here is the opportunity to take control of the Appropriations Committee, the opportunity to exercise some influence over the Budget Committee and perhaps other committees as well. And they can use the rules in the same way that Senator McConnell used against the Democrats when he prevented the organization of that chamber for 15 days, until he got a commitment that the Democrats wouldn’t get rid of the filibuster.

Wallner: McConnell is a master at appearing to do one thing and doing something completely different. You know, very rarely do you take McConnell’s actions at face value. I think that the behind the scenes stuff, the machinations, the negotiations, he’s with the other side, with the other leader. They’re always there. And what he does is he will exploit the inevitable. He will exploit a situation that is going to happen anyway. And then he will use that to basically portray himself in a different light.

Look, Schumer, Democrat leaders in general notwithstanding, McConnell is loathe to normalize these types of behaviors, right? You do raise an important point with nominations in the Senate. You don’t have to go through committee for a lot of things. We call it rule 14. Any senator can just put a bill on the floor on the calendar. They can offer an amendment, but you can’t rule 14 nominees. Yeah, there’s ways around that, but they’re very rarely done. With that being said, though, we only have what, like two and a half years left in the Trump administration. And so once we get past December, any person that he puts in an interim basis in a position is going to serve out the term. And so the nominations, the leverage there isn’t as great.

James Wallner: Yes. An interim nominee can’t do everything. A regular nominee, a confirmed nominee can. But you have to put yourself into like, how are the leaders going to because they don’t want to normalize senators running around like crazy people using their power. That’s just not what they like doing. You have to think about how, what are the arguments that they’re going to make to try to dissuade you and your colleagues, or get your colleagues to think that you’re crazy, to isolate you so that you won’t ultimately go through with it. And they’re going to say things like on the nominees that he’s just going to do this anyway because it’s the end of his term, and he can just make these interim recess appointments, right? That’s what they’re going to say. He’s going to say that’s not going to work on the appropriation stuff. He’s going to stand up and say, look, I’m with you, I get it. But you know what we really need to do right now is let the Republicans blow this up themselves. Right? Let’s keep the focus on them right now because we have an election coming. Right. And then hold on. But that doesn’t.

Daniel Schuman: Isn’t it the inverse? Doesn’t Schumer want to show that they’re fighting so that there is more energy among the base to do things? He wants to take control of the Senate. He needs to fire up support.

Wallner: No, but fighting exposes divisions in your own party. And that’s what both sides don’t want to do. I think what they’re going to do is say, look, let’s keep the focus on them. Let’s show them what shows the American people that they’re not doing anything for affordability. They’re not doing anything. We’ve got this war in Iran. We got all this stuff. Why on earth would we want to become the situation, the focus right before midterm. That’s exactly what McConnell would say. The same thing. Thune will say the same. That’s what they do. That’s because the way you fight is not inside the Senate. It’s in an election. And the only way to win that election is to be unified and keep the focus on the other side.

So anytime somebody stands up like a Merkley or somebody and says, we should probably do this and do that, they’re going to these are the types of arguments they’re going to get back. And those arguments aren’t designed to persuade Merkley not to fight. They’re designed to persuade all of the other people that Merkley is a knucklehead and he shouldn’t follow him, because if you do, we’re never going to be back in the majority. And that’s the same dynamic that you get when you’re conservative Republican trying to get. It’s like, what’s happening to Lee and Scott right now when they’re trying to push the Save America Act internally, they’re getting these same types of arguments thrown right back at them.

Schuman: It’s better to wait and try to win the election than to do something when you have the opportunity to actually do something in power.

Wallner: Yeah. But the kicker is that there’s always another election.

Schuman: Which is why, as you were saying, they never do anything because it’s always about what’s next and not what’s happening right now.

Wallner: Look, I would just say Mike Mansfield put the Civil Rights Act of 64 on the Senate floor and a presidential election year in March. I think it was March of a presidential election year. He thought this was going to destroy his party. That’s how far we have come.

Schuman: So there used to be senators who were willing to do things because they thought that they mattered, or because they were important, or because it screwed the timing. We’re going to do it now because we have a chance to do something.

Wallner: In the halcyon days of long ago, the way you did, the way you did stuff, was that you tried to do it right. Today, the way you do stuff is that you literally don’t do it. You gotta wait. And if you try anything, then that’s going to mean that we can’t ever do it. That’s the kind of dynamic. You saw this with the Green New Deal, when leaders tried to push AOC to not push it in the House. Right. I’m with you. But if you do this, we’ll never be able to do it because we’ll lose the election and our Our moderates won’t support it, and then there’ll be Republicans in the future. So let’s not do it. So that one day we can do it.

Schuman: Yeah. This is why people keep throwing out the status quo candidates. They can’t stand it anymore. And they’re the maybe you feel this, but where I sit, it feels like the party system is starting to fundamentally change. You’re seeing the personalism in the Republican Party right now. You’re seeing Democratic candidates to some extent starting to lose against insurgents. The political organization of the House is breaking apart in ways that are really interesting. And the Senate just looks like the graveyard of any type of hope and ideas. And McConnellism is gone or is leaving. It seems like there’s just transitions that are happening in whatever the political system is. And the old keep your team together, screw the other side and wait till the election model of governing. Maybe that’s not the thing anymore.

Wallner: Yeah, you can’t keep pushing. You can’t keep punting forever. It doesn’t work. At some point, the system is going to demand action. The Senate has gone through the most dramatic, radical, significant and far reaching institutional change in its history over the last 20-25 years. I firmly believe that the Senate of today is not recognizable to the Senate of the 90s or the early 2000s. It’s not. And compared to the 60s, it’s like Mars. It’s not even on the same planet. And it is remarkable how thorough and swift and extensive this change has been. And I don’t think it’s sustainable. It’s not because Congress is a crucible of conflict. It’s where we send the people we elect to adjudicate our differences and make collective decisions. And you cannot avoid having arguments in that place forever. And all it takes is 1 or 2 people. And the next thing, the whole thing is going to be different like that.

Schuman: Yeah. And if we don’t fight in Congress, then we’re going to fight elsewhere. And fighting elsewhere is bad.

Wallner: Yeah. You don’t want to fight elsewhere. You want to fight in Congress. It’s important. It’s a hallowed place. I would always say in the 19th century, we had all these fights. I don’t think we should be fighting physically, but people fought over in the House and Senate. They hit each other, right?

Schuman: Yeah. Yeah. The book. There are 80 or 90. Yeah. Feel the blood. There are 80 or 90 incidents of members beating the ever loving crap out of each other in the 19th century that they could document with gang members waiting for other members to ambush them.

Wallner: I read a review of that book a while ago for Law and Liberty, and my opening line was, the problem with members of Congress today is they can’t take a punch. And I don’t mean that literally.

Schuman: But yeah.

Wallner: They people fought over the House and the Senate because those places were important. It is a signal if somebody’s giving a speech on the House or Senate floor, could piss you off enough to make you go down there and punch them in the face. Like this, a Democratic senator from South Carolina listened to another Democratic senator from South Carolina give a speech about Cuba. And like whether or not we should take Cuba. And he walked up to him and punched him in the face. If the Senate floor is important and it has to be for you to go punch somebody for something they say standing on it, that’s something we need. Not the punching, but the Senate floor being important today. If somebody said something on the Senate floor, you’re like, whatever. You probably don’t even know what they say. Nobody cares. They’re not listening.

Schuman: Yeah, yeah, it has to matter. And I guess that comes down to if the Senate matters, then the Democrats would be willing to play this type of procedural hardball, and the Republicans be willing to respond with this type of procedural hardball. And if it doesn’t matter, then, yeah, then then go do something else someplace else.

Wallner: The Senate floor is a liability to winning elections in each party. That’s how they see it. You see this with the Save America Act debate in the Republican conference. It’s we can’t they’re having this whole internal debate that is, the president gave a prime time address. This is basically ripping the party apart. Right. And the base is all agitated. It’s all over. Should we try? Since the debate you’ll see in the Democratic Party as well.

Schuman: If Schumer plays two dimensional chess. I’m making a joke here, or at least trying to instead of the not checkers. Right? Not three dimensional chess, but two dimensional chess. Like he could expose the Senate Republican thing. On one hand, we can’t do the Save America Act. On the other hand, we can go and get rid of the way that we put people on committees and high in that contradiction.

Wallner: Yeah, but Schumer also doesn’t want people doing this when he’s in control.

Schuman: Yeah. You’re right.

Wallner: Party leaders have no power in the Senate. It’s like they’re like a tin can village or something. They’re like, it’s just all an illusion. And the last thing you want to do is normalize aggressive behavior and procedural hardball. Because when you’re in that position and look, the Senate minority leader is the second most powerful senator, the majority leader is the first, most powerful senator. And those two work together, especially in the nominations process. Those two, Thune and Schumer, managed the Senate on a daily basis. The last thing that Schumer doing this would do was basically go in and be like, I’m not working with you. And then the whole Senate would be upended because then those two wouldn’t be able to manage the institution. And so I think, never underestimate the kind of bipartisan comedy between the minority and majority leader, even when Reid and McConnell were like, trashing each other publicly, they’re still working together privately on a regular daily basis because that’s how the Senate functions today.

Schuman: Yeah. The real adversary is the rank and file, not the other party leader.

Wallner: Yeah. The real adversaries are the progressive and conservative knuckledraggers who are like, you’re like, please don’t look at the rule book and realize what you can do and then try to do it. And that’s how they come down so swiftly against them because they want to make examples of them so that the other rank and file don’t go along with them. Right? It’s all about trying to keep everybody together behind you and not to think for themselves.

Schuman: James, you are a phenomenal resource and a treasure. Thank you so much for explaining this.

House Republican leadership followed President Trump last week in rekindling an anticommunist Red Scare in response to a handful of democratic socialist-endorsed Democratic candidates winning primary elections. It’s bad-faith political posturing to attribute these victories to a “communist” takeover of the Democratic Party ahead of an election that clearly will be a mandate on Republican governance and the collapsing of governmental, business, and Trumpist interests into a single governing junta. Nevertheless, the lack of nuance elsewhere reinforces a binary between legitimate and illegitimate political perspectives.

Take, for example, some moderate House Democrats’ decision to provide a neoliberal amplification to Republicans’ delegitimizing frame. Fearful of any leftward shift in the party that weakens their political power, they have launched a pledge campaign that declares, “we are capitalist, not socialist,” and “we are mainstream, not extreme,” filling in fiscal and foreign policy details that cast those farther to their left as the objectionable side of their binaries.

Of course, the contrast works the other way as well. Belonging to and seeking the endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America, which does not run its own candidates, is a brand marker for Democrats distancing themselves from established “moderate” or neoliberal party positions that are increasingly unpopular with core constituencies unhappy with the status quo. Despite leadership’s recent calls for unity and the search for a unifying policy message that resonates with both the base and swing voters, real divisions have emerged among Democrats on economic priorities, climate change, expanding the social safety net, and the Israeli campaign in Gaza. These divides typically are framed in the press as between “progressives” and “moderates,” which are not particularly explanatory labels. A Democrat self-identifying as a democratic socialist rather than simply choosing the available progressive label is a decision to push that frame in another direction.

Given America’s historical hostility to “socialism,” and the stronger position of the progressive faction in Congress more recently, use of the term “democratic socialist” is an interesting choice. So, what does “socialism” or “democratic socialism” really mean in the early 21st century? Are they synonymous? And how is this faction going to function as part of the Democratic caucus?

First, “communism” in the historical or contemporary sense is not the same as “socialism,” and nobody in America is running for office espousing communist ideals. Socialism is an ideology derived from the work of mid-to-late-19th century theorists like Karl Marx that views the next stage of human development as replacing the capitalist system with collective, egalitarian control of the “means of production” within the economy. Communism is a more specific ideology, espousing that a political organization representing the working class should have total control over the government and economy of a country in order to replace capitalism with socialism. It’s essentially a movement to speed up the process of achieving socialism through whatever means necessary, particularly negating other political actors who may get in the way of progress. Socialism views democracy as compatible with achieving the social and economic changes sought.

While communism has remained at its core authoritarian, socialism, as we’ll explore below, has undergone significant change and reconsideration in its critique of capitalism and political project for mass or “democratic” control of industrial sectors. Modern social and economic life, after all, looks much different than the advent of heavy industry and modern democracies more equitable than Gilded Age plutocracy. But some problems remain the same. Direct political control of parts of the economic system that affect the lives of ordinary people, even if it’s just to provide access to a marketplace as in “socialized” health care, is reflective of this longer Marxist tradition. The idea that capitalism must be removed root and branch, however, is something that very few self-identifying “socialists” have believed for some time.

We have a word for the remaining hard-core people: Tankies.

A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF SOCIALISM IN AMERICA

The “socialism” of the turn of the 20th century was interested in very broad social change. During its heyday from the 1900s to the early 1920s, the Socialist Party of America sought public ownership and control of “the means of our common life,” in the words of its leader Eugene Debs. Debs had started his political activism trying to bring trade unionism to the railroad industry, which was spectacularly dangerous for workers paid poverty wages. Unlike its Communist Party contemporaries around the world it sought to do so through unionization and becoming a workers’ political party.

Neither effort made much progress, in part because resistance was ferocious. Although less doctrinal municipal office candidates won offices. World War I, when many Socialist Party leaders including Debs were jailed, and the First Red Scare thereafter crippled it. The post-Bolshevik Revolution repression campaign had broader impact as well, as the U.S. government engaged in illegal searches and arrests of thousands of individuals, hundreds of deportations, passage of legislation to suppress political “dissent,” as well as a major increase in anti-immigration nativist groups.

What was successful as a political agenda of securing collective economic rights was the Democratic Party’s New Deal in 1933. Although it drew from some socialist ideas like state ownership (the Tennessee Valley Authority), income assistance (Social Security), and labor rights (collective bargaining, federal wage standards), the New Deal remained rooted in Populist and Progressive views of using democratic state power to moderate capitalism’s outcomes and power inequalities, not replace it. The Roosevelt Administration’s labor policies also began the integration of unions into the core of the Democratic Party machinery, depriving any potential workers’ party of any significant constituency.

Soviet deals with Nazi Germany, the Cold War, and revelations about Stalinism’s crimes delegitimized any flavor of Marxist thought in the United States at mid-century. A political consensus emerged between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans that American exceptionalism was built on the nation’s fortunate avoidance of the “isms” of fascism and communism. Even socialist parties in Western Europe were dropping Marxism, replacing it with the goals of broader social justice within a capitalist system. The Second Red Scare, prompted by Sen. Joe McCarthy’s claims of active communist subversives within the federal bureaucracy, resulted in political persecutions and mass surveillance. But Marxist political organizing had diminished so much that most second Red Scare accusations involved activities taking place in the 1930s.

IT’S ALWAYS 1968

If Socialism as a political force has been practically extinct politically for nearly a century, what accounts for its sudden return in modern political discourse? We’re still feeling the reverberations of the political earthquakes of the 1960s and 70s. By that time, the shine had come off liberalism. The Civil Rights Movement had delivered political rights by 1965, but liberals still struggled to contend with the pervasive economic impact of discrimination. (The Great Society mostly focused on affecting equality of opportunity over the long term through child-focused policies.) The Civil Rights Movement also inspired agitation for rights by other marginalized groups. And American military intervention in Vietnam led young people to question the wisdom of a liberal government that sent them to fight and die in a visibly unsuccessful war against communism in an obscure, impoverished corner of the world. A fight that was, in retrospect, an anti-colonial war by the Vietnamese, not the march of a unified communist front.

The language of liberalism and the organizational structures of the Democratic Party couldn’t contain the political energy. Some activists saw the party as part of “the system” maintaining repression and abandoned electoral politics for direct action protest and “consciousness raising” efforts. Rhetorically, some political actors like Martin Luther King Jr. started dabbling in using “democratic socialism” as a descriptor for their critique of the capitalist system, evoking the turn European labor parties had taken in building a social welfare state within capitalism. Some antiwar protestors also started to express attraction to socialism as a double-symbol of their objection to the capitalist American war machine and sympathy for the Vietnamese.

The Democratic Party, meanwhile, was splitting between the old guard of the liberal New Deal machine and advocates of “New Politics,” who sought to harness the energy of the era’s activism to reform it institutionally and reinvent its agenda. Antiestablishment young activists who remained engaged with partisan politics threw themselves into campaigns of candidates like Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy (and later George McGovern.) It all came to a head at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which saw credentialing battles between delegates and a heated presidential nomination process while the Chicago police beat antiwar protestors outside. Richard Nixon, a major figure in the Second Red Scare who secretly sabotaged the Vietnam peace talks to aid his election effort, would win the presidency; the loss intensified the conflict between the old and new party guard within the Democratic Party.

The small band of socialist activists still members of the Socialist Party also were coping with the seismic shifts occurring. The withered husk of the Socialist Party of America was so steeped in reflexive anticommunism at that point that it supported the U.S.’s war in Vietnam. A few nominal Marxists were turning to terrorism through the Weathermen. Other socialists who had been part of anti-establishment organizing through the floundering antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society launched the New America Movement in 1971, injecting feminism into grassroots efforts to mobilize against economic exploitation.

The following year, Michael Harrington broke with the Socialist Party to form the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, aiming to harness student activism as an external force that could still engage the Democratic Party and push it back toward New Deal jobs and infrastructure programs. The “democratic” in democratic socialism was somewhat self-referential, reflecting the hope to build a broad coalition in concert with the Democratic Party seeking social justice, including unionists, feminists, African-American and Latino rights activists, and antiwar groups. The goal no longer was to replace capitalism but push the American state to respond to its worst inequities and abuses, transforming capitalism into something more ethical in the process. The two groups ultimately merged in 1982 to form the Democratic Socialists of America.

Harrington’s hopes that democratic socialism could push the Democratic Party back toward state interventionist policies were unrealized in the Carter Administration’s retreat from liberalism and increasingly irrelevant after the election of Ronald Reagan. The Democratic Party became more corporate and identitarian. DSA remained a station for intellectuals and activists opposed to Reagan Administration economic policies, the administration’s hostility to organized labor, its social conservatism, support of Apartheid South Africa, and interventionist policies in Central America. The closest thing resembling DSA’s coalitional vision that would emerge inside Democratic politics was Jesse Jackson’s 1988 “Rainbow Coalition” presidential campaign, which included many DSA policy priorities like progressive taxation, universal healthcare and child care, and expansion of public housing. Change a few words, and the positions of the DSA-Rainbow Coalition Democrats and current DSA-endorsed Democrats sound remarkably similar.

ARE DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS THE NEW “PROGRESSIVES”?

I’ve shared this bit of political history to show the parallels between recent DSA-backed candidates fighting against the Democratic establishment and historical fights between left-aligned activists and party leaders. Within the party, the rights revolution and Vietnam War opened up rifts between the old liberal party establishment and those supportive of changing the status quo. These fractures still remain, with “moderate” factions being most comfortable politically with the position of corporate power in society and the current course of American foreign policy and “progressives” to varying degrees not being comfortable.

Because we only have two political parties, the way we can understand these intraparty differences and identify the players (or factions) is through the use of additional political labels. The label “progressive,” interestingly enough, developed as a way for DSA-aligned Democrats to differentiate themselves from old guard liberals and the growing New Democrat (i.e., Third Way or neoliberal) faction that would push Bill Clinton into the presidency.

In 1991, DSA members Bernie Sanders and Ron Dellums, Jesse Jackson supporter Maxine Waters, Pete DeFazio, and Lane Evans formed the Congressional Progressive Caucus. They apparently chose this term instead of democratic socialism or social democracy for its resonance within the American language of political reform. In their invitation to their Democratic colleagues, they noted that “it seems to us that a key reason that the American people are giving up on the political process is that Congress appears to be unable to confront the major problems facing our nation.”

Their agenda was hardly socialist: progressive tax reform, reduced military spending after the end of the Cold War, a single-payer health care system, extension of unemployment benefits during the ongoing recession, and end to the savings and loan bailouts as key policies for which the caucus would advocate. Its statement of purpose included adequate response to the AIDS crisis, women’s rights, and environmental reform.

The “progressive” label has subsequently, if not sporadically, grown and the progressive caucus now boasts nearly 100 members. Again, for candidates most invested in specific issues like the housing crisis, income inequality, and Gaza, adopting a differentiating label like “democratic socialist” makes sense as a contrast to mainstream Democratic positions on these issues that either are not popular or satisfying. As John Judis recently wrote, younger progressives consider “socialism” to be checks on an unfettered and unregulated free market system that led to the financial crisis and climate change or the adoption of European-style welfare programs.

It is also possible that “democratic socialist” is becoming an attractive label for some Democrats because the growth of “progressive” self-identification has watered down some of its original 1990s distinctiveness. Consider Hillary Clinton campaigning in 2016 as a “progressive who gets things done,” a phrase that was as much an insult as an expression of belonging. Perhaps “democratic socialist” is an attempt to return the party to its New Deal roots, which is certainly how Harrington and people like Barbara Ehrenreich meant it, and push beyond those using “progressive” to signal identitarian politics without any critique of the political economy.

The Democratic Party fundamentally changed the way it organizes electioneering after the Vietnam War. The result is a process, still with us today, that is much more open to participation. As a consequence, anyone who masters the rules of electing primary candidates is able to exercise significant power. Outsider candidates can try to tap into the energy of activist bases like DSA because, well, they aren’t political parties. Establishment Democrats who rose via other means are vulnerable in low-turnout affairs.

There isn’t much that’s different, therefore, between how Eugene McCarthy secured the Democratic nomination for president in 1972, Bernie Sanders competed doggedly against Hillary Clinton in 2016, or how a few Democratic primary candidates upset incumbents this cycle. The political labels are much less important and interesting than the basis of the critique of the status quo offered by the insurgents, including the direction of Democratic leadership. That is not to say labels are not important at all, as the “socialist” or “democratic socialist” label must navigate the current nationalization of partisan politics. What works in Harlem or Queens doesn’t need to work in suburban Wisconsin or rural Texas, but nationalization interferes with distinctive political brands.

The tension between the old (neoliberal) Democratic establishment and constituencies disappointed in their performance, it should be noted, goes beyond the DSA story: it’s bubbling up in somewhat awkward ways in congressional races in Michigan, where the Congressional Black Caucus responded negatively to a white candidate’s critique of the old Black political guard’s conservatism, but younger Black community leaders validated the critique.

IS A LARGER “SQUAD” A LEFT-WING TEA PARTY?

Perhaps because humans crave symmetry, political observers instantly connected DSA-backed candidates’ primary victories with the emergence of the Tea Party within the Republican Party in the 2010 midterm elections. Some have strong expectations that the group will behave similarly to the House Freedom Caucus, which grew out of the Tea Party Republican insurgency in 2015 and has been a major thorn in the side of Republican leadership. Some commentators are going farther, warning that “socialism” could mount a similar takeover of the Democratic Party that Trump supporters mounted within the Republican Party without sufficient counterresponse from moderates. Even William Daley, the son of the Chicago Democratic boss who sent the cops after protestors in 1968, has chimed in. (Remember, it’s always 1968 somewhere.)

This comparison is irrelevant and the factual circumstances are different. The “extremism” of some House Freedom Caucus/MAGA members includes fundamental rejections of the results of democratic elections and the desire to expel colleagues for political positions they disagree with. At the head of the Republican party is an anti-party populist whose views have eaten the Republican party.

There isn’t an analog across the aisle. The Democratic Socialists do not seek a personalist presidency, but a series of policy goals. The most prominent Democratic Socialist in Congress, Bernie Sanders, pushes the party to the left, but also works to secure durable political wins in concert with his right-leaning Democratic colleagues.

Political factions within parties should be trying to maximize their positions because the point is deliberation across differences. It would be a positive thing institutionally if this faction leverages its power within a small majority to carve out a greater role in policy creation. Stronger factions within the Democratic Party, as Ruth Bloch Rubin explains, result in better policies and could even make life easier for a Democratic Speaker.

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THIS WEEK

Several hearings of note for this week:

• The Committee on House Administration’s Subcommittee on Modernization and Innovation holds its rescheduled hearing on “Modernizing Public Access to Legislative Data and Information” Tuesday at 2:00 PM in Longworth 1310. The public angle is important, but this topic has deep institutional relevance, too, as congressional users are accessing the same platforms to do their jobs. When they can find the information they need in a timely fashion, Congress is more effective. We summarized the written testimony of the hearing’s three witnesses last week.

• Tuesday morning, the Senate Appropriations Committee considers the Administration’s supplemental funding request for the current fiscal year, which includes $21 billion for the Department of Defense. With the renewal of bombing in Iran, it will be a stage for a separation of powers argument.

• The House Appropriations Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on reforms relevant to government shutdowns on Wednesday at 10:00 AM in Rayburn 2128. As I write, no witnesses have been announced, but it’s an intriguing topic. Senators James Lankford and Maggie Hassan have introduced a bill to initiate short continuing resolutions automatically at the start of a shutdown.

ODDS AND ENDS

If you missed it last week, the Congressional Management Foundation’s Democracy Awards ceremony is available for viewing on its website.

Congrats to the Committee on House Administration staff for passing the 1,000 application mark for the “Level Up” professional development course for senior Republican staff. More than 450 staff have completed the program.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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CHA checked in on CRS after a period of significant transition for the office. This was the first time that Donfried has appeared in front of the committee as director since taking over the role in 2024. The previous director, Mary Mazanec, stepped down three years ago after it became clear she was incapable of managing the agency and had lost the trust of CRS employees and of Congress. Robert Newlen stepped into the acting director role and began to clean house and address glaring problems at the agency. We are very pleased to see the House Administration Committee holding this hearing and we recognize its efforts to provide oversight over the legislative branch.

Congress has been encouraging CRS to use AI for a number of purposes, including notably to expedite the production of bill summaries. These summaries accompany legislation published on Congress.gov, but the twelve CRS analysts responsible for generating them are not capable of keeping up with the volume of legislation, and thus thousands of bills either lack a summary entirely or do not receive a summary in a timely way. Newlen, at his 2024 hearing, explained CRS’s engagement with AI and committed to reviewing using AI to expedite production of bill summaries.

Committee interest remained largely focused on that use case during the hearing. Donfried relayed that CRS had tested summarizing approximately 1,000 bills using six large language model-based products released over the last two years. (Her written testimony indicated agency testing took place during FY 2024, which runs from October 2023-September 2024.) When employees reviewed the quality of the 3,000 summaries, however, only 3% met CRS standards for accuracy, coherence, relevance, and objectivity for publication. She also explained that bill summaries are much more complicated than may initially appear, as they’re not just a summary of what a bill does but also how it would change the law.

Based on those results, CRS has shifted its attention toward using AI to streamline bill summary production, like identifying which bills are heading to the floor. Donfried’s written testimony states it “has a prioritized implementation plan for seven unique AI use cases across the bill summary workflow that, if fully implemented, is expected to provide a significant increase in the number of bill summaries produced by current staff.” The written comment suggests no development work will take place in the absence of new funds – “timely investment in an AI platform in fiscal 2027 will be needed in order for these gains to be realized” – but her oral comments suggest they may be able to use end-of-year money to address discrete places within the workflow. There was no discussion of whether other process changes that do not require AI intervention were being explored to expedite bill summaries, and we are unaware of a description of the bill summary workflow process being made available to the public.

Donfried indicated that CRS is using AI in other ways in the agency. For example, it is using AI to assist coding tasks that go into producing infographics. Also, at congressional direction, CRS has created five data analytics models. And it is categorizing comments on regulations.gov to identify whether they are supportive, neutral, or in opposition to a regulation. (The Sunlight Foundation had piloted this kind of tool, called DocketWrench, in 2012, which used Natural Language Processing.)

With respect to AI generating bill summaries with a 3 percent acceptability rate, some committee members nodded along to this finding as though it matched their skepticism about whether AI could produce objective and trustworthy analysis. There was significant conversation on this point, based in part on a recent Washington Post article. We know little from what Donfried said, however, about how those tests were conducted beyond that they used the free versions of popular platforms. Without information on what processes were used in the 2024 tests, it’s difficult to evaluate their assessment on AI’s summarization capabilities. We wonder whether more modern versions of the tools would prove more capable of meeting CRS’s needs.

In terms of near-term future expansion of CRS’s use of AI, Donfried reminded committee members of the Library of Congress’s roughly $5 million request to build an AI testing environment using secured legislative branch data and CRS’s request of an additional $1.6 million to hire five new staff with data science and AI development experience. Although Reps. Stephanie Bice and Joseph Morelle sit on both CHA and House Appropriations, CHA isn’t in the position to secure this funding. We have not closely tracked whether prior funds for CRS have been earmarked for AI specifically and how they have been spent.

MISSION AND CULTURE

Throughout the hearing, Donfried assured the committee that CRS would not compromise its five core values of confidentiality, objectivity, nonpartisanship, authoritativeness, and timeliness with AI adoption. Some of these values, however, are in tension when applied to technology, while others could be better served by greater openness by CRS to the broader legislative branch data community.

The culture of CRS is to default to what it defines as the most authoritative source of a document or piece of information either when ingesting it or making it public on user-facing platforms like congress.gov. This results in delays in CRS processing materials and in CRS making information available to Congress (and to the public.) For example, it is our view that appropriations bills published by the appropriations committee are authoritative; that bills published by committees on docs.house.gov are authoritative; that announcements of floor proceedings announced by the Majority Leader are authoritative, etc. In some instances, CRS waits for materials to be published by the Government Publishing Office before performing their analyses even when the materials are otherwise available, which can lead to a delay of hours to days to weeks before any CRS products are undertaken. The Congressional Budget Office, by contrast, looks to wherever it can find an official source of a bill to start its analysis, and may even reach out to the relevant committee for information. CRS staff may wish to do this, but some tell us they are not empowered by management to do so.

AI applications will not impact these overarching process decisions. Requests to CRS to improve their data acquisition and analysis processes are often tagged by CRS as problems with sourcing data from upstream data providers elsewhere within the legislative branch. The implication of that categorization is an implicit belief that the House and Senate should conform their publication practices and business processes to the ways CRS prefers to receive information, rather than CRS adapting its processes to the ways that Congress operates.

Interestingly, Donfried did not mention the CRS Text Analysis Program, under development since 2011, and refreshed in 2022, which uses natural language processing to identify bills with similar text across different Congresses and within different legislation. The new version, which CRS demonstrated at the most recent Congressional Data Task Force meeting on June 11, is very sophisticated and is used inside CRS (it is also available to House staff). The TAP is a great use of AI in service of CRS’s mission generally and in support of bill summaries specifically. Until this month, Congress and the public had little visibility into its operations.

We believe, in fact, that the text analysis capability is underutilized. Identifying relationships across legislation is something that can be done computationally, at least to a large extent. We know this because we built BillMap, a pilot program to draw these relationships across legislation from the same Congress and across multiple Congresses. Our purpose was not only to identify related legislation, but to draw together information associated with these different bills to provide context about that legislation that is useful for staff. To see what we mean, watch our live demo from 2021 here. This remains our vision of where we’d like to see Congress.gov evolve.

For now, the desire of CRS to provide unimpeachable authoritative information on congress.gov for the general public to access is part of the culture holding resources like TAP behind a congressional firewall. The value of computational matching of strongly-related bills is that the analysis can be done at scale and with a specific range of confidence in the finding. CRS’s approach likely would be to have a human verify every strong match, which undermines the scale and timeliness of the project’s output. We think people interested in this type of research can weigh the strength of a match on their own (when provided appropriate contextual information) and would benefit from tools that connect legislative information and reveal the level of confidence we have in that analysis. Requiring absolute certainty in a tool – which isn’t attainable in the real world – severely constrains its use cases. What’s worse, it forces users to seek proprietary solutions for analysis of data that is a public resource. When people cannot get the information they need from official sources, they will look elsewhere. It is our view that CRS’s role is to help Congress do its job, and that it’s perfectly fine to provide Congress with the facts as you understand them — the best analysis you can provide within given constraints —and let staff draw their own conclusions.

We are also curious about the extent to which CRS has the capability to develop tools in-house, or has developed projects in-house, but staff are unaware of them. Recall last week that we discussed the long-standing workplace culture within CRS designed to protect it from criticism of violating its core values, which when operationalized inside the agency stifle individual initiative and deter innovation beyond standard processes.

CRS is full of brilliant people, and some possess additional technical skills. Is experimentation encouraged inside CRS to use technology to help provide better service to Congress? Do staff have a forum to share ideas or identify common process challenges either within teams or across them? Does it support events like internal hackathons?

Are ideas for new technologies and processes embraced, or is there a fear that management will punish innovation? Does CRS encourage staff to attend the Congressional Data Task Force meetings, the Congress.gov annual meeting, and the Congressional Hackathon? To what extent are CRS staff engaged with civil society, academics, technologists and others who are trying to solve information analysis problems in the federal legislative domain? Or does CRS leadership and culture dissuade staff from taking advantage of the opportunities because, in their view, “CRS has no public mission” and thus will not talk to outsiders – even if those “outsiders” are elsewhere at the Library, the legislative branch, or beyond?

We know what the old culture at CRS was like. It’s difficult to see whether it has changed.

Our experience in speaking with parliaments around the world is that collaboration between internal and external stakeholders can yield significant improvements even when modest funds are available. Innovation can be spurred by constraints.

COMMUNITIES OF CHANGE

If CRS cannot hire the five experts it wants to in FY 2027 — and it appears challenging for CRS to receive the additional funds they’ve requested from Congress — fully utilizing its in-house techie capacity will be all the more important. Doing so will require shifting culture toward greater permissiveness that allows staff to bring more of their talents to light. A lot is being asked of Donfried already, so if this approach were adopted it may take time. Some members of the old guard remain in positions of power so there would have to be leadership from the very top of the agency to change the culture. Nonetheless, different parts of the legislative branch can be models for CRS in successfully shifting culture to greater cooperation and permissiveness for experimentation in support of its mission to serve Congress.

Civil society also can compensate for inadequate resources for technology innovation. The Library of Congress has the authority to accept gifts, which could include collaborating on tech projects for public use. Given the importance of the CRS mission to Congress, we are confident that the agency could build relationships with civil society groups and the emerging congressionally-focused civic tech scene. Again, as part of the Library, CRS has a public-facing mission that runs in parallel with its congressional one. Better structure and public access to CRS nonconfidential information would be mutually beneficial for the agency and the public. Rep. Bice started to raise this topic when she asked about creating an API for public CRS information as exists for congress.gov, but the discussion went in another direction.

Hopefully, hearings like this also will encourage CRS to emerge from its defensive crouch and participate more fully in the legislative data community that is sustaining much of the technological progress on the Hill. The Congressional Data Task Force is one existing forum for that community, and it was positive to see CRS demo TAP and not just talk about improvements to congress.gov (as much as we appreciate hearing about those, too). CRS has a huge trove of data useful across the legislative branch that remains largely inaccessible to cross-organizational efforts.

Much of this data would be supremely valuable to internal (and external) development of AI models and tools. For example, we’d be interested in how CRS has developed metadata for nonconfidential current and historical reports and what it would take for it to extract data from its files into machine-readable format. In other words, a question worth asking is how much can CRS contribute to AI development within the legislative branch, not just how much can it benefit from adoption. We remain, in the words of Acting Librarian Newlen, a loving critic of the Congressional Research Service, and it is our hope that the agency, under Dr. Donfried, will reach its potential. In fact, we shared with the committee our thoughts on how it can become more agile, innovative, collaborative, and transparent while meeting its promise of maintaining confidentiality in its congressional services last week.

Next up, the CHA’s Subcommittee on Modernization and Innovation will hold a hearing Wednesday at 2:00 PM in Longworth 1310 on “Modernizing Public Access to Legislative Data and Information.” The witnesses will be Kirsten Gullickson from the Office of the Clerk and the coordinator of the Congressional Data Task Force, Charlotte Lee, a House veteran and user experience expert, and Deputy Chief Information Officer of the Library of Congress John Rutledge.

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END OF FIRST PAST THE POST IN UK PARLIAMENT?

Two things caught our attention with the apparent ascent of Manchester mayor Andy Burnham to British Prime Minister: his appreciation of the Manchester rock scene (despite neglecting The Fall); and his support for shifting the House of Commons from single-member first past the post elections to a system of proportional representation with multi-member districts.

Although the current electoral system is commonly thought of as part of the long tradition of British representative government, it actually used a variety of electoral systems for Parliament up until 1948, when FPTP was codified. The timing influenced Britain’s newly-independent colonies and commonwealth nations, which adopted the system, too, reinforcing the notion of it being long-standing when it was in fact a conservative response to the extension of the franchise to working class men in the 1880s. New Zealand dispensed with FPTP in favor of proportional representation via referendum in 1993. The devolved parliaments in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales also use different systems.

The current system is out of whack with political developments in the country, as Labour won two-thirds of seats in the House of Commons in 2024 but only one-third of the overall popular vote. The longstanding postwar two-party system is breaking down, meanwhile, with three smaller parties polling as well or better as Conservatives and Labour.

Even though the current system benefits his party, Burnham has endorsed the change since winning the Manchester mayoral election under a supplementary vote system that forced him to court voters in the farther-left Green and Liberal Democrat parties to rank him second (these parties also endorse PR). He has gone on to discuss how proportional, multi-member systems quell the resentment voters feel in the FPTP system’s imbalances, give greater potential voice to Labour’s historic working-class constituency, and open up potential cross-party coalitions on issues. The other thing it would do is prevent surging Reform UK from turning the tables on Labour and seize a disproportionate number of seats in the future.

The political crisis Britain is facing and potential benefits of proportional representation that Burnham has described, we think, align neatly with American challenges with FPTP. Britain may have minor parties, but factional differences within our two parties increasingly are functioning in a similar way, even if American political observers still default to partisan unity being a desired end state. PR in the US would allow for candidates who better represent local interests and preferences to emerge, or in Burnham’s words, create “a politics that is more place first rather than party first” that focuses on “less point-scoring, more problem-solving” through fluid issue-oriented coalitions. It also would allow American factions to mature and develop distinct brands with an electoral structure that provides institutional permanence.

If Burnham succeeds in bringing about this reform, he can teach members of Congress who are similarly frustrated with the American FPTP system much about the best path forward. He clearly thinks PR is good not only for Great Britain, but the Labour Party long-term, even though the current system has such immediate benefit to its massive majority in the House of Commons. Britain, too, is facing the whiplash of anti-incumbency elections, where voter frustration with the limited policy solutions offered by the current system has generated instability that is counterproductive to actually governing (in a parliamentary system, they didn’t have to wait for a national election to oust Keir Starmer). That anti-incumbent sentiment in both countries also has opened up space for nativist demagogues to challenge the multicultural social order politically. Britain’s seen the results of that space here in the US, and Labour reducing some short-term advantages through reforms that provide longer-term potential to isolate elements like Reform UK really is the only play left.

The calculations for members of Congress aren’t that much different. Both parties are scrambling to redistrict in preparation for inevitable backlash elections. Party leadership sees minimizing major bipartisan legislation as the preferable electoral branding strategy, and even when mutually-beneficial legislation does emerge, it remains subject to presidential moods. This week, the House Majority Whip asserted that an entire immigrant group within his home state were criminals and fraudsters, a strong signal to Republican factions that have been supportive of integrationist immigration policy in the recent past like the Main Street Caucus that the party is moving on. Single-member district, first past the post elections are going to continue to make members’ nonconformity a primary challenge liability. The system will stick them with political identities that don’t fit, force support for policies they don’t want, insist on silence on policies they do favor, and limit opportunities for their own ambitions.

The good news is, like the UK Parliament, Congress could adopt a new electoral system simply through legislation. The current requirement of single member districts, in fact, only dates back to 1971, to prevent southern states from using multimember districts or districts of disproportionate size to dilute African-American votes after passage of the Voting Rights Act. The demise of majority-minority districts this Supreme Court term is a reason, at least for southern Democrats, to reconsider. We remain convinced that shifting away from single member districts would assist the careers of many members of Congress in both parties because it would relieve the intraparty pressure they face. And as with the case of Burnham, we think the most likely avenue for system reform is via elected officials themselves, not grassroots pressure campaigns. The more they understand PR systems benefit not only the democratic republic but themselves, the more likely the reform will come to pass.

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CHA MARKUP

CHA reported H.R. 9367 in a markup Wednesday, a bill that would restrict congressional participation in prediction markets on only a few topics. Chair Bryan Steil argued that a blanket prohibition may penalize honest mistakes as a reason for a more tailored approach similar to the Stop Insider Trading Act the committee approved in January, calling H.R. 9367 a companion to that bill, which still allows members and family to sell stock and buy commodity futures, mutual funds, and cryptocurrencies and reinvest dividends. H.R. 9367 only forbids members and their families from betting on implementation of government policies, a specific government action, or another event that comes to the attention of covered individuals through a member’s service in Congress.

After the Senate unanimously changed chamber rules to prohibit its members and staff from betting on prediction markets on April 30, Reps. Ashley Hinson and Dina Titus introduced resolutions doing the same for the House (the difference being Titus, who represents part of Las Vegas, would still allow sports betting). Leadership has curbed those resolutions. Reps. Maggie Goodlander and Brian Fitzpatrick included betting market prohibitions in a new stock trading ban bill they introduced also on Wednesday.

As we discussed with the stock trading issue when it came before CHA in January, the fundamental issue is if members were paid much more in accordance with the service they provide, seeking supplemental income from ethically-cloudy alternatives would be less of a temptation.

GPO modernization. The committee also reported Rep. Stephanie Bice’s bill to provide a variety of updates to the Government Publishing Office’s statutory language that bring it into alignment with its digital publishing mission and strike some obsolete duties. Many of the bill’s provisions emerged from a GPO digital publishing task force, Bice noted.

The bill updates language related to the duties of the Superintendent of Documents and allows depository libraries to choose to receive digital versions of government documents instead of paper copies, preserving public access while saving libraries room. It also grants GPO the ability to accept gifts to facilitate its work.

Additional bills. Having concluded its work to offer guidance on archiving paper-based records of congressional offices, CHA also approved legislation to shut down the Advisory Committee on the Records of Congress. The committee also supported a bill unanimously that grants the U.S. Capitol Police full authority to track and disable drones over the Capitol Complex.

MAKER SPACE

This week is more of a preview of a coming attraction, but we recently met a rising senior at Washington & Lee University named Sam Cook. As a Computer Science and Politics major, he observed the delicate dance between platforms and spreadsheets used by the congressional office in which he was interning to manage its scheduling as a potential project. He started on building a platform that could pull information from multiple sources into one scheduling dashboard as an independent study project last semester at W&L and has returned to DC this summer to complete the work.

His HillDesk platform features a combination of automation and user review we think will save member offices significant time with necessary reassurance that information won’t be missed or garbled. It finds and flags emails containing meeting requests and event invitations through natural language processing and extracts the calendaring outputs side by side with the email, allowing users to double-check at the moment of processing. Cook has provided context based on a typical Hill office for the extraction system to improve its accuracy. The dashboard also pulls in the House floor schedule via DomeWatch.

In addition to being a promising tool to save congressional schedulers’ time and sanity, we’re intrigued by this project because it’s the first we’ve come across testing out the House Chief Administrative Officer’s unsolicited tech pitch form, which was announced at this spring’s Congressional Data Task Force meeting to provide an on-ramp for independent developers. If approved, it would be a great example of someone taking their experience from a congressional office and applying their know-how to make an incremental but meaningful improvement. That’s a sign of the kind of culture we’ve been championing in congressional modernization for some time. It’s even cooler that it’s coming from a college student who touched the institution for a short time but feels the motivation to make it better.

Reach out to Sam about the project at Samuel at hilldesk dot app.

Another project we featured for this section, Derek Willis’ CongressPress database, formed the basis of research into congressional discussion of climate change for this Inside Climate News article.

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The Committee on House Administration will examine technological modernization at the Congressional Research Service in a hearing Thursday at 10:15 AM. The focus will be the “future of AI-enabled policy analysis,” which Acting Librarian of Congress Robert Newlen (who served in many roles at CRS over his distinguished career) has discussed as a major area of interest in reducing some of the workload at CRS. As of today, witnesses haven’t been announced, but we imagine CRS Director Karen Donfried, who was appointed to that role in 2024, will be testifying.

The role that technology should play at CRS is deeply tied up with CRS’s history, its management culture, and Congress’s research needs in the era of AI. These factors are worth exploring at some length before any consideration of technological modernization to optimize CRS for the new information era.

The intended role for CRS

The role of the Congressional Research Service was set in statute through the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970. This legislation reorganized its predecessor, the Legislative Reference Service, which had been established inside the Library of Congress in 1914 to support reference questions from Congress. Over time, members needed support analyzing legislation and policy, a role to which LRS was not suited.

The Legislative Reorganization Act created a larger office with a renewed mission to provide both chambers with high-quality analysis of public policy and legislation, not only reference assistance.

Its new director was authorized to hire specialists who could, as the legislative text described, analyze legislative or agency action proposals, determine the advisability of their enactment, project their results, and present alternative methods for the same result.1 It also empowered CRS specialists to produce research reports on their own initiative that could inform congressional action on particular problems and provide confidential guidance to individual offices. It also mandated the production of summaries of bills reaching the floor.

The design of CRS reflects the centrality of committees at this point in congressional history. CRS was mandated to prepare a list for each congressional committee at the beginning of each Congress of subjects and policy areas they may want to pursue. CRS staff would routinely go on long details with committees, and staff would build close and enduring relationships with members.

Although materials requested by congressional offices would remain confidential, CRS staff were not shuttered away in the Library. They were expected to be experts on their topics and routinely would attend conferences and publish scholarly works like academic professionals. CRS nonconfidential reports were frequently made publicly available, and CRS published a magazine, the CRS Review, to provide a digest of its policy research and analysis that was publicly available through the GPO store. All of this was intended to improve discoverability of its products by staff and improve the information ecosystem surrounding Congress.

Political change and the onset of “neutrality”

Changes in the power dynamics within Congress began to affect CRS beginning in the 1980s. Leadership in the House was becoming more powerful and some of the work of legislating was being moved out of committees. The Republican Revolution after the 1994 midterms accelerated the shift to a leadership-centered model of House organization, creating challenges for offices and organizational structures that provided independent policy analysis like the Government Accountability Office, Office of Technology Assessment, and congressional caucuses among others.

The Gingrich revolution promised to cut the size of government and started with the legislative branch, pledging a one-third reduction in the number of committee staff. Speaker Gingrich cut spending for committee staff in excess of 20%, eliminated the Office of Technology Assessment, cut staff at GAO and CRS by more than 20%, defunded the Joint Committee on Printing, and destroyed the operating model for legislative service organizations. Indeed, there are anecdotes that suggest there was a moment where Gingrich was considering eliminating CRS under the theory that partisan think tanks could provide Congress with the same kind of policy support. Some Republicans defended these offices and agencies against dissolution or decimation, but leadership generally got its way. Whatever Gingrich’s intent may have been, the result was to move expertise and power to House leadership and away from the committees and rank and file.

In response to these threats, CRS management began changing how CRS engaged with Congress. Former senior specialist Harold Relyea described CRS managers as beginning to minimize CRS’s public profile, particularly in talking to the press. In 2004, CRS issued a memorandum directing that staff, when speaking publicly, must adopt a position of “neutrality.” This poorly defined directive was immediately criticized by CRS staff as requiring staff to avoid reaching an expert opinion–to “take no positions and reach no conclusions.”

A particular moment of inflection was a hullabaloo in 2006 when CRS experts provided their expert views in a public forum. In this case, one analyst accurately described his CRS report to a journalist on the limitations of protections to whistleblowers, prompting blowback from a committee chair. The CRS director apparently ordered the analyst to apologize to his division manager or be terminated. He ultimately ended up reassigned elsewhere in the Library, performing similar duties.

There were other such incidents. In 2009, CRS fired former military commissions prosecutor Morris Davis for expressing his personal views in the Wall Street Journal criticizing the Obama Administration’s policy on detainees. In 2012, CRS withdrew a report by analyst Thomas Hungerford on the effects of various tax policy proposals when some members of Congress didn’t like his conclusions. It belatedly reissued that report with the conclusions intact and the insertion of watered down language.

According to former CRS analyst Kevin Kosar, “there was a change in the quality of our internal reports” as a result. How serious was the problem? “Reaching conclusions—the job of an expert—became verboten. In fact, for a time, CRS analysts were told not to end their reports with a section titled ‘conclusion.’”

The problem remained pervasive and ingrained in management practices. In 2019, CRS’s union pointed to agency staff engaging in self-censorship out of fear of management reaction. “Management fear of Member objections overrode the nonpartisan, expert analysis and judgment of their analysts,” the union president testified to CHA. “Authors see this trend and scale back analytically ambitious products on their own. In some cases, analysts are prevented in CRS’s review process from synthesizing new perspectives on issues, and are told to instead focus only on what others have said. The chilling effect influences the design of new projects and the review of draft products by peers, supervisors, division management, and the CRS Review Office.”

Pressures from Congress and its own management subsumed much of the initial intent behind the creation of CRS as a wayfinder and analytic spare brain for the House and Senate. Reports became less analytical and more descriptive and staff were discouraged from engaging with their academic peers. Much of its mandated work, meanwhile, was being largely ignored, like those lists of issue areas for committees to consider exploring. As Kosar noted in Washington Monthly shortly after leaving to enter the think tank world in 2015, what had been “set up as a professorial policy analysis shop, now spends a lot of time answering constituent requests.” It also had become “a remarkably risk-averse organization, tenaciously clinging to old ways and habits.”

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CRS in crisis

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit Congress, calcified management and decades of underinvestment in technology placed additional strain on the agency. Robert Newlen testified in 2024 about how “there was a lot of concern about IT support in our divisions and offices and frustration with getting things resolved very quickly.” There were many examples of basic tools not working properly, including an antiquated version of Microsoft Word, Zoom accounts that would cut out mid-meeting with staff, cell phone dead zones that made it impossible to call staff back, and failed attempts to procure data resources critical to its work.2

Managerial problems under the direction of Mary Mazanec had become acute. In a 2023 CHA oversight hearing, CRS’s union had expressed deep concern with CRS’s leadership, calling it a “five-alarm fire,” and pointing to high attrition, low morale, poor communication, and a lack of trust and confidence in senior leadership. In the American Law Division, staff turnover had hit 19% over a three year period without reaction. When asked at the hearing what was one thing the committee could do to make CRS best serve Congress, Kosar answered, “By my assessment, most policies that affect the service of CRS to the Congress come from the front office of the agency. If you want to effect the most change in the most immediate way, you change leadership.”

Two months after this hearing, Mazanec departed under a cloud. Newlen, who started his career at CRS, had served in positions throughout the Library, and stepped down in 2017 to run a private foundation, was brought back and appointed acting CRS director. He testified before the House at its most recent hearing on CRS, in 2024, supporting the modernization of CRS and the use of federal data. Newlen once described himself as a loving critic of CRS; he now serves as the highly respected acting Librarian of Congress. In the wake of the hearing with Newlen, the Washington Monthly published a guide to reviving CRS, prescribing remedies to strengthen the agency and arguing it is an essential component of a strong Congress.

The State of CRS

What we saw at the 2023 hearing was that Congress had a CRS management team driven into a decades-long defensive crouch and a workforce driven by irreconcilable requirements to provide useful analysis to Congress and to avoid saying anything that could offend them. Moreover, the technology available to CRS staff was antiquated and many of their statutory requirements no longer fit Congress’s needs. On top of all of that, CRS leadership at that time was utterly incapable of meeting the challenges before them and created a culture of fear among CRS staff and learned helplessness.

How is CRS doing now? CRS and the Library’s annual reports, and their testimony before appropriators, provide some insights. Generally speaking, it is difficult to know. So far, our understanding is anecdotal and confidential, except for the public-facing testimony of CRS’s union. That’s why this hearing is so timely.

What we can gather about CRS activities from its annual reports, which AGI has collected, are the metrics of how busy the place is (very!), but little more. For example, in its FY 2024 report, the most recent one available to the public, CRS reported 75,000 custom responses to requests from congressional offices, publication of about 1,000 new reports, 1,700 report updates, 6,500 bill summaries, 2,500 confidential memos, 1,850 in-person consultations, and nearly a million hits on the crs.gov website. These figures have been consistent over the last decade.

In 1970, Congress started asking for various types of products, and ever since, CRS has produced them. But are they useful and used by staff?

Congress and the Information Environment

To answer that question, we must understand how congressional staff seek and use information to solve problems. This is a much larger topic than we have space for here, but in brief, any answer would depend on how experienced the staffer is, where they work, how quickly they need an answer, and their purpose: objective research, confirming an opinion, making a public communication, or satisfying a request.

With a few exceptions, no one has placed researchers in congressional offices to watch what they really do. Relevant literature on this topic is out of date or limited to specific domains (like science). In the US, congressional staff are discouraged from answering surveys, making reliable data scarce. CRS conducted internal staff climate surveys,3 but as testimony from CRS’s union in 2019 indicated, leadership tampered with the report and the version posted on CRS’s website was missing some of its recommendations.

If CRS were interested in such user-centered research, a 2017 effort by the British Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology entitled “The Role of Research in the UK Parliament“ could be a model. It surveyed 157 people, providing context for how reference services work. It was not, however, a time-and-motion study.

We think approaching reference and analysis work from the perspective of a variety of staff backgrounds is essential. For our BillMap project, which sought to build a tool to provide contextual information to staff trying to evaluate legislation, we created archetypes for the various kinds of users we expected—a personal office legislative assistant, a senior professional staffer in a committee, etc.—and conducted in-depth interviews to understand how they engaged with their information environment.

We need to understand that staffers are trying to learn about and solve a problem under tremendous time pressure. They are not interested or able to dig around CRS’s website, then go to GAO’s website, then the website for the national academy of science, partisan think tanks, etc. Staff will go to CRS’s website, as the data shows, but this is not their primary discovery path. (Indeed, going to CRS’s website becomes even more disfavored when staff realize that CRS doesn’t make all of its reports available on its website—that more of them are discoverable on the open web than CRS’s intranet.) Furthermore, CRS reports can be quite lengthy, requiring a time commitment to discover if it’s even useful.

Written products are one type of user experience for congressional staff. They also can schedule time for consultation with a CRS analyst. Even these experiences can be variable, as not all researchers have the same level of expertise. That challenge may have gotten worse as CRS’s union in 2019 pointed to the hiring of less experienced CRS analysts in recent years.

A 2019 National Academy of Public Administration report classified the various kinds of support needs that a staffer may have — quick turnaround, networking, consultative, short term report, technology assessment, and horizon scanning — and recommended that Congress have a single place staffers can go to that is an intermediary between all the sources they may wish to use but is expert at providing that information in the ways that Congress can use. CRS could be that intermediary, if properly reformed and retooled. As this hearing will undoubtedly touch upon, artificial intelligence could be, too. But even if it could, should it be in an institution driven by politics and collective problem solving by humans?

CRS and AI

We have no doubt that AI technology can be a productivity booster inside CRS, freeing analysts to have more time to the type of work befitting their qualifications. CRS stood up an artificial intelligence working group in May 2023 to identify “best practices and operational processes necessary for the adoption of AI technologies” and share awareness of AI use across the Library. Acting Librarian Newlen has mentioned in Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee hearings of interest in CRS developing its own Large Language Models with congressional data and it will be interesting to hear the office’s current perspective on use cases.

To our minds, however, a more pressing question is not how AI can accelerate the delivery of work products that CRS already produces, but whether CRS products and services truly are meeting users’ needs in the current information environment context. Can AI accelerate the delivery of analyses built upon expertise from across the various legislative branch agencies and synthesized with official data from congressional databases (like committee reports) and beyond?

And, if AI can do that work directly, or at least do some of that work, what risks, biases, dangers, and costs is Congress taking on by putting front and center an automated synthesizing tool that is essentially a black box with the capability of hallucinating? What exactly do we mean by AI? Are we talking about deterministic tools like natural language processing, or probabilistic tools like small or large language models? Moreover, should these tools be owned by the legislative branch or is it appropriate to have data and technology also reside with the major AI companies?

It is our view that Congress has for decades underinvested in the tools and techniques that don’t require probabilistic AI.4 Not all of CRS’s reports are digitized and made available online—or even available directly to congressional staff—even as the older reports are relevant today.5 Not all of Congress’s committee reports are digitized and available online, a project that won’t be completed for at least another four years. Websites like Congress.gov should be rethought based on the different kinds of users and their use cases, providing contextualized, timely data in user-friendly interfaces. The Library and other information intermediaries should focus on delivering information to staff at the time that it’s needed, not following procedures that deliver “authoritative” information long after it has gone stale. (We acknowledge that major improvements have been made to aspects of Congress.gov over the last 15 years, and the welcome efforts to engage with internal and external stakeholders, but we also acknowledge that not all components of the Library are rowing in the same direction.)

This doesn’t mean there isn’t room for AI. It can speed up the discovery and contextualization of information. But for it to be deployed to the best effect, it needs authoritative, complete, comprehensive, clean, well-organized data that has been digitized and made available in bulk, through APIs, or via Model Context Protocol (a standard that lets AI applications connect to external datasets).

In the context of CRS, analysts should be able to search across the entirety of materials generated by the legislative branch to be able to find information that answers questions by congressional staff. Because they are experts, they should be empowered to direct the creation of and to review, refine, and vet automated AI responses and to compare it against their knowledge and experience to make sure that any response they give to staff is as close to timely, complete, and reliable as humanly possible. A human should still be in the loop for analytical products. And for finding aids, AI can facilitate the surfacing of information for agency and congressional staff, as well as the general public.

Moreover, AI can facilitate the production of information assets that meet the needs of congressional staff. Maybe the product shouldn’t be a report, but a dashboard. Or a dataset. Or a model. Or a series of interactive graphs. Or a podcast.

This question of how to do all this is in many ways a managerial, not technical one, touching on how CRS leadership structures feedback mechanisms from users, approaches and implements innovative ideas from staff, and measures its impact on serving Congress’s needs. It is also a financial one, dependent on whether Congress provides sufficient, sustained funds to make this transformation occur. The woeful underfunding of CRS in particular, and the legislative branch in general, over the last few decades makes it hard to invest in new approaches when the agency is on life support.

CRS and Congress

We suggest the Committee on House Administration think about that context when discussing technological modernization because faster delivery of materials that are not fully aligned to congressional use cases or can be obtained elsewhere would underdeliver on what AI promises to provide: a comprehensive single touchpoint for congressional staff to get answers to their questions regardless of where the data resides.

To attain that promise, congressional stakeholders have to guide CRS out of its risk aversion. Even with a new agency director and a capable Librarian of Congress, some of the old managerial culture (and dare we say personnel) who punish innovation, rely on process over outcomes, and prevent problems from bubbling to the surface for resolution, remain in situ. Addressing the needs of congressional users must come first.

Other parliamentary research organizations can be a helpful model, or at least a comparator. Some do a much better job in public outreach, engagement with outside experts, and explaining the limitations of their research efforts. The United Kingdom Parliament’s Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology is the gold standard in public openness and two-way engagement, and the nonprofit Hansard Society regularly publishes podcasts on the workings of Parliament. The European Union’s Parliamentary Research Service publishes their reports, holds online briefings, uses social media, and even has an app.

Indeed, parliaments worldwide are struggling with how to incorporate AI, which we wrote about recently. They are trying to be thoughtful in improving their capacities without creating expensive dependencies and undue risks to their work.

CRS should be in dialogue with these and other parliaments, as well as with congressional and public stakeholders. Yes, public stakeholders. The public has a lot to say about the provision of congressional information. They are in routine conversation with congressional staff, and CRS should be in regular conversation with them. This 2020 civil society report is a roadmap of how some legislative information services could be improved.6 CRS does have a public mission, despite protestations by some to the contrary, and CRS should understand that making much of its information publicly available is how it feeds the congressional information ecosystem to help members and staff understand and solve their problems.

CHA may have to consider charter changes for CRS to accomplish some of the managerial and workplace culture change described here. The rapid development of AI technology is a great opportunity to help ensure that Congress has access to reliable, non-partisan, expert policy advice that synthesizes all available information in a timely way that meets congressional user needs.

We do not expect this hearing to be contentious, but curious. We are excited to see what’s in the future for CRS and for Congress.

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APPROPRIATIONS

Once dead in the water, appropriations have restarted in the Senate. The Appropriations Committee will hold a four-part markup on Thursday beginning at 10:00 AM in 106 Dirksen. On the schedule is Legislative Appropriations, which we will do our best to summarize.

ODDS AND ENDS

Democracy Awards: The Congressional Management Foundation has announced the winners of its 2026 Democracy Awards, given in six categories to a Republican and Democratic office. The awards also honor two House and Senate chiefs of staff of the year.

Faction: Politico handicaps five members who may lead the House Freedom Caucus next Congress, in which many current members will be out of office.

Agenic reporting: The Department of Defense is using AI to produce some of the many, many mandated reports it owes to GAO. The legislative branch is contributing to the problem as the number of mandates has soared well past 1,000 and DoD staff have to come through legislation to discover new ones.

Not automatic: The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities’s Richard Kogan and Sam Berger assess the Lankford-Hassan proposal to avoid government shutdowns through an automatic continuing resolution and find it lacking. In particular, it strengthens the power of the executive branch because “The President could repeatedly and indefinitely veto any appropriations bill that provides more funding than he supports or includes legislative language aimed at ensuring he is complying with congressional intent in funding matters, without concern that it would result in a disruptive shutdown of key government operations.”

Baked in: The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance has a new report exploring “how rules on agendas, debate, discipline and legislative scrutiny can be turned into tools for silencing opposition, concentrating power and weakening democratic accountability” across parliaments.

Strong responses: Agora shares good practices for parliaments in addressing violence directed against female lawmakers.

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Daniel Schuman: June 30th marks one year on the job. How are things going?

Chief Michael Sullivan: Terrific. This is an incredible organization with an incredible mission, much different than other jobs that I’ve had in major municipal cities. Really focusing on what we do here, which is protecting members, protecting this place, and protecting the legislative process.

And that protective mission-- while policing is certainly part of that mission -- security and the protection piece is something that is much stronger than any other place. I would say it’s flip-flopped. I had protective missions in other places; however, it was a small piece of my portfolio. I would argue that protection piece of this place and the members is a much larger piece of the portfolio here at the United States Capitol Police.

Schuman: The legislative branch has tremendous security needs and of course you can’t do everything, you can’t focus on everything. Is there something that you’re focusing on right now?

Sullivan: There’s a lot of things that I’m focusing on right now. I met with a lot of folks over the last year right after my entry, hearing members’ concerns about safety, the concerning emails, phone calls, and threats that were coming to them directly. And, I can tell you there was deep concern across the entire membership that I talked to directly and had those one-on-ones on how we’re handling those. Being able to have those conversations really made me understand that difference in that policing mission versus what I would call a protection or security mission. It was helpful in instructing some of the areas I needed to make sure that I assessed and focused and did the best we can with the resources that we currently have. That’s been part of what I’ve looked at.

I’ve also looked at, making sure -- because this agency made incredible strides since January 6^th -- making sure that we have systems in place that embed that progress, that we don’t backslide. We have to make sure that we are always prepared, and a day like that, if it ever comes, that we’re there to meet that day and meet that purpose. I truly believe that we are today, but we’re going to kick the tires and if we’re failing in any way, we’re going to fix it.

Schuman: Can I just stay on this for a second? In prior years, with some of your predecessors, there were questions around are you focusing on training, because training was a big issue, particularly [on January 6^th] Are you focusing on communications? Are you focusing on particular aspects of member security? There’s a million things that someone in your role, of course, needs to be paying attention to, and you had spoken about the security mission. You gave us a good top level, but is there a particular thing that you’re trying right now to address?

Sullivan: I can tell you as the chief of a major organization, I have to focus on all those things at once. Training is a huge issue. Making sure that we have leadership training, embedded in this organization.

We have people up in Boston right now at the Senior Management Institute, which is an executive leadership school. I’ll be up there speaking to them and that entire cohort this Friday. That’s incredibly important to me. We’re investing in that. This is a very busy time of year, but we found time to send our senior folks there to get that training.

Then we look at how do we embed the training, because it’s different here, right? Every place else I’ve been there’s been a state post that requires and mandates so much training. We don’t have that here, and making sure that we get our folks the training that they need, whether it’s around their critical needs like just something as simple as... and it’s not simple, but screening at the doors. We can’t just ask people to do that without giving them the training.

We focused on improving policy, improving training. One of the things that I’ve learned over my time ... When I came up in this profession, you’d make a policy change, sometimes a significant policy change, and it would come across to you at roll call, you would sign for it, and after you signed for it, you were responsible for it. That was the impetus of your training of this many times a very important policy. We need to train our folks and if we make a significant consequential policy change, it needs to be followed up with training.

What that training looks like can be many different things depending on what the policy changes are. But policy changes, are great, but they’re only great if they’re actually embedded in the culture, followed up on, and then our people are trained to be able to be held accountable to them.

Chris Nehls: I want to go back to … you mentioned the threats that members have been experiencing, staff have been experiencing. We’ve seen the reporting and the information out from the department is there’s 15,000, almost 15,000 of these threats last year. This is up, almost double from just five, six years ago; but it’s hard for us to understand what that all means in terms of context. First, how do you define a threat?

Sullivan: When we talk about that 15,000-number, we talk about threat cases. Okay. These are concerning cases. Some of them have a criminal nexus. Some of them, I would say the majority of them, do not -- it’s First Amendment protected speech. But I can tell you, as the executive over this organization, if we did not capture something that is a concerning statement and causes a member’s offices concern, and then that person comes up on the radar again, we don’t see that escalation, that would be a bad thing. So, it’s incredibly important for us to make sure that we do our due diligence on each of these concerning statements, threats that are risen to us, because if an office is reaching out to us and has concerns about it, we should have concerns about it.

When I talk about that 15,000, those are 15,000 cases that are threats agents are working and have to manage. Certainly, First Amendment protected activity, that investigation is much different than a full-blown threat investigation where we don’t have somebody identified, where we have to go out and get legal service to be able to identify that person and then we have to engage with the US attorney, whether it’s here locally or somewhere out in the United States, to be able to facilitate a prosecution.

As you talk about these cases, we all want to look at prosecution as the bottom line. That’s a tool that we have in the tool belt. It’s certainly something that we want to use when it’s appropriate, but our mission is to keep these members safe. Sometimes keeping members safe means getting them engaged with family that they’re not engaged with right now because of some issue, mental health, so all of a sudden, this person that has been a consistent issue because of some other challenges that they have in their life. Maybe the prosecution isn’t necessarily the right way to go. Many times, if we can do those interventions, we solved a problem and we kept a member safe in the long run, maybe safer than prosecution.

With that said, we don’t hesitate to prosecute. We can’t stand for people to make, blatant, outright threats, to our members and to this place and to the people that work here. We’re focused on that and focused on keeping people safe.

Nehls: Could you give us a little bit of a sense of how you filter through... It seems like such an enormous amount of work that goes into investigating, as you said, investigating 15,000. How do you manage or filter through what sounds like it might be somebody just calling up randomly who’s mad and yelling at an intern versus things that go higher in a threat matrix? Can you just talk through how the department, works that through?

Sullivan: We stood up a protective intelligence operations center. It’s an operation center, so it manages all those operations that are outside the NCR [National Capitol Region] that are going on with members, making sure that we’re focused on and understanding what that looks like. In addition to doing that, the concern is with 15,000 cases coming in 18 different places, we needed one central collection point. So that one central collection point is our Protective Intelligence Operation Centers. It allows us to triage and then assign the cases. It makes sure that they all have that one entry point so we don’t miss something, which is always the fear that you have, that you miss that one string that you could have pulled.

There are assessments that go on during that process. There has to be communication with the offices because if you’ve given this to us, the follow-up that we have to have -- which has been one of the most challenging, just to be quite frank, one of the most challenging pieces that we’ve had because of the sheer volume -- making sure that we get back and keep members’ offices or other victims apprised of where we are, what we’ve been able to find, whether we’re waiting on maybe potentially legal process or a conversation of this doesn’t meet the level for a criminal prosecution: This is First Amendment protected activity.

This is why sometimes that doesn’t feel good. I’ve had threats personally against me that didn’t rise to the level of something, but threatened my family. It doesn’t feel good, and I can tell you that it doesn’t feel good to members, but being able to have those discussions are incredibly important.

We have talented and very skilled investigative agents look at this, but we also have PhD-level doctors that are skilled and experts in this that take a look to understand this person’s entire picture, to help us look for different mitigation techniques. So being able to filter it all to one place.

This is difficult. While I’m not going to share the number of threat officers I have, I’ve expanded that. It’s expanded significantly since I’ve been here and we have plans to continue to expand.

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Nehls: There’s been a discussion about political violence and political language becoming incendiary. Does the department think about how do you get that number to go down from a policing standpoint, or is that not really a way that we should think about that?

Sullivan: I think everybody would like it to go away, but I can tell you we’ve had political violence for years, between Gabby Giffords, Representative Scalise and the baseball game. But it seems like over the last year, year and a half, you have the governor in Pennsylvania, you have Minnesota, you have the president, you have Charlie Kirk, you have the president. The level, it seems to be accelerating and becoming more the norm. Certainly, it’s our job, and I think it’s my job, to speak out against political violence. I have in a number of forums, whether it be on media or at conferences that I’ve talked to folks. It can’t become the norm. When we can hold people accountable, we will.

I’ve worked with federal prosecutors my entire career. Federal cases are some of the hardest to bring. There’s a reason when I came through that they have a 90-plus-percent conviction rate in the federal system compared to the state system: It’s because they only take those cases after they’re fully vetted and they’re confident in where they are. So, that’s a challenge, but I’ve seen a willingness to take some cases that I’d I would just say years ago maybe they wouldn’t take because of where we are today. I thank, the US Attorneys office around the country for their participation with us in that.

In addition to that, I think it’s our outreach. We have incredibly, good relationships with people around the country, and that’s been a focus of mine since I’ve been here. One of the other things that has expanded significantly is a program where we have memorandums of understanding with people around the country. We had about 100 when I got here, and we’re pushing 600 now. That’s because we’ve had a concerted effort. It’s not because we just sat back and said, “Hey, you want to come join us?” No, I’ve been on the phone, I’ve been at conferences, explaining what this program is.

The program really is, hey, let’s have this piece of paper in place, and if I pick up the phone as the Capitol Police and say, “Hey, we need help at this event,” and it’s something that you normally wouldn’t do, it’s outside of your regular course of business but you can provide potentially people to help us -- whether it’s on straight time, whether it’s on overtime -- but it’s for our mission that we will reimburse you.

While that’s expanded, it doesn’t mean the work’s expanded. What it means is our reach and our ability to reach out and touch people and pull them in to this work that we have is terrific. And it’s been well-received as I’ve talked to chiefs and sheriffs across the country.

Nehls: What else goes into the MOU besides, events? what other activities?

Sullivan: It could be events; it could be there are specific threats. There’re different mitigation techniques that other departments can use. I don’t want to go into the specifics of it, but it’s anything to do with member security and protection when they’re back in their home districts. I know the House and the Senate have their own programs now. It’s an ability for us to leverage all of these different tools that we have to keep members safe, which is what we’re all focused on.

Schuman: With the 15,000 concerning statements, is the language is concerning statements, behaviors, and communications and whatnot? can you break that down? How many of those roughly are deemed to be credible threats?

Sullivan: We break them down into threats and direction of interest cases. Direction of interest could have a whole lot of stuff in there. And like I said, the vast majority are direction of interest cases. It’s a small subset that are threats. I don’t have the breakdown with me.

Schuman: Your predecessor, Chief Manger, was asked about this, and he said it was a couple hundred things that were credible threats. So you’ve got this year it’s, 15,000 directions. But, there’s something out there that’s causing you to look more deeply, so you’ll maybe open a preliminary investigation. You’ll look at it in some facet, you’ll make an assessment.

Then of those you can’t, there’s no way with the resources that you have, even though they’re significant, you can look at all of them. There’s a point where you’re going to winnow it down significantly: these are the ones that are much more concerning we’re going to put more resources in, we’re really going to investigate this.

And then of those that you go and you put more resources into, and you deem them credible or substantive or whatever the term of art is, then there’s, a further cut, right? All right, we’re going to send this over to a prosecutor.

What I’m trying to get a sense of, when the press reports on this, they look at this number that’s gone from 8,000 to 15,000. That’s a huge increase. What I’m trying to get a sense of underneath that big number that can reflect a lot, how much it’s something that is actionable. It’s something that you guys are saying, “We have to go to the next level of investigation and do something about.” I’m not expecting you to have on the top of your head, but just to get a sense of it, is it 10% or 5%? Is it a couple hundred? that’s why I’m asking the question.

Sullivan: No, absolutely. And the vast majority, it’s hundreds versus thousands of DOIs. And of those threat cases, I can have a credible -- I don’t want to use the word credible-- I can have a threat case and it is something that if I identify who made this it’s prosecutable. The first step is identify who that person is, which can be a challenge depending on what media it comes in on and what information we have, what’s been preserved, how long has it been since we received the information. There could be a case that, yes, vis ery concerning. However, we’ve exhausted all our leads, which takes a lot of time, put out subpoenas potentially to the the different places and we can’t get it because of a number of reasons, so you could run into that.

Then, you run into cases, okay, I have the person identified: this person, did they truly have the means? They’re sitting in a basement in Alaska and making a threat about a member who lives on the East Coast. Do they truly have the means to facilitate what they’re doing? Probably getting a prosecutor to pick that up is slim. But those are conversations that we have to have going forward, and goes to my point of why we want to capture all of the escalating behavior potentially behind. Unfortunately, many of the things that we see, this is the first time people pop on our radar when they do something.

Schuman: Do you track the prosecutions? Do you keep track of the number of prosecutions that occur based upon the work that you’ve done?

Sullivan: We have numbers on what that is. I don’t have those with me today. Once again, it’s a subset of those hundreds.

Schuman: What we had heard before was that it was very difficult to get prosecutors to prosecute. The Capitol Police is subsidizing, I think, a couple of AUSAs to help focus so that they’re willing to spend time on something that they wouldn’t necessarily have been willing to do otherwise.

Let me turn my question to a statement. It would be helpful, to have a sense of, looking at the last couple years, just being able to break it down, not as a way of, diminishing the work, but I think to help the members better understand the nature of the work. Because we see every time the new number, the new top-line number comes out, there’s increasing panic from them. Yes, the threat number has gone up to 15,000 or 17,000, but we’re calculating a lot of people by social media. Some of these are threats from people in Tasmania, right? They may have a threat, but they’re not likely to be able to cause any type of injury.

Would you be willing to, or else would you be willing to look at, providing a little bit more detail in the numbers to help break down the directions of interest, the threats, the number of prosecutions, either going backward in time or going forward in time so we can just better understand that environment?

Sullivan: That was one of the things that I actually asked when I first got here, and I was concerned. We were managing the work that we did in a records management system, which is not the way you manage cases. The ability for me to get detail was very limited. Very limited, very time-consuming, hand counts, Excel spreadsheets.

USCP staff: Do you mind if I was just going to add something just for context. So, try to tell a member of Congress that if they get a voicemail that says, “I wish someone would cut off your fucking head,” try to tell them that’s not a threat. But it’s not a threat.

Sullivan: It’s not a threat; that’s a direction of interest. So, the hysteria that you guys talk about, that is what they’re bringing to us because they’re getting those calls. We’re not dramatizing the numbers. We’re running down all the threat assessment cases. I think if we tried to say I’m just making a number They’re going to go, “No, it’s not. Do you know how many calls I have? Do you know how many emails I have?” They’re getting them every day. So we’re not causing the hysteria. No. The feeling of that threat is very real every day.

Schuman: Part of our job is to provide better context for them, and I think that’s -- and I don’t, I’m not to put words in your mouth, so I apologize -- but that’s part of your mission as well to help them understand how to be safe and what the threat environment looks like, and how to behave in those circumstances. And you’re releasing a number that is an alarming number. There’s nothing wrong with you releasing it. I think it is appropriate for you to do I think it’s great that you’re doing so. I think that providing these are the terms that we use: here’s a direction of interest. This is a direction of interest versus it’s, a credible threat. We define this way and this that way. We want you to know that we are tracking this well.

It sounds like there have been records challenges, and I’ve heard about that as well that the data has been difficult. Trying to go backward in time, it is not as reliable as one might necessarily want. But even just on a going forward basis, being able to help people understand a little bit better if there’s only a couple of prosecutions, that’s not necessarily a bad thing if you’re finding ways to divert the attention, if you’re finding, ways to better protect the members. I think that’s fine. Right now, all we have is the statement for each of the years for the last eight years. Would you be willing to, if you could to release it?

Sullivan: That’s one of my first assessments when I got here: this is crazy, we can’t manage 15,000 cases in an RMS system. It’s a records management system: We need a case management system to be able to do that, and we’re in the process of bringing on a modern case management system that will allow us to have better insight.

Schuman: I’ll just put a final button on that and move on: if Congress were to express support for you releasing this number, these numbers in a greater level of detail, you wouldn’t have any objections to doing so?

Sullivan: We work with Congress every day, and we follow their lead, we work to support them.

Schuman: A number of years ago, Congress directed the Capitol Police to create a FOIA-like process and to consult with civil society in developing those regulations. It was in the appropriations bill. Obviously, this is before your tenure. The department, in fact, did issue a FOIA-like policy. There are several legislative branch agencies that have done so. The GAO has a FOIA-like policy, the Library of Congress has one, and the Capitol Police has one.

But in doing so, while there was direction to have consultations with the public, those consultations didn’t occur, and the resulting policy seems to hold back categories of information beyond what would be typical for a law enforcement agency if we’re located in a city or even that applies to the executive branch. So, the information that the FBI normally would release is significantly broader than what’s currently coming out of the Capitol Police.

And by way of example, I had made a public records request for who else is filing public records requests and what were those requests, and that was denied. Those types of FOIA logs are routinely released. Is this something at all that you’ve been tracking? I know you’ve got a million other things going on. Have you been looking at these aspects of transparency? Obviously, your having a conversation with us is a significant commitment to doing so. Are you looking at the records practices as well? Is this something that you might be willing to look at?

Sullivan: Certainly, I’m going to follow the laws that Congress makes for me in this area and it’s something I’m tracking. I know that there’s been challenges and there’s ongoing challenges that are part of the legal process in this area. I rely on my team to make sure that we’re doing that. With that, I think it’s important to get information out and balance the information that the public needs to hear and the security of this campus and the members that we’re challenged with.

So, it’s that balance between the two. But to your point, I’ve sat down with everybody that’s asked and had conversations in the year that I’ve been here, and would continue to do that, making sure that we can get out what we can get out.

Schuman: And we would welcome the opportunity to have a conversation with you or with, with your colleagues about, how to further strengthen that process.

Nehls: I want to just shift: the Architect of the Capitol testified at the House Administration Committee last week. They didn’t really get into it but they’re going to produce a master plan by the end of the fall. Of course, the AOC is on the police board, they work with you on different security structures and things. I’m just curious, as they wrap that master plan up if the department feels like it has the physical infrastructure it needs, or if you feel like you’re getting behind on something.

Sullivan: I’ve only been here a year, and one thing that I’ve learned is you never give up space, and if you can get space, you better grab it and hold on to it. Space is at a premium here.

We certainly need additional space and we certainly are understaffed to complete the mission that we’re asked to do. That means I need to get people here, which many times means parking as they come to and from. It means locker space for them to be able to do this.

One of the things I was surprised at was when I heard roll call, I expected it to be what I had experienced roll call at a table like this. Everybody sits down and you have a nice conversation, pass information along and go forward. Depending on where you are, it’s a very different place, whether it’s down in the Senate roll call room or it’s on the House side or the library side. It could be in a hallway rather than a place that’s conducive to what I would call the most important 15, 20 minutes of the day: to be able to share the information that have gone across.

That being said, we understand, we’re here. They’re not here to support us, we’re here to support this entire operation. Being part of that, we’ve expressed the needs, challenges that we’ve had. I know that we’ve looked at opportunities to move that forward and we’ll continue to work with the Architect in partnership to be able to do that.

One of the other big challenges that we have is training, and the facilities at Cheltenham (Maryland) are less than ideal. We need to have significant investment to be able to get that where it needs to be.

One of the other organizations I came in, the place that we trained was abysmal. There was cardboard and duct tape on the windows. It was a terrible place to bring new employees in and say, “Hey, welcome. This is how much we value you, and we bring you to a place like that.” I’m not saying that’s where we are with Cheltenham, but it’s certainly not ideal.

And then just where we are right now with our staffing with the 9/11 folks that now can retire. This hiring is not going to stop for the foreseeable future, to grow us, and it’s going to take a number of years to get us to where we potentially need to be looking at it forecasting today.

Who knows what technology will be in place and what things that we can put in place in the future. But looking at what it needs just to staff where we are today, if we want to say, “Hey, how can we staff what we want to staff here on campus and on our protective model,” we’re hundreds short on both the protective mission and the mission here on campus.

Schuman: You have, and please correct me, it’s 2,350 authorized, and you need another 300 more?

Sullivan: I have a staffing office that’s working on a report that literally, they’re taking a look at every post that we have, which changes sometimes weekly if somebody wants another door open or there’s another security measure that requires us to fill that. We have the discussions about it, but when we’re asked to do that, it takes a toll on our folks. That means overtime, which means we’re holding people over or drafting people, which is a concern of mine when it comes to wellness of our officers.

Schuman: Part of why we ask about spacing is we know that there are challenges with the Rayburn Building. It’s going to need to be remediated almost immediately, and of course, there are some Capitol Police facilities in the sub-basement there. There are other buildings that are... Longworth is in deep trouble. One or two of the Senate buildings are also in a challenging circumstance and there are challenges inside the Capitol Building as well. And we’re not even talking about Ford and some of the other congressional buildings.

Of course, you have other facilities, that are separate from the main campus. And, we’re seeing House and Senate appropriators trying to grapple with investment in the campus has not kept up with the needs, and the buildings, some of them are in terrible shape.

And I think we’re going to see in the next five or 10 years a tremendous change in the way that we organize all of this. the Capitol Police has more than doubled in size in the last 25 years in terms of people and it’s quadrupled in terms of budget, right? You’re doing a much better job of keeping track of your equipment, which was a challenge for January 6th and before. So, I’m just trying to think about what the physical space needs and how to make sure that you guys can get to where you need to get to. Not to mention that you’re responsible for the entirety of the legislative branch with the exception of GPO, so it’s a tremendously large mission. So that’s why we’re asking about, your needs for the buildings.

Sullivan: Yeah, we have tremendous needs, and we’ll continue to have tremendous needs. There’s ways that we can mitigate that, whether it’s on campus or immediately off and the Architect’s looking at all those in the conversations that I’ve had with that office.

Nehls: What other things would you like to communicate to the congressional community, that we haven’t talked about yet?

Sullivan: We’re lucky that we have an incredibly resilient workforce, a workforce that is so positive. It’s unbelievable the interaction when I go out and talk with officers -- and this comes from somebody that … I’ve had experience across the country with law enforcement, but the positivity with which they look forward to this job is something that is refreshing.

And we have also a very young workforce. I talk about that workforce really changing over. We lost a lot of people after January 6th and we’ve been doing consistent hiring since then. We’re getting to that point that our workforce is getting younger, which means that we have to make sure that we give them the training and supervision that they need to be able to do their job and guide them so they have successful careers and complete and focus on the mission.

I’m incredibly proud to lead them. It’s a challenging mission every day. We’ve been challenged a number of times since I’ve been here and they’ve performed incredibly and will continue to do that every single day. When we fall down, we’re going to learn from it, and we’re going to move forward and be better the next day.

Schuman: Wonderful. Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it.

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We at the American Governance Institute manage the Congressional Data Coalition, a group of external stakeholders that have engaged with and documented this process—and helped set it in motion. This internal-external coordination has made this data useful to internal and external website and application developers building tools to keep Congress and the public better informed.

Thursday demonstrated how far CDTF has grown into a collaborative forum that facilitates legislative branch modernization. Most participating legislative branch support offices used their meeting slot to demo powerful platforms they’ve built for congressional users or preview coming attractions. We in civil society, working on the other side of the congressional firewall, were excited and appreciative that staff gave us a peek at their accomplishments through the demos, some of which were shared publicly for the first time.

There was one major data project unveiled at the meeting: the presentation by the Government Publishing Office has added the Legislative Branch Data Map compiled by the Congressional Data Coalition and the House Office of the CAO in an easy-to-read format on the Legislative Branch Innovation Hub for all to explore. It is a catalog of datasets across the legislative branch that stakeholders can use to build their tools and solve their problems, something that heretofore has not existed. It grew out of a project demoed at the 2025 Congressional Hackathon and seeded by our 2023 “biased yet reliable guide to sources of information and data about Congress.”

The map includes the title, description, and link to the publisher source of data produced by legislative branch offices and civil society organizations as well as their DCAT, or standardized metadata. Like other GitHub pages, people can contribute new entries through this link. This resource centralizes dozens of data sources on a single reference and should be a great help to developers supporting legislative branch modernization. Veneice Smith in the Clerk’s office, who is managing the project, worked hard (in collaboration with others) to get the project to the point where the data is published online on the Innovation Hub.

We will have a longer write-up of information shared and tools demonstrated at the meeting, but here are a few highlights, including the text amendment project, Senate modernization, House modernization projects, and tracking congressionally mandated reports.

BILL TEXT ANALYSIS

Comparative Print Suite. New tools built on top of data standardization have made it possible for Hill staff to perform sophisticated bill text analysis with greater efficiency. The House Clerk’s Office demoed the completed full version of its comparative print suite platform, which CDTF coordinator Kirsten Gullickson noted is likely the first (but not only) artificial intelligence-enabled tool developed within the House. It cleanly shows inline text how a bill would change existing law and allows users to upload bill drafts. We’ve been tracking this complex, multi-year project and congratulate all involved. (We’ve written about this tool, also known as the Posey project, previously.)

It is available to all members of the House and is also used by CRS. A pilot group of about 80 Senate staff is using the comparative print suite as well, with interest growing from offices for more access. They have been working for a while to resolve licensing and administrative issues to allow for expanded usage in the Senate. (The comparative print suite we should note is not available to the public, although we have advocated for its availability.)

Text Analysis Program. Barbara Perkins from the Congressional Research Service provided a demo of its Text Analysis Program, which finds bills with similar text that may have been introduced in previous Congresses or have been tucked inside longer legislation. This is incredibly powerful, because it allows for the tracking of legislative ideas as they propagate across the current Congress or over multiple Congresses. This is version 2 of TAP, and it is very sophisticated indeed. (We had built a prototype of this approach, called BillMap, a few years back to demonstrate that it was possible to do.) TAP 1.0 was described by CRS in 2011 as a tool to identify similarities in congressional bills covering the 103rd Congress to date. Modernization efforts kicked off around FY 2022, according to the Library.

TAP 2.0 can help support resolving a recommendation by the House Modernization Committee (no. 120) to provide information resources that can show members’ activity on issues over time. In theory, it makes it possible for a member of Congress to receive credit for legislation they introduced even if that bill passes as part of a larger bill, or in an amended form. For that to work, the output of TAP must be shown on Congress.gov, identifying various kinds of relatedness of legislation.

Identifying related legislation is a tricky concept. How do you identify bills that are identical, near identical, and similar? Do you identify similarity in text, and if so, how similar do they need to be? Do you identify bills that have similar outcomes? We were comfortable with revealing how we identified similarity and having the user decide whether we made the right connection. CRS has some wariness about this approach, and so its analysis requires a lot more intervention by human experts who make the determination.

It is our view that combining the relatedness of legislation over multiple Congresses with information about those related bills, such as committee reports, votes, GAO reports, statements of administrative policy, and the like, could provide congressional users with a wealth of information to help them analyze legislation quickly by looking at how it has been responded to previously.

TAP 2.0 contains legislation going back to the 113th Congress and offers side-by-side views. We aren’t 100% sure, but we think that it is only available inside CRS, at least for now. Correction: TAP is available in the House.

SENATE PROGRESS

Webster. Arin Shapiro of the Office of the Secretary of the Senate announced it will begin a revamp of the widely-used internal website called Webster. The technology behind the resource is becoming obsolete and the update will continue to help staff discover information useful in their work.1 An update involves several Senate stakeholders so it may be complex, but Shapiro said it should be completed in nine to 18 months. It is unclear whether it will be made available to House staff, but there is a growing effort to create greater federation of authentication between the two chambers to allow for better data and tool sharing.

The Bells. The secretary’s office also is finishing up development of a Senate version of an app that can keep users informed of open votes, quorum calls, and when the Senate is in session. For decades, this information has been displayed via lights on the clocks inside congressional office buildings and with alarms, transmitted through radio signals. It’s been a complicated technical challenge to convert this system to modern mobile devices, but the new app will work on and off the Hill via a VPN. The Senate team learned from a similar effort on the House side for its bells system. The data will be available internally through an API, but there are no plans as of yet to make it publicly available. There will be an app for internal users as well. Readers of this newsletter may remember Capitol Bells, an app developed by Ted Henderson that let the public know for whom the bells tolled, and had wide usage on the hill, too.

As we wrote about previously, the Secretary of the Senate’s office has updated the internal technology—the Amendment Tracking System—used to track senate bills and amendments as they’re considered on the Senate floor. As things stand, at times the Senate will vote on bills that have not yet been made publicly available.

Congress.gov data is far downstream from the Senate process, and unlike the House, which first publishes its legislation on docs.house.gov as uses it to measure online availability of legislation, there is no Senate equivalent. We have written letters and submitted testimony calling for legislation and amendments to be made publicly available as they are considered by the Senate. For its part, the Senate’s new technology is capable of providing public access, a testament to the robust design process for the new ATS, but leadership direction is required to provide transparency to the public.

MODERNIZATION FUND PROJECTS

CAO House Digital Service Director Ken Ward presented four projects that House appropriators recently approved to receive Modernization Initiative Account funding.

Constituent Engagement Innovation Project. This project will define a common format for information coming into member offices from constituent emails, phone calls, letters, etc. that go into offices’ constituent management systems software. The House Modernization Committee described the goal as “to provide Members with the option to select from a broad range of providers for the unique services that best meet their needs.” Starting this year, the HDS will engage in initial discovery and proof of concept work with the ultimate goal of producing a data lake so that members are not locked into a particular Constituent Management System, but can control their own data and move between platforms.

FlagTrack 2.0. Building on the successful flag tracking system, FlagTrack 2.0 will further streamline the process by allowing checks and refunds to be processed through the portal, providing an option for a flag to be sent to member offices or shipped directly to the constituent, and give constituents the ability to track their flag requests. This should take nine-18 months to complete.

Digital Signage and Wayfinding Initiative. Visiting the Capitol complex can be very confusing, and this project will improve the visitor experience in the House side of the complex. There will be nine new digital displays at entrances to the main House buildings that list member and public office locations as well as real time information about committee, floor, and public events. In addition, there will be a newly created House Visitors App that provides a 3D digital map, the ability to look up Member and public office locations, and turn-by-turn directions. You can scan a QR code and get directions. Think of it as Waze for Congress (well, the House side). The data to make all this work will be drawn from the CAO’s newish LegiDex directory, which provides up-to-date information about locations on the campus, as well as HouseCal, which keeps track of what events are occurring. This project should be complete in 18-24 months.

Service Academy Nomination Portal and Dashboard. Members of Congress annually nominate constituents to Service Academy positions, but the way member offices handle the process of collecting applications and processing recommendations varies widely. This tool will replace the spreadsheet and email-based systems used by most offices and replace it with a streamlined, online system. It will include an applicant portal, a public-facing web application for submitting applications and supporting documents and tracking application progress, and a staff dashboard, which allows staff to track and manage the applications. This is expected to be completed in nine-18 months.

Altogether, these projects should significantly improve the efficiency of office constituent services and the user experience for people interacting directly with Congress. This is a great validation of the process by which the Modernization Committee at House Administration recommends projects, appropriators provide the funds, and various stakeholders inside the House build the technology.

We are hopeful that once members can see their benefits, appropriators will restore the $10 million authorization for the Member Initiative Account so HDS can do even more. We also would be pleased to see more House-Senate and legislative branch-wide collaborations on modernizing technology, including seeing progress on implementing appropriators’ direction for the House and Senate to co-develop technology and sign a MOU to facilitate tool building. The House FY 2027 Legislative Branch Appropriations bill funds the account at $4 million for a second consecutive year.

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ONGOING PROJECTS

There are a number of ongoing projects, including the joint House-Senate effort to provide unique IDs for lobbyists, the House’s building of a committee activity portal, and updates to USLM. More information about those projects will be published on the House Modernization Reports website in July.

MATCHING MANDATED REPORTS

Daniel shared a project the American Governance Institute has started with the help of government data and tech leader Dave Zvenyach to identify missing records of congressionally mandated reports that agencies are required to submit to GPO. It draws from a list of more than 3,000 required reports drawn up by the House Clerk’s Office and attempts to match it up with the more than 1,000 records on govinfo.gov. There is not a common data standard for what the legislative branch is ingesting and executive branch agencies are providing, which made the effort challenging.

Here are the key findings. First, most congressional mandates for reports to be provided to Congress do not have matching reports in the GPO repository. Second, 395 reports in the GPO repository are not identified in the House’s list of reports due to Congress. Finally, in light of metadata limitations arising from looking at the list of reports due against the list of reports received, the next step is to look at the transmission letters to Congress and match that against the reports themselves.

This is one of four technology projects undertaken by the American Governance Institute this year with the support of Zvenyach. Expect to see presentations on identifying absent House committee video data, transforming appropriations bills and reports into data, and tracking changes in appropriations report language.

At the meeting, Daniel also shared a few observations from a recent convening in Dublin of parliamentary officials from dozens of countries on data management and modernization efforts. He wrote a longer summary of the event on the Congressional Data Coalition blog.

The next CDTF meeting is scheduled for December 3, again in the Library of Congress. The next Congress.gov public forum will be on September 24. Several other events are in the works for September as well—this is when the Hackathon is usually scheduled—so stay tuned.

In addition, if you’re a staffer and interested in earning an ethics-approved professional certificate on ‘data skills for Congress,’ go here to learn more about the virtual class.

We will share a more in-depth summary of the quarterly meeting on the Congressional Data Coalition website, where we have a repository of summaries of past meetings.

REINFORCING ARTICLE 1

The House passed a bill last week that would give a council of congressional leaders control of the selection process for the next Librarian of Congress and director of the Government Publishing Office. H.R. 6028, which the Committee on House Administration hammered out over the last year, removes presidential nomination from the process. The bill is similar to a recent law changing the selection and removal of the Architect of the Capitol.

These changes would strengthen legislative branch independence in the wake of President Trump’s firing of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and effort to remove Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter and his attempt to install then-Deputy Attorney General (and his former defense attorney) Todd Blanche as Librarian. Trump also tried to name a new Deputy Librarian and Register, but none of these individuals were allowed in the building. (Perlmutter eventually won her job back via lawsuit.) Having Administration lackeys in charge of the Congressional Research Service and other resources would have undermined members’ ability to gather reliable and independent information about public policy and undermined the independence of copyright processes.

H.R. 6028 changes the selection of the Register of Copyrights as well, allowing the majority and minority leadership of CHA, the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, and the Judiciary Committees of both chambers to recommend jointly three nominees for the president to choose from to fill the role, with the Senate approving the appointment. Rep. Morgan Griffith, the bill’s primary sponsor, noted that the Register has some executive-type functions even though it is a legislative branch office, so keeping the president in the process was warranted. (Interestingly, Griffith also wants the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative transferred to Congress.)

The addition of CHA and Senate Rules to the process was one of the substantive changes that emerged from the bill’s markup. The text agreed to by the House unanimously under suspension on Tuesday was the first we’ve seen of this version of the bill. The original bill struck a section of existing law that required the Register to consult with the Librarian when establishing new regulations. The version the House passed restores this consultative role. It also stands up a completely independent inspector general’s office in the Copyright Office. We note these changes as evidence of how the committee worked through the specifics of these reforms.

These reforms are important for preserving the separation of powers and independence of the legislative branch. They also make a set of congressional leaders responsible and therefore accountable for making successful choices for these positions, incentivizing them to take the process seriously. A similar change to the selection of Architect of the Capitol appears to be a success with the performance of Thomas Austin. CHA members were on the whole complimentary and appreciative of Austin’s efforts in his first year in the role during the committee’s recent oversight hearing with the AOC.

We note that House Appropriators included a different approach regarding appointments of the Librarian of Congress and Director of the GPO in the bill recently reported by that committee.

We remain concerned about the presidential role retained under current law for the president to nominate the next Comptroller General. Jurisdictional challenges and policy disagreements may have made addressing GAO in the CHA bill challenging, as the House Oversight Committee has jurisdiction over the legislative branch’s watchdog. We have trouble imagining the Senate would be willing to move the House’s legislation absent a GAO fix.

Speaking of GAO, it is being stonewalled regularly by the Trump Administration on requests for information from a number of federal agencies, according to NOTUS. At times, requests were denied if issued by committee ranking members, whereas in other cases GAO was denied records and data it had received routinely in the past. Sometimes, “agencies have not responded to GAO’s emailed questions or even acknowledged that an audit is taking place,” Jose Pagliery reports. GAO and its legislative branch masters may need more tools to force executive branch compliance.

It’s also worth exploring common data layers for the executive and legislative branches so some data can be delivered to the legislative branch automatically.

SNAPSHOT OF PARLIAMENT’S STAFF

The British House of Commons recently published a granular survey of the growth of full-time employees from 2014 to 2025. Unlike their American congressional cousins, House of Commons FTEs have increased over that ten years by 90% with about two-thirds of those undertaking new activities for the Parliament. The House of Commons now has about 3,400 full-time employees serving in roles akin to congressional legislative branch support offices. More than half serve both houses of Parliament on teams like a new Parliamentary Security Department and the Parliamentary Digital Service.

What do those new hires do? The report offers down-to-the-FTE detail (we would love to see something similar from Congress). The Parliamentary Digital Service added 285 staff, more than doubling in size. Dozens of new FTEs work on digital democracy implementation, the Parliament’s web and broadcast teams, digital infrastructure, and what we would call member services: digital tools for MPs’ procedural needs like remote voting and the digital hubs they use to help answer constituent questions. The security team added about 575 staff over that time.

Like the U.S. Congress, MPs are authorized to hire their own personal staff with public funds. The current allowance, however, only supports five FTEs for the 650 MPs. British elected officials, therefore, receive more direct support from parliamentary services staff in research and analysis than personal staff.

The House of Representatives and the Senate should conduct and publicly release a similar longitudinal survey of staff FTEs across the legislative branch.

ODDS AND ENDS

Tribute. We congratulate the Project on Government Oversight for 45 years of operation and raise a glass to Executive Director Danielle Brian, a giant in the field, for her 35 years with the organization.

Blocked grants training. Lawyers for Good Government, legal experts and other civil society groups will offer a free virtual training for congressional caseworkers on assisting constituents with disrupted federal grants on June 17 at 1:00PM EST. Sign up to attend here.

Unblocking threats. A change in Meta’s algorithm led to a tripling in threats to lawmakers in both parties, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Minority powers. Georgetown University Law Center’s David Rapallo has updated his recent paper on the options minority parties in the Senate have to check the executive branch through investigative powers.

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We had a wide-ranging conversation about the history of factions, how they operate, and why members of Congress, the philanthropic community, and the public should embrace energetic debate rather than the false goal of finding bipartisan, politically moderate policy solutions.

Daniel Schuman: We are here today with Soren Dayton and James Wallner with the Foundation for American Innovation. And we’re here to talk about their new paper, Rebuilding Congress from Within How Factions Facilitate Deliberation and Lawmaking. Thank you both for joining us.

James Wallner: Thanks for having us. And can I just say off the top real quick? I really wanted to name it something different. I mean, Soren was like, let’s just go with that. It’s a good name. I was thinking more like, you know, Kong versus Godzilla, you know, rise of the factions or something, spicy to get people in. But, you know, we went with Soren’s title.

Schuman: That’s fair. I mean, you could have done the facts on factions, but that would also be kind of a pedestrian approach.

Wallner: Or factions of life.

Schuman: Oh yeah. You take the good, you take the bad, that kind of thing.

Wallner: There’s so many options. Good thing we’re going to have a never ending series of factions papers after this just for the titles.

Schuman: Your paper argues that Congress is dysfunctional because the members are not organized to deliberate and legislate in the present environment. James? What do you mean by that?

Wallner: Well, I want to take a step back. I think it’s important to maintain a clear focus on agency in this, as you and I have talked about in all of our writings and conversations around town and over the years. It’s important to maintain focus on agency when we say Congress isn’t organized. I think the way to rephrase that, if I’m teaching one of my writing classes and colleges, where it’s active voice, active voice, active voice. And it is that lawmakers are not organizing themselves to facilitate their own participation in the process and to enhance their own ability to deliberate and to impact outcomes. There’s lots of different ways that Congress can organize themselves, but one way is through these things called factions congressional caucuses, intraparty caucuses -- people call them different things -- but they’re in essence, factions, sub-party kind of units. Sometimes they can be cross-party -- not so much in this day and age.

We zero in on these in particular, because if you are an opponent of the status quo – and most of the reform throughout Congress’s history has been driven by opponents of the status quo, the outliers, if you will – you’re not going to be able to rely on existing kinds of legislative organization, right? So, congressional committees and the political in the party structure in the House and Senate, because those are set up by winners of the status quo, they’re set up by the people who are the reason why the status quo is the status quo, and so they’re going to be less inclined to kind of rock the boat. They’re not very friendly to the skunks at the garden party or the ants at the picnic. Factions really become important in that scenario.

And then when you look at Congress today and the dysfunction that we see in Congress today, and the bipartisan frustration from the far left to the far right, that all seem to be echoing the same sentiment. It’s just astonishing to me that they are not using this tool to the degree that it has been used in the past and that it could be used to enhance their own stated goals.

Schuman: So would it be fair to say that Congress is organized, but it’s organized by leadership and it’s not organized by the members? Or is that too much of an overstatement?

Wallner: I wrote a piece a long time ago. There was an open letter in the Washington Post and it was by all these former members and it was like, Congress is broken, the Senate is broken. And then they went through and they’re like, it’s not leadership’s fault. Then they’re like, it’s not the committee’s fault. They’re like, it’s not the rank and file fault. I’m like, well, whose fault is it? Is it some guy from Scooby Doo? Earl down the street? You know, he pulls off his mask or some invisible ghost? No, the Senate is dysfunctional, the House is dysfunctional because the members of the House and Senate make it dysfunctional. They make it dysfunctional when they defer to their leaders, when they empower their leaders to run things certain ways. They make it dysfunctional when they continue to acquiesce in that environment. Look, I’m not pretending like there’s not a cost to this, a social cost or political cost, etc.. Of course there is. But I think it’s important to keep really focused on the main point, which is that the members themselves are the ones who are in charge, and they’re the ones who are responsible for the House and the Senate operating the way the House and Senate operate.

And they have many, many tools at their disposal to change things. If they don’t like how they are operating or try to change things, they are not victims. They talk about themselves in the third person all the time. If you think about how Congress talks like the bill was passed, I’m like, no, you passed it or your colleagues passed it over your objections. The bill wasn’t passed when we just woke up. Oh my God, did you see that the bill was passed? No, you did this. And so I think it’s important to keep that focus, laser focus on that.

This paper, I think, gets into one of those key tools that I think is a kind of a foundational tool. And Soren, I know, shares this thought that allows them to facilitate their own organization, their own cooperation, and then use other tools at their disposal much more effectively.

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Schuman: Perfect. So let me pick up on that and turn to Soren. You guys are talking about factions. Are there examples of factions in Congress now? What do they look like? What and what do you mean by faction?

Soren Dayton: So I think in the House there’s two things. There’s two caucuses that look something like what we have thought of historically as a faction. They are the Freedom Caucus and the Progressive Caucus. The Republican study committee is almost just an information machine. They’re not actually a coordination machine.

To go back to the Progressive Caucus and the Freedom Caucus, they both have things like rules about how they should vote together. They have membership requirements. They have regular meetings where it is expected of the members that they will coordinate on activities. And, I think it’s very helpful to read the books of someone like Ruth Bloch Rubin, who goes into a key element of successful factions is that internal rule making process, that internal coordination process that binds people, that requires them to act in certain ways. There are other things, like I think the New Dems and the Republican Study Committee are these huge monstrosities that are essentially a branding vehicle in some cases, or the Republican Study Committee, if you’re a Republican member or a Republican staffer, you want to be in the study committee because it is the only source of information other than leadership.

And this is history James knows better than me: the Freedom Caucus got frustrated with the status quo the RSC had been and broke off to be not just the right wing in a sort of substantive policy version, but also more adversarial to leadership and more revolutionary on process. And in some ways, the Progressive Caucus I think is less adversarial with leadership than the Freedom Caucus through a variety of ways, partially. It’s hard to do when it’s that big, and so many of its members are committee chairs and things like that. But at times you’ve seen the Squad be a little Freedom Caucus-like in its sort of adversarialness to leadership, but it’s not organized.

I think you have a slightly different set of entities in the caucus in the Democratic Party: the Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus and the APIA -- I’m probably getting the letters wrong -- caucus. There’s affiliated C3s and C4s. There’s staff pipelines, but those are actually really concrete problems they have. But so going back to the Progressive Caucus and the Freedom Caucus for a second, there is a sense of shared subjectivity that I don’t see in the bigger ones, right. These are people that have a certain ideological location within the party, and they have a theory of the need to change the party in a certain way. And I think most of the other things that are factions or that purport to be factions are just sort of people. They’re in a space not with the theory of change about how the parties should change in their direction, or they should leverage their power within the parties, even though they sometimes do leverage their power.

Schuman: Can I push you on that just a touch?

Dayton: Yeah, absolutely. That’s what we’re here for.

Schuman: looking at the affinity caucuses, like the CBC: the CBC, from where I sit, except on a handful of issues, does not necessarily have a policy agenda that it shares, but it does have a procedural agenda that the members share about how the committees are going to function. It’s going to be more based on seniority. I think it also on the Senate side with the Republican steering committee you know.

Wallner: Just the Senate steering committee, it’s not Republican Study Committee.

Schuman: Thank you for correcting me. I knew you were going to do that as the former Grand Puba.

Wallner: I mean, I guess, but I left before we could change the title. It was just executive director. Harry Reid would get very upset about it. [Sen. Robert[ Byrd gave a famous speech on the floor about how there’s no Senate steering committee. That’s a problem. We’re like, we’re not Republican.

Schuman: Yeah. You’re just the Senate steering committee just composed of Republicans, which isn’t the same.

Wallner: There were Democrats when we first got started, but that’s another story.

Schuman: Yeah. Well, I want to come back to that story. But on this, it seems like there can be procedural factions or organizations in the House like you organize by state: the California caucus or the Texas caucus is very powerful, and they achieve goods to bring home and to organize and to elevate their own people into power that they wouldn’t necessarily have. Would those be to your way of thinking a faction as well?

Dayton: Well, one I’m not too worried about, the definitions, and in Congress, people don’t call those factions. They just call them the delegation. Right? I mean, they have their own label for that. It does have many of those elements. When I worked on the Hill, my boss was a Michigan Republican, and the Michigan Republicans had a delegation meeting once a week. And every once in a while there was a bipartisan delegation meeting, but they often voted together. They often had shared interests that sometimes, interests in the state, either political, agricultural, industrial, popped up. You can get manifestations of that with the Dingell family that was tied into Ford or GM, I forget which one Debbie Dingell was a lobbyist for before she became a member. You certainly have examples of alignment of interests that aren’t by party narrowly, or that aren’t purely by ideology. I think in Congress, that is the dirty little secret, right? Anyone who works on a low salience issue sees that all the time.

But the important part about factions is often are you willing to leverage your power sort in a higher salience fight? And, that’s probably where I put that distinction. But I also wouldn’t worry about the distinction too much, because there’s a reason that Congress uses the language delegation to talk about it. And there’s all sorts of entities like political parties that sort of capture and support that.

Schuman: So, James, people have a tendency when they talk about Congress to talk about the House. But the Senate, as it turns out, is also a thing that matters at times. Does the Senate, and if you read like Ruth [Bloch Rubin’s] book in some of the other books, like they talk about gangs, but there’s also more like you were the executive director of a more organized, a more organized faction within that chamber. How is it different on the Senate side? How do factions work there?

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Wallner: First, let me just say, I did start my career in the House, working for a Southeast Alabama congressman. I helped write the peanut title in 2008, farm bill. I am the founding executive director of the Congressional Peanut Caucus. And when I left, I don’t know if anybody...I think I’m still the executive director of the congressional caucus. I mean, I’ve never you know, we never really talked about it...

But, there’s different reasons to have some kind of organized or semi-organized factions. What I like to say is everything that’s in the Senate is in the House and vice versa, they just manifest themselves differently, right? Members are going to have different access to the floor in the House and Senate. That’s why factions in the House, historically, have focused on information, right? Going back to the DSG, the Democratic Study Group, RC was modeled on that as well. Even in its founding, RC was much more of a kind of information policy pipeline kind of development organization. Freedom Caucus when it was created -- I was very much there at the time -- was created to be much more operational and focused than to have one goal and one goal only, and that was to vote against rules as leverage and of facilitate the ability of members and the party to withstand the pressure and to vote against rules and then bring that pressure to bear. And you’ve seen them do that time and time again. We wrote a piece on the Kevin McCarthy speakership thing where people are like, the sky is falling. And we’re like, it’s fine. You saw that it was a very successful use of leverage by a kind of a subset of the Freedom Caucus banding together until they got what they wanted.

But yeah, the Senate is a little different because the members in the Senate are going to be much more autonomous. They have much more access to the floor.

The Steering Committee was founded by Paul Weyrich around the same time that one year after Ed Feulner founded the RSC with his members in the House. From the very beginning, it took on a much different flair. It’s much more kind of like the Freedom Caucus today, although they have written rules. We don’t have written rules: I got all the files in my closet, I guess they call me and they’re like, what’s the rule for this? I’m like, let me go check the files. It started off just like this weekly meeting, and then everybody started coming to the meeting. Then all the Republican senators are coming to the meeting, and the conservatives are like, well, we gotta get an executive committee now. Then everybody thought they were in the steering committee. And then it turns out, no, they’re not. They’re just coming to our lunch. We got a new thing called the executive committee. It was always much more operational and staff had a much different function, steering staff or monitoring hotlines. We were inserting ourselves in negotiation with committees and party leaders. It’s mainly staff driven: the executive director is kind of like the face of it, but staff are really working with outside groups. They’re working with key interested members on the committee on different things they care about. And as I told my staffers all the time, look, you got to be three, four, five steps out in front of your members. Just make sure if they go left, you’re not going right because that’s going to be problematic. It’s a lot more negotiation based, a lot more kind of operational and tactical and not so much policy development, although there’s certainly parts of that.

Chris Nehls: I want to build on what you’re both talking about and go back to. Soren’s identification of the Freedom Caucus and the Progressive Caucuses like the two that seem most actually factionally faction. One of the things I think is great about your paper is you’re trying to change the way people are looking at the activity in Congress and understand what they’re seeing and what they should be seeing. There’s this conventional wisdom that Congress is dysfunctional because of polarization, and what we really need are moderate members to come together and negotiate and come up with kind of practical solutions and things like that. People have funded that activity very thoroughly. And you’re saying that’s not what we’re talking about at all. Actually, you need to understand the way Congress should be working differently, and faction is one part of that. Could you guys kind of riff on where you think that conventional wisdom came from and why it’s wrong?

Wallner: Let me just give the kind of high level answer and I’ll turn to Soren. I think the conventional wisdom is just wrong. But I think the reason why I think people have lost sight of factions, lost sight of all of these tools that members look -- I mean, the Congress in the 60’s and 70’s, when it was actually relying on subs like the the conservative Southerners who were trying to stop civil rights, you got other civil groups that are supportive of civil rights that are working together, some formal, some not so formal, working with outside groups advancing inside outside games. The 60’s and 70’s was Congress’s most productive legislative period in its history, hands down, and this country was on fire. People across the board are pissed off. There’s violence in the streets. The CIA is killing God knows who, who knows where, all kinds of terrible stuff is happening, and we are picking up the most controversial issues you can imagine, and we’re legislating on them. They picked up the Civil Rights Act of ‘64 in the Senate in March of a presidential election year. [Mike] Mansfield, the majority leader at the time, is convinced it’s going to destroy his party, and he does it anyway. I mean, it’s amazing today we’re like, we can’t do that. We’re gonna have an election in three years, you know? And it’s like nonsense.

But I think that is indicative of a different view of conflict. Today, we have this sense that conflict, that the messy realities of legislating, of disagreeing are a bad thing. And when you see it as a bad thing, you then try to insulate Congress from it and you try to get new people into Congress that aren’t going to facilitate it. You get this emphasis on the moderates and everything.

Moderates in the past, moderates have driven change, too. Think about the 20s and the institutional reforms, particularly in the House, they were driven by moderates in the center, like the progressive Republicans, but they were moderates working with Democrats, trying to force a more decentralization of the process and empower their rank and file.

But I don’t like the idea of moderates and extremes. I think it comes down to do you support the status quo or do you not? And if you don’t support the status quo, are you willing to use the tools at your disposal to change it? My problem with the emphasis on moderates these days is that one, it centers on people who aren’t necessarily so upset with the status quo. Then number two, it centers on people who don’t have the temperament to think like a John McCain. I don’t think he’s an outlier conservative, knuckle dragging conservative or something. I think he is a maverick and he would do things.

And that’s a personality trait that I think that we -- or a Howard Metzenbaum, for instance -- I think that the kind of moderates that we, the kind of philanthropic community, the media, the party establishment center around typically lack that personality trait and they’re not it’s not fun upsetting the apple cart, but I think it does come down to this idea that conflict itself is bad. But last time I checked, the way you get compromise is that you first disagree. And it is literally impossible, impossible to compromise if you do not have disagreement first, right? If you can agree without disagreeing, that’s a consensus. If it’s a consensus, we don’t need Congress, right? We do not need to deal with that. The whole point of Congress is that it is where we go to negotiate the non-negotiable. But our I think our commentary in the academy, in the media, certainly among kind of the reform community and, the members themselves seem to have forgotten that that is the whole point of Congress and that sometimes people are going to disagree with you and you need to roll up your sleeves, get out of bed, put your feet on the ground, look yourself in the mirror and be like, I’m gonna go to work today and I’m gonna try to win.

Dayton: So I have a related, but I think somewhat different take. There are certainly plenty of times in recent years where moderates have leveraged their power to accomplish various things. I would point to the modernization committee itself, where the Problem Solver Dems held out on the speaker’s vote to get some concessions. I think some pretty weak concessions. That said, some important ones you had in a variety of fights, and we include some of these in the paper. You had Gottheimer and similar moderate Dems holding out on a set of issues.

But I think one key part of the difference that people in different ideological locations have is how they’re negotiating for power within the party. And for the most part, there is an alignment between the leadership and the moderates, not on ideology, but on sort of electability, right. They’re all interested in getting the majority, whether they use it for things or not. And, and so there is a pretty clear straight line of consensus there. And, and you see this in critiques from, I won’t say the extremes, but from the edges, maybe, in both parties. You know that said, you could imagine and you’ve seen in the past factions out of the moderates.

I think historically, the Blue Dogs, there’s not enough of them to matter that much, certainly not in the minority. But you know, there have been actions by moderate Dems in the last couple of years. That’s a distinct public identity and it’s important for them to organize as such and leverage that identity as such. There’s also this inside-outside game where, for most people in both parties in the House, they’re essentially running as the generic “R” “D.” So the question becomes for people that are organizing in factions, are they not generic because of ideological or cultural positioning? Think Blue Dogs. Are they not generic because of a status quo critique? Or are they essentially running, alongside the party, and in which case, at least on brand and image, they’re aligned.

Now, I do think there’s some interesting cases that you run into that there’s very little publicly written on. Both parties in the House have steering committees and how the steering committee seats are allocated is a really important set of questions. And in some ways, for example, the moderate factions in the Republican Party have owned that process really certainly for the last probably 40, 50 years. That’s only really stopped with Johnson, and nobody’s really figured out what’s going on there yet. I mean, a little bit, like McCarthy traded away some seats. But I think that is one of the most interesting things that’s happening right now. What will happen to House Republican moderates if they aren’t winning the fights in the steering committee and if they aren’t getting the steering committee spots? And how does that change their incentives to organize?

You also have a similar sort of question for the New Dems. As Daniel noted, really the power of the Black Caucus is seniority and committee chairs, and the Progressive Caucus has some of that too. And so there is potentially an incentive for the New Dems not on substantive policy, because they’re mostly getting that from the party, but on distribution of power within the caucus where you could see some hardball. And that’s where I look for right now as places where interesting activity could emerge from.

Schuman: So what you’re describing from a certain perspective, not my perspective, I should say, but it sounds like chaos and anarchy, right? This sounds like James, a deep cut sounds like parliamentary war, right? It sounds like just everybody, trying to organize around their own stuff.

Nehls: The Dems are in disarray.

Schuman: Or the inverse statement which drives me up the wall: our unity is our strength, which makes me want to take my head and hit against the wall several times. How do robust factions actually help Congress to organize the disagreements that they have and to facilitate decision making? I mean, not that what we’ve had over the last 5 or 10 years has been a model of the greatest deliberative process that one could imagine, but how would having more and stronger factions make it possible for Congress to do more?

Wallner: I think it just comes down to a realization of how the process works. It’s easier to see in the Senate, but it’s the same in the House. In the Senate, my job at the steering committee was to stop things my members didn’t like. That’s what you do. And so I’d hire people and I’d be like, you got to go stop that bill. And they’re like, how do I stop a bill? I’m like, what do you mean? You just try to win the day. You just freeze action. You figure out a way to freeze the process just as long as you can, and then, you do it again and you do it again. Maybe stuff builds up. Things begin to collapse under its own weight, and then the bill dies. That’s how you stop a bill when the bill goes.

I remember Allen Freeman, the former parliamentarian, was telling me about for this book the rules of the Senate, the rules of the House, there’s a logic to them. There’s a logic to the process, no matter how absurd it may seem on the outside, and that logic facilitates participation, it orders it and it structures it and it produces outcomes. It always, 9.9 times out of ten is going to lead to an outcome. The kicker is you can’t know what that outcome is in advance. You can’t define it. You can’t know with any certainty. You can’t protect what you would like to pass.

Today we have this idea that this is the bill we want to do. And then like the floor now is this really dangerous place. What the leadership does is that they literally freeze the process right when they start the process, which is like doing my job for me. And so I think on a broader level, it makes it really hard to advance bills that people have a lot of disagreements about on the most salient issues for the American people, because it then goes behind closed doors. And when you’re behind closed doors, it is harder to call people’s bluffs. It is harder to set up the debate in such a way, to put people in positions where they feel compelled to go along with what you want, even though they don’t agree with it. It’s harder to bring the outside into play. The system itself becomes much less dynamic, and it becomes harder to get an agreement that everybody can come together on. And then there’s no fight, you don’t see the fight. Losers in the debate aren’t reconciled to the outcome. People on the outside of Congress, the activists and the American people, they’re like, what? Schumer comes out, he’s like, this is the best we could do, and they’re like, well, I don’t trust you. That’s the best you could do? Y’all don’t even try. Maybe they did. Who knows? It was all behind closed doors.

What factions do is that they empower lawmakers to open up that process. And it’s not chaos and it’s not anarchy. It’s just that you can’t control it. If you’re a leader today, that looks like chaos and that looks like anarchy. In reality, the grand scheme of things, Congress is a very permeable institution, and it is going to follow what the people want it to do. It is. And if there is a big debate, a big fight that goes on for a little while, guess what happens? People are going to start paying more attention. More people are going to get involved, more activist organizations.

That’s the [story of the] Civil Rights Act. What tipped the balance there was what Martin Luther King was doing across the South with civil disobedience and others, John Lewis and others, and all of a sudden it’s on the news in the Midwest. Then you have the Civil Rights Act now on the floor and it’s frozen out everything else and you have Midwesterners who are like, we’re kind of with you on this, but we don’t really care, we just want to do this other stuff. Then you have the religious communities, the Lutherans in particular, some of the great unsung heroes of the civil rights movement, like really mobilizing people in the Midwest and getting them to demand that their members get in there with the Northern Democrats. And that’s what ultimately tipped the balance. You would not have had that if there was not a sustained effort on the floor to pass civil rights, coupled with a sustained effort using the same principles out in the streets with civil disobedience.

If the whole point of the House is like, we’re going to figure out what we can pass the majority and we’re going to put something on the floor and we’re going to vote on it. Well, sometimes you can’t do that in a room, right? Sometimes, you need to do it out in public.

And what I think the factions do there is that I could see a scenario where the House, if you’re the speaker and there’s a big thing coming up, what you want to do is get buy-in on the front end, not the back end. So you call together, you know, your Freedom Caucus or SC. Maybe you get the moderate, the Wednesday group or whatever they call themselves now, and you get the factions in the room and you say, this is what we’re thinking, and you kind of try to get them in the process and you say, what do you guys think? And then you bargain with them, and then you try to figure that out so that in the back end, you’re not going to get the whole thing blown up and surprised.

I think, ironically, by decentralizing the process more, by empowering members to participate more and to facilitate more conflict, you are going to get more outcomes, more compromises. And those compromises are going to be sturdier, and they’re going to be viewed as more legitimate. And then it’s not going to then result in this kind of thing that we have today. When Congress doesn’t do anything, kicks it to the executive branch or the judiciary, or they do stuff, but it’s like they wait until the last minute and they try to jam you, and it just leaves everybody feeling worse.

Dayton: I can tell a fun story: James mentioned civil rights and the Wednesday group or whatever their name is. The actual history of the Wednesday group is amazing. It was the Republicans that voted to expand the Rules Committee in 1961, when Democrats in the House wanted to expand the Rules Committee to get civil rights and other legislation through under JFK. And Halleck, the Republican whip, wanted that expansion to fail just so the other team failed because that’s in fact, what your job is, mostly in the minority. And these were the people who wanted to pass it to get civil rights legislation. And they were ostracized in the party and got and just they started doing what you do in Congress: they started drinking together on Wednesday nights, and that’s how they became the Wednesday group. And they organized themselves later. That experience in 1961, they became the Wednesday group because they had lunches on Wednesdays. Then you had the conference lunch on Wednesdays, so they had to become the Tuesday group. The Tuesday Lunch Bunch was the name, right, because they organized on Tuesday.

Wallner: but they never got anything done.

Dayton: Yeah.

Wallner: Monday through Friday was just…They never even saw them. They’re just tanked, schnockered all the time.

Soren Dayton: Well, many of them are already schnockered across the ideological spectrum in both parties, but that’s a somewhat separate question. But the idea of these people working together and shaping the institution and changing the rules of the institution is a perfect example of how people can have power. But it’s also that time when our politics was much less presidentialized.

I think one of the hard questions and part of what we were trying to do in this paper, and also the connection to philanthropy and outside groups is that you can’t solve these problems in today’s world without solving external brand issues, right? This is why the Blue Dogs have such a clear identity. You know, the Black Caucus doesn’t need an identity. mean, it’s sort of baked in, shall we say, same same for the Latino caucus. The Freedom Caucus certainly has an identity. The Progressive Caucus has an identity and works with parts of the ideological ecosystems. But if that recognition that it’s an inside outside play in a time of a presidentialized media ecosystem is a key part of the story here as our parties have hollowed out and we just communicate by email and, and TV ads.

Nehls: So is it going to be on the outside groups to cultivate faction then? Or can we incentivize or encourage members to start to map on to that 60s and 70s experience into their own, their own negative experiences now of just being basically cattle and getting them to do something different.

Wallner: I think there’s a couple of things. The ethics environment’s a little different today than it was when the RNC and the steering committee were founded. I think Heritage [Foundation] was paying Weyrich. I think there’s a kind of a scholarly component, an academic component of trying to educate people on the historical parallels, what is possible and that’s how members typically relate to things and ideas: how has this ever worked in the past? I think that’s important. And, various organizations, nonprofits, philanthropy can help to fund those efforts.

I think there’s a space for philanthropy in particular, and people don’t appreciate this, but it’s so critical. The role of space. Space is so important, because space is where people gather together to talk and deliberate and negotiate and bargain with one another. And right now, all of the spaces inside Congress are pretty much dominated by the party leadership. And you may have some of these factions that meet, but even then, if you got a big faction, you have to find a place to get everybody together in the room. In the Senate, we’ve got big personal offices. The steering committee had like 16 people when I was there. When I started, it was like eight, so you could fit everybody in the room. We would have a weekly lunch of just the LDs for the steering committee members over at the Heritage Foundation where we met and talked. It was the meeting before the meeting every week.

It wasn’t necessarily a faction thing, but I started an LD lunch in the Senate with AEI and they would bring in [experts] and they would educate people. They would have a speaker that would come and talk, but then they would leave at the end and we had this room. I created this environment where the LDS all got together just like the members doing the steering lunch and could talk to one another and yell at one another and tell each other what they thought and say, this is what my boss is thinking. And it was the leadership was not in control. I was in control of the meeting, and I made sure no one was in control of the meeting. And I’ve heard from people across the spectrum in our conference how valuable that was. And so I think philanthropy can, with existing rules, provide spaces for the members, provide spaces for their staff to help facilitate their own internal conversations and negotiations instead of having to rely on the leadership controlled spaces in essence.

Dayton: It’s not an accident that FAI’s new office is two blocks from the Senate, and it’s very nice. Across the street is Searchlight, right, which is Adam Jentleson’s organization. It is a place where it’s still hard to get members to come off, but we’re about as far away as Heritage was.

One of the one of the things that I think is unfortunate about the political science discipline -- and I mean, there are many things that are unfortunate about the political science discipline -- is I actually don’t think the sort of mechanics of that history with Heritage are well understood. And I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it, but the Heritage Steering Committee and our SC role started in the 70’s, as James said. I think some of it’s over at CPI now to some extent with the Freedom Caucus, they’re probably still connected to our SC, but I think that’s a really important model. And similarly, in a although through a very different mechanism, the Black Caucus and the Hispanic Caucus and the P caucus and the Democratic side have these outside groups that provide paid internships because, internships aren’t paid on the Hill and provide talent pipelines for staff because in many cases, those are the big challenges that those caucuses have.

I do think along these lines, an interesting test case may be the attempt to rebuild the Blue Dogs, because you have now a self-conscious C4, Blue Dog Action, and you have potential allies in something like Searchlight and a lot of things. If Searchlight’s the [John] Fetterman thing, there’s a lot of cultural connectivity there. I could see something emerging there. You have the components, you have some funders, you have you have members, but not too many because too many members, you have to feed too many children. And, and you have a distinct ideological location that’s being sold to voters as such. So that’s one of the places where I think something could emerge that’s new and interesting.

Schuman: One thing that would be fascinating to do, I haven’t seen anyone do it well, is just mapping the geography around Capitol Hill about who owns what buildings – not just the holding companies, but who is actually operating in there is really because I’ve walked around a bit and I’ve looked at it, and it’s fascinating to see the trade associations and the advocacy groups.

What I wanted to ask is, if factions are so useful, how can they become weak compared to what they were previously? What happened? Do we know?

James Wallner: I think it’s a change in how people think about politics, when you think that the way you win policy is you win elections, right? We have this idea now that politics has shifted and it’s now like a factory, like Congress becomes a factory. The number one thing you have to do if you want to control the factory is you have to control the means of production, right? Let’s put all our, Marxist hats on, you got to control the means of production. How do you do that? Well, you win elections. That’s how you get gavels. That’s how you get votes. That’s how you get majorities. And then you have to keep winning elections.

We have this idea that the way you win elections is by unified parties. And then we have this further idea that you can’t divide your party, which is why all this messy legislating has now been migrating away from public spaces and the parties try to present a unified view. So, Chris, to your point about polarization, we talk about our politics like it’s polarized, right? But in many respects, it’s just reflecting this like kabuki dance. The parties, as you see, are just an utter disarray internally. But yet they don’t like to present that. Ultimately, we in that environment, if you are trying to do something and it’s going to expose rifts and divisions in the party, which by definition, anything meaningful that you do is going to do that, If you’re trying to change the status quo, then you’re going to be ostracized. You’re going to be marginalized and you’re going to be made an example of, and it’s going to be very unpleasant, and you’re going to be told you’re the reason why everything bad is happening. The republic’s falling in the ocean, right? It’s not really about you, it’s about everybody else so they don’t get the same idea.

Over time, that has translated into this view of conflict being bad. We just need to win the next election. We got to keep our moderates. We got to do this. We got to do that. Can’t push too hard, you know, and it’s not the way we do politics. It’s not the way we’ve ever done successful politics in this country. Any big meaningful stuff from the left to the right doesn’t matter. That’s not how we do it.

But in this environment, it is very hard for members because at first they have to establish that it is legitimate to have a faction in the first place, and then to go to war to fight your own party and then everybody says, well, we were with you. I’d love to do that. Of course, of course I’m with you. But if we do it, we’re not going to be able to do it ever. So we shouldn’t try to do it if you want to do it right. And they never talk about the actual thing you’re trying to do. And it’s always about, well, you’re just undermining control.

I think that right now, instead of just saying it’s already hard enough to organize, it’s hard enough to band together, it’s hard enough to navigate the space, it’s hard enough to find people who know how to do it from staff to members, it’s hard enough to go to war with your own party, much less your own president sometimes. But to add on top of that, you have to legitimize the very basic fact of your acting as an okay thing to do, is it makes it almost impossible for anybody. And I think right now that’s where we are. The idea now is that it is not legitimate for individual members to go out and act on their own, to try to do things, that is not an okay thing to do. We had this civil war in both parties in the Senate from 2008 to 2014 or so, 2015. And the side that said we should individuals acting as an okay thing to do lost. We lost that on both sides of the aisle, that’s what we’re grappling with. Members have to both defend what they want to do, but also they have to defend the very tool they’re trying to use to do. It is not being something that’s disruptive and is going to undermine the whole enterprise.

Dayton: The other thing is it’s got to be worth something to organize and there are two issues here. Again, I go back to sort of presidentialized, national branded politics where members have to make a decision how and when they’re going to differentiate from the party brand. One important strategy is what I call squeal and cave: complain, complain, complain so that you get press, you get press in the district and then, cave to the party, give party leadership what they want or the party interest groups what they want so they can’t actually campaign against you on like substantive things. I refer you to the literature on what happens in times when elections are closely or when majorities are closely contested. All the incentives for the reasons James mentioned are to just line up and provide support for winning.

I still think there’s factional activity on low salience things, but not on high salience things because they don’t have those sorts of branding opportunities. That’s why you see things like the talent pipelines in the tri caucus, and that’s why you see on regional issues, things work a little differently. Finally, and this goes back to the moderate discussion, I’ve heard from moderates in both parties that one of the challenges they face is finding good campaign staff that actually knows how to campaign on moderate issues. I won’t share the name in a broadcast format, but one high profile moderate chief of staff told me once that they had an education issue that they were working on and their campaign manager in the district didn’t know how to run a campaign on a moderate education issue. He only knew how to run sort of red meat issues. And so they basically

Wallner: Gonna reveal all names on the Patreon page. Be sure to subscribe. $100 fee to know what the guy is talking about. We’re going to name his name. Names will be named on Patreon.

Dayton: I think sort of really thinking deeply about the political challenges these people have like talent pipeline challenges and positioning challenges are important. Finally, it’s only worth doing if you’re going to make policy. Is it worth a fight with your party if there’s not real wins, if there’s not a real branding win, if you’re not actually changing activity. That’s the history of these things at their best. The blue Dogs had those. I used the governance group, the civil rights people were fighting over real substantive policy and cultural identity. These are the fights that matter. But you’re not just going to stand up and fight over nothing, and I think a lot of discourse has been fighting over nothing.

Wallner: I tried to convince a steering chair once to pick a fight with McConnell, because I wanted the Daniel Webster statue outside his office. Let’s just pick a fight and then in the end, be like, we’re going to cave. But I need that statue.

Nehls: But rejoinder we hear is leadership is just going to shut you down.

Wallner: Leadership can’t shut you down unless you give them the power to do so. They can make your life difficult. They can make it unpleasant, of course. Any effort to change how Congress operates in the current environment is going to take away power from leadership, so of course they’re going to resist anything that would do that. It makes complete sense. But leadership, especially in the Senate, but also in the House leadership does not have the power to stop you. They can try to do various things and you can push back. I mean, look at Mark Meadows. It took his gavel, they took him off these subcommittees. And what did he do? He ended up getting Boehner fired. Boehner resigned, he said, okay, fine, he followed his motion to vacate the chair. And people are like, I can’t believe he did that. And I’m like, well, then don’t take away his committee, Boehner. Right. Like we’re like, oh my God, what are you doing? And it’s like, he’s just using a tool he has at his disposal.

I mean, a lot of that angst and energy at the time also went into the Freedom Caucus and Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, the founding members, because they were frustrated with the RNC and its inability for it to kind of coordinate action with the members. But yeah, leadership is great. I mean, but they’re not like Zeus. They don’t have bolts. They’re not sitting up in the sky throwing things down, smiting us mere mortals. They work for the rank and file. Full stop.

Schuman: And I’m going to take that point and aim it at Soren, which some of the paper argues that this is actually good for leadership.

Dayton: Certainly there are certainly cases. This is Ruth Rubin’s second book, [Divided Parties, Strong Leaders]. I’ve heard a delicious story that I have instincts on how I’d check, but the history of the Mainstreet Republicans, which is sort of the second moderate Republican faction, as it were. I joke it’s the moderate Republicans in red in red seats when the Freedom Caucus was created. Leadership was like, that means when the table has Freedom Caucus, RSC and one moderate, we need to make another moderate group. And that this is the actual story of where it came from, because they needed to be able to balance a room of human beings.

I also think it doesn’t matter, to James’s point. You have power and you can fight and get what you want. Here’s where I go back to the modernization committee, here’s where I go back to many of the things that Gottheimer has done over the years. People get annoyed, people hate it. He gets good press and actually sometimes even gets policy wins and that’s like, you can fight. You can fight in the center. You can fight at the edges. There are plenty of proof points. And the question is, do you have the disposition to do it? Especially for the people in the center, they have a play that’s tucked tail behind leadership. I keep giving Republican examples because that’s what I know, but the only time you ever saw letters from the moderate Republicans was explicitly in defense of leadership, because they know they can go to leadership in private. They don’t have to do it in public.

Wallner: Factions also offer a pressure release valve, especially in the House. If you have a structure, an institutional structure that is more or less formal that facilitates participation of disgruntled members in the process, gives them a voice. And then it’s a sore point about the table and they’re interacting with leadership all the time, and that voice is then percolating up and it can change things here and there in various things. It doesn’t put the leaders and these kinds of disgruntled members in an adversarial position throughout the process. It actually, by creating that structure, helps to release pressure, helps to generate buy-in, even if they don’t prevail in the end. It’s not as bad versus if you’re just sitting there getting kicked over and over and over again and you’re ignored, then you know what’s going to happen: You’re going to blow up the party, you’re going to leave the party, you’re going to do the kinds of things that, like the progressive Republicans were doing in the 20s and that’s not good.

Then you have the Freedom Caucus. They try to be, so far as I can tell, a team player. They use their leverage to push their team here and there, but they’re not bolting. They’re not trying to completely undermine their party because they see their party is their source of power. What they’re trying to do is use the various leverage points they have at their disposal, both in public and in private, to influence negotiations inside the party. And so I don’t think factions are adversarial, but when you’re a leader and everybody expects that you’re the ones who figure out what’s going to happen, you can control what’s going to happen, and then if things don’t happen that way, it’s on you and it’s your fault, which is absurd, right? But if that’s what you kind of embrace and imbibe that worldview, then you’re going to be terrified of anything that doesn’t make that easier.

Schuman: This is a good chance to get to the final section of your paper. Leaders are getting blamed for not making the trains run on time. I know if I were writing this paper for you, James, you would mark it up because who’s blaming the leaders for not making the trains to run on time? It’s the people who donate to the party, but it’s also the editorial boards and the journalists who report on it.

One thing that we were talking about was having space to meet. I’m sure that the FAI building was provided at no cost to the organization as a general rule. If you want space, you need money, right. And if you want lunches, there’s money. But when you talk to a lot of funders and some former funders who are commentators in this space, they are very much drawn to either non-partisan approaches. We’re we’re above the fray, We’re not we’re not Democrats or Republicans, or bipartisan approaches where you got to get a lefty and you got to get a righty and you got to bring them together. But what you’re describing as a factual approach is not bipartisanship. Not really. It’s not non-partisanship. It seems like it’s like multipartisanship or something. What can funders do and why should they embrace a different way of thinking about supporting organizations that are playing in the space? Why is this worth their time? Why should they be different?

Wallner: First off, just look at what’s happened. Has the considerable investment in this space produced any meaningful change? I would argue the modernization committee aside, this stuff here and there aside, no it hasn’t. Doesn’t mean it’s all been wasted. Doesn’t mean there’s good stuff that’s happened, of course, but it hasn’t produced meaningful change. And the reason why it’s not focused on the stuff that produces change, if we just make it as simple as we possibly can -- which is what I always try to do, I try to dumb it down so much where it’s like, I feel like I might be dumb at this point -- But if you are concerned about Congress not functioning, not legislating, not deliberating, if that is what you are concerned about, it seems to me that the what you need to do is to get members legislating and deliberating and arguing. You don’t need to get the right members arguing about the right things and being reasonable and all this other stuff. No, you just literally want to poke people until they start acting and one person does something and another person’s going to try to stop them. And then, next thing they’re going to be legislating, And so I think we need to have a much more focused approach on not trying to control what the outcomes are. And I think a lot of the space, a lot of the philanthropy in this space, a lot of the work in the reform community in this space is all focused on outcomes.

We need to get the appropriations process working better. How about we just get members trying to appropriate? If they do that, they’re going to do it, it’s going to happen, and then stuff’s going to happen in the end. How about we empower members, whoever they may be, to know what the rules are, to know what their tools are so that they can use them and get out there and try to achieve their goals. We’re not going to empower the people we agree with, and I think it’s this idea of funding efforts, funding organizations, funding spaces and working with people on the Hill through ethics compliant means, of course, but doing it all in a way that is its nonpartisan approach, because you’re doing it by definition for everybody. I’m a conservative Republican, but throughout my entire career, on and off the Hill and certainly off, I help everybody who comes to me, every member, every staffer, I will tell you every single thing that you can do to achieve your goals and then the cost and trade offs that might come along the way. Because my true goal is not policy: my true goal is institutional. That’s what wakes me up and keeps me up at night; it’s the concern about this institution. And so for me, if I can get a liberal or a conservative doing something that is a huge victory. And so I think it’s that kind of nonpartisan type approach.

Dayton: I would add that the question about philanthropy has a couple of different versions. One is, there are the sorts of philanthropy, the sorts of foundations that have funded things like the modernization stuff and sort of the big institutional investors. But another one is the ideological ones, If you’re giving millions to help members get elected. Maybe there’s some logic in giving some of that money that’s going to the TV guys and some of that’s some of that money that’s going to the digital guys and putting some of that in capacity building for your ideological allies. I’m not even saying give money to the modernization project. I’m saying, and you actually have seen this on the right and I think to some extent on the left, although I don’t understand the CPC’s, the CPC Foundation funding source in the same way, but like the people that spend money electing Republicans often also give money to Heritage or to some of these other groups.

There’s also an argument here that these people can be spending their hard money, but they can also use their C3 on this stuff and build something. One of the things that would be useful from mainstream philanthropy is to see that kind of politics is constructive. Here, I actually think we’re making progress with some parts of philanthropy and the academics where they’re like, no, no, no, these people fighting could actually be useful if they had that institutional capacity and point of view in their associated C3 and C4s, where they could think in better institutional ways.

My ideal world is actually leveraging some of the analytic credibility of the big philanthropy and matching it up with the ideological fervor of the people that give hard money to elect people and soft money too, for that matter. But too many people only think of politics of getting involved in supporting factions is spending money. The hard money side and the superPAC side of the C4 side, when they can also be doing it in these other ways and making the members that they support and help get elected more effective once they’re actually in office.

Schuman: Who would think that the two years in between the congressional election cycle would actually be a place where you’d want to put some effort and interest?

Wallner: Who knew? One other thing I just want to say, factions will generate more inter-party collegiality. It will facilitate more respect. This is just a basic thing that we’ve lost sight of. John Quincy Adams, when he came back to Congress, this guy didn’t like slavery. John C Calhoun is the first statesman, is a brilliant guy in a lot of ways, but he’s the first guy who argues for the moral good of slavery. This is a big deal. This is the issue, right? They fight on it. They disagree with one another. Same thing with Webster and Calhoun as well. When John Quincy Adams dies, before he dies, he asked Calhoun to be a pallbearer in his funeral.

Then, when Webster is giving a speech on the floor, he goes and sees Calhoun. Calhoun’s on his deathbed across the street at this boarding house. And he’s like, I need you to come hear this speech. Webster’s giving a speech where he is bashing Calhoun. He’s like, this guy is wrong. And Calhoun says, I can’t make it in. Webster’s giving the speech. And then Calhoun struggles up, gets over there, and he keeps trying to say that he’s there. And Webster’s talking on the floor, and Calhoun’s on the floor, and Calhoun can’t speak. He’s got consumption, he’s about to die. And finally he bangs his cane on the floor, and he just croaks out, I’m here! And Webster turns around and sees him. He bows to him. Calhoun bows to Webster. Then Webster turns around and proceeds to go on bashing Calhoun.

It’s this premise that game respects game. When you go to battle with somebody in the arena and you lose or you win, and the other side puts up a good fight, you generate a relationship with that person and a familiarity with that person, even though you do not agree with that person. And over time you get a respect, a begrudging respect. And that is one thing, I think that everybody in this climate of ours today misses about old politics, and I think that it can come back. It can come back. And one way it can come back is through a robust, rigorous, deliberative process. And the best way, I think, to get that it’s not the only way, but one of the best ways to get that is to facilitate members’ participation in that process by empowering them through factions.

Dayton: Also, these people are just really lonely.

Wallner: There’s a loneliness epidemic among lawmakers.

Dayton: Yeah, there absolutely is. These people need more hanging out with their buddies and need to develop more buddies. Maybe they do some of that with the in state delegations, but they certainly don’t do it much in committees these days. This is a way to help people experience each other a little bit more and work together a little bit more. That’s the only way you ever get anything done in politics. But let’s face it, being a lawmaker is really hard right now. And so another thing we’re talking about here is just giving people more friends to get things done together with.

Wallner: Stay tuned. I want to have a television show. It’s like a 17 foot flat skiff, you’re in the Florida Keys, two members because it’s a tiny boat. You’re on there all day long, just fly fishing or something. And it’s like Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz and then like a video crew and you’re just stuck on the boat. I bet you there’ll be some interesting stuff that comes out of that. Call it precisely to Soren’s point, it’s crazy what happens when you bring people together.

Schuman: You call it Cruz Control, maybe.

Wallner: Oh, I had that when we were at steering. I’ll just say this, maybe say it for the Patreon page. We were at steering, and I want to do this thing called Cruz Control. And we’re going to have Cruz over at Union Station. We’re going to do like a live shot from the lunch and it would be like Cruz walking up to people going, what do you think about Mitch McConnell’s amnesty effort or something? And they’d be like, we hate it because of course we’d plant the people. And it was all it was Cruz control. I like that.

He didn’t like it. We didn’t do it.

Schuman: Before this gets worse, I’m glad that we’ve established that factions are good and that philanthropy should consider if they want civility, they need to encourage more fighting. And that. I guess the final thing is that Doren and James, Chris and I just really appreciate you making the time to talk with us.

Dayton: Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Schuman: Game recognizes game.

Wallner: Daniel, I, I love you, man. We’ve worked together a lot. We disagree on a lot, and we also agree on a lot. I think this is a great example of the kind of thing that we’ve all been talking about, you’ve been talking about in your work as well. You can have intense respect and admiration for people that you disagree with on some policy questions. I guarantee you’re not going to disagree on all policy questions. And this also represents, I think, for philanthropy out there, you and I have the same goal. I think this is a great example of how this kind of effort can produce institutional change for the better.

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Architect of the Capitol Thomas Austin shared that anecdote with the Committee on House Administration Wednesday to provide an example of what “catastrophic systems failure” inside of an office building means to congressional operations. There are nearly 200 member offices and committee hearing rooms in the 2.4-million-square-foot Rayburn Building, by far the largest of the three House office buildings. An electrical, water, or climate control systems failure could force the relocation of many more than 22 offices, which would be enormously disruptive to legislative branch operations. It could happen during some critical work period for Congress, which could impact the nation.

The culprit for Rayburn’s condition, Austin explained to the committee, is decades of deferred maintenance. Past congresses have been so parsimonious with maintenance budgets that much of Rayburn’s electrical hardware, plumbing, and ducts are original. That broken air handler? It reached the end of its expected life cycle in the 1990s. It is so old the AOC had to use a custom-fabricated replacement part to repair it.

And yet, current appropriators are repeating the behavior. Austin said his team has identified $600 million in necessary projects for this budget year alone. The Legislative Branch Appropriations bill reported out of committee recently only provides $689.2 million for the AOC in total. Although it provides funds to start renovation design work promptly, the bill included no funds for designing the swing space and parking structures the AOC needs to start on the Rayburn project, effectively hamstringing the agency until Congress approves and funds a swing space plan.

At the hearing Wednesday, CHA Ranking Member Joseph Morelle, who is also on the Appropriations Committee, said he was “deeply disappointed” in that committee’s decisions.

“Allowing the buildings we work in to deteriorate around us is a fitting illustration of the broader failure to strengthen and sustain Article I that has come to define, in my view, this Congress,” he added.

We remain confused as to why there remains a disconnect between the authorizing and appropriating committees on the Rayburn project. At the hearing, CHA Chair Steil thanked AOC Austin for sharing the findings of the AOC internal swing space study late last year and for regular updates on the options under consideration. The AOC prefers to build a new building to serve as swing space, which is one of two swing space options that the National Academy of Public Administration considered in a 2020 report to Congress (NAPA recommended constructing temporary office space in the Longworth Building’s courtyard.) Morelle mentioned the NAPA study in his opening remarks, so CHA is aware of the options before it. However, in a story about the hearing, Rep. Nick LaLota told Politico’s Katherine Tully-McManus that appropriators still needed “our own proper understanding of the evidence” before making a decision. Recall that the original report language for the Legislative Branch Appropriations bill chided the AOC for not providing enough information on the swing space options, only to admit it had been looped into plans in the manager’s amendment.

Appropriations Chair Tom Cole, meanwhile, told Tully-McManus, “I’m not terribly worried about” the $9 billion proposed renovation plan because he wouldn’t be in Congress when work is finished. Again, deferred action.

Although Austin said the agency will follow Congress’s directive, the AOC prefers building over the west House underground garage. The permanent building would be the multifunction option as it could serve as swing space for a Longworth renovation. Austin also mentioned in the hearing the building could be used to “reshore” hundreds of thousands of square feet Congress leases in the District, providing some cost savings. That potential received nods of approval from the chair and ranking member. Along with Rep. Morelle, Rep. Mike Carey voiced support for the new construction option.

PROJECT BUDGET CONTROL

During the hearing, members were eager to dig into why the cost estimate for the Rayburn project was nine times greater than the Cannon renewal, which is finishing up. Austin noted that the Rayburn project would be one of the largest building renovations across the entire federal government. Because of the building techniques used in the ‘60s, it is chock full of asbestos, even on its structural steel. On top of remediation and historic preservation costs, the AOC would need to keep part of the building in operation and open to the public while work continued if it lacked enough swing space, which Austin said would drive up costs further.

Members also inquired on what the AOC had learned from the Cannon renewal experience, which ended up being nearly $200 million over budget and took a decade to complete. First, Austin answered, the phased approach it took to advancing the project in stages was a failure that it would not repeat with Rayburn. The AOC also tried during the Cannon project to limit interruptions to congressional operations, which meant it had to do a lot of construction work on nights and weekends, which drove up costs and was inefficient with labor. Hence, the swing space plan. Austin also said that Cannon suffered from poor change management. The project had a “low threshold for changes” to the design, and members made many requests to change plans. This time, the AOC would “make sure that we nail the design up front” and only make changes for health and safety concerns, Austin said.

Members also developed a false expectation for the cost of the Cannon project because of the way the AOC created its estimate. Austin told the committee that the original estimate of $750 million was drawn up in 2009, very early in the process for such a project, and included an unusually large 40% estimate buffer. The final cost of $971 million actually is well within that 40% range, and also reflects pandemic-era inflation for building materials.

Austin, as Mr. Morelle noted in his opening remarks, is the first Architect of the Capitol chosen by Congress itself. Many committee members expressed appreciation for his efforts in the position over the last two years (we note that no other Democratic members of the committee attended the hearing), which suggests the AOC appointment reform has strengthened relations between the agency and CHA. Austin and his team deserve credit for righting the ship after J. Brett Blanton was removed from the position and for continuing to do more with less in terms of budgetary support. He noted the agency has a 95% on-time record with its current work orders.

It’s worth remembering that the AOC does much more than manage construction, repairs, and maintenance of buildings and grounds. Steil raised Austin’s role as a member of the U.S. Capitol Police Board and Rep. Barry Loudermilk asked about the strengthening of complex physical security after the January 6 insurrection and relations with the Sergeant at Arms. Austin mentioned coordination with the House Chief Administrative Office in upgrading committee room technology. Having someone in whom members have confidence in this role pays considerable institutional dividends.

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APPROPRIATIONS

The scheduled Senate Appropriations Committee markup of its legislative branch package was postponed Thursday to accommodate vote-o-rama for the immigration enforcement reconciliation bill. We were hopeful at least to see the report language and bill text, but alas.

Institutionally, this reconciliation bill remains a travesty. Funding for ICE and CBP outside the annual appropriations process and over the remainder of the Trump Administration effectively shields it from alteration by the next democratically elected Congress. It also means these agencies will not be subject to administrative provisions and riders added to appropriations bills routinely. All of this can be done with a 50-vote threshold. (Georgetown’s Matt Glassman and budget wonk Kevin McNellis have an expansive conversation about this topic on Matt’s Substack.)

Senators also approved the January 6 slush fund, but only after managing some of its political toxicity. Punchbowl reported that departing Senator Bill Cassidy agreed after some arm twisting to vote against an amendment offered by Senator Chuck Schumer to remove the fund, providing the vote margin for several Republican senators in contested reelection races to vote for it. If Cassidy had succeeded in producing a fund-killing amendment that could pass with a 50-vote threshold, as he attempted, they would have voted no on it.

POWER OF THE PURSE

NOTUS has two important stories on the Trump Administration commandeering congressionally-directed spending to shape the national historical narrative as it prefers. For the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the White House is withholding most of the $150 million Congress appropriated last summer for the bipartisan America250 commission for celebrations. The Trump Administration created its own alternative commission within the National Park Foundation and funneled $68 million of public funds into it. Because the foundation was set up to receive private sector donations to the National Park Service, Trump’s Freedom 250 also can receive outside money that is difficult to track. The fate of that $68 million is also unknown.

The Office of Management and Budget, meanwhile, has asserted control over how the Smithsonian Institution spends congressionally appropriated funds, instructing it to submit requests to spend funds to ensure programs are consistent with the White House budget. That document, of course, is not law, putting Smithsonian officials in the position of violating the Antideficiency Act and/or the Impoundment Control Act. Programmatically, it also sets OMB up to block any cultural content it doesn’t like: for example neither the National Museum of the American Latino nor the Anacostia Community Museum was included in the president’s budget request.

HISTORICAL DIGRESSION

These stories matter for more than the abuse of executive power and nullification of congressional spending authority. When I was in academia, one of my areas of expertise was the history of American nationalism in the late 19th and 20th centuries, so forgive me for riffing here.

Unlike most other peer nations, the American government never developed its own robust “official” nationalist narrative. Instead, it contributed to a decentralized cultural effort driven by patriotic societies, white supremacists, veterans groups, business, intellectuals and artists, and ultimately social reformers. That has made the cultural meaning of American national identity contested and reflective of the rights struggles of various groups to achieve equality. I think you can see that in several Smithsonian museums, which present no core narrative beyond the celebration of social and cultural complexity.

The administration clearly prefers to dominate that narrative itself. So far, it has failed to do so spectacularly. The Freedom250 organizing efforts so far have been a costly flop, not even being able to entice the living member of Milli Vanili to its cause. But administration-led celebration significantly privileges its political allies in civil society as they work to shape a nationalist narrative. Or perhaps more effectively, it spotlights who is not welcome to participate in nation defining, which is dangerous to the principle of equality.

Unfortunately, civil society appears not to be organizing a significant counter-narrative around the Semiquincentennial about American national identity, especially one grounded in America’s exceptional multiracial cultural and social traditions. Even if Trump only presents a vision of America filtered through white male kitsch (a cage fighting match, a car race, etc), if America 250 is successfully strangled, it’ll be the only story being told.

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MAKER SPACE

Maker Space is a semi-regular new feature to spotlight the community of people inside and outside Congress who are tinkering with different legislative datasets and code to produce useful tools. The intent is to build awareness of these projects – large and small – to build that community and help people find out about cool stuff.

The first edition introduced the member press release data collection Capitol Press created by Derek Willis, and the second a congressional hearing database from Capitol Labs.

This time, we highlight a project launched by Candace Moix and Julie Lin, two alumnae of the TechCongress program, to provide a free, robust digital advocacy platform called MyCapitol.ai. AGI supports leveling the informational playing field when it comes to Congress, so this is a very exciting project not only for under-resourced advocacy groups and nonprofits, but congressional staff, too.

Moix told me the idea came from watching Senate staff during her TechCongress fellowship interact with advocacy groups and industry lobbyists, noting the disparity not only of impact on legislative activity, but the understanding of how to connect successfully with the right congressional stakeholders (which is also why we co-developed this advocacy playbook for nonprofits). MyCapitol combines a variety of government data streams to allow users to track bills and issues as well as what topics outside groups, donors, and lobbyists are engaging on. It also integrates with Claude to create bill summaries, draft sample bill text, letters, and policy briefs, and summarize members’ career highlights and policy accomplishments.

Moix and Lin are upfront about how they are using generative AI not only to produce content but help build the platform. They have a thoughtful best practices guide on their website. It’s really about making the fundamentals of advocacy as efficient as possible for small organizations that may not otherwise have the time to engage with full rigor. The data analysis capacity, meanwhile, is intended to help identify the right champions and most promising pathways for legislative proposals, which professional lobbyists and senior staff know from years of experience but is a steep learning curve for everyone else.

As a civic tech project, MyCapitol actively invites user feedback. Moix is hopeful that congressional staff also will use it and discover new use cases to build out. There’s also a lot investigative journalists could do with the platform, too.

LINK OUT

The GovLab’s Reboot Democracy blog recently featured a guest post by Rep. Laura Friedman’s Communications Director Zach Florman, who has built the (also free) Capitol Wire tool. It monitors the House Clerk and majority leader’s announcements of floor votes via AI automation and pushes alerts. It sounds like an updated version of the old Captiol Bells app, plus automatic bill analysis.

Florman explains he just built it so people wouldn’t have to rely on very expensive subscriptions for what is public information. He explains, “when Hill staff can get up to speed on legislation more quickly, they give better advice to the members casting votes. When reporters can track floor activity in real time, the public gets better coverage of what Congress is doing and why. And when anyone can actually see what’s coming to the floor and understand what it means, they can call their representative, show up, or make noise before a vote happens instead of after.” Exactly.

Reminder: the Congressional Data Task Force, which is the engine behind so many current projects, meets on Thursday from 2:00-4:00PM in the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress, room LJ-119 and virtually (registration required online).

ODDS AND ENDS

The Office of the Whistleblower Ombuds is now offering training for members on working with whistleblowers through the House Staff Academy. Members and their staff can ask questions and pick up info sheets at its pop-up table on June 10 from 11:30 AM to 1:00 PM in the Longworth Cafeteria.

Not too Kean. Although he remains in some kind of care facility, Rep. Tom Kean is introducing legislation. Unless something changed we’re not aware of, bills require his physical signature, so this is not great.

Daniel spoke with PBS NewsHour last week about the Kean situation.

Declining staffing. The 119th Congress lost 1% of its staff at the end of the winter, Omar Awan of HillClimbers has found crunching congressional data. That decline is the second sharpest over the last five congresses for the same period of time on the calendar. He concludes that flat budgets in an inflationary environment is the culprit.

Ethics challenges. Is one of the reasons the House Ethics Committee has been light on male members accused of sexual misconduct gender bias within the committee? It’s never had more than four female members out of ten serving at once.

Budget reform. Americans for Prosperity’s Kurt Couchman examines how instituting an annual budget process along the lines of Rep. Blake Moore’s reform plan would remedy government shutdown politics and provide rank-and-file members with greater input.

Defying gravity. The U.S. Capitol Police released a recent inspector general report from January that found employees assigned to posts outside the District received cost-of-living and relocation compensation even in places that have a lower cost-of-living than the Washington area. Employees assigned to San Francisco received higher cost-of-living adjustments, but those assigned to Tampa, FL and Brunswick, GA were still paid at the Washington, DC metro area rate. The IG questioned more than $580,000 of incurred costs for these positions. “Without fairly applying pay practices that are in line with the USCP’s governing statutes, regulations, and best practices throughout the federal government, the Department risks wasting resources,” the report concludes.

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This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.

Daniel Schuman: So, we’re here today with Brian Baird, former member of Congress from 1999 to 2011, and as far as I know, the only clinical psychologist to serve in Congress in modern times.

Rep. Brian Baird: Well, actually, Ted Strickland served as well. He was a psychologist as well, but think he had a slightly different degree.

Schuman: We’re focusing on member security and the way that members relate to each other. There have been a number of mass attacks on members of Congress in the last handful of years. There was the attack recently at the Hilton Hotel, where, of course, President Trump and his Cabinet were -- but there were also journalists in attendance and many members of Congress. And while the executive branch officials were sort of whisked away, many members of Congress were sort of left to fend for themselves in light of an uncertain environment.

And of course, we had the January 6th attack just a handful of years ago, where, again, members of Congress were the subject of a mass attack that presumably could leave significantly different attitudes towards their colleagues or how they felt about the institution.

And I’m hoping that you could talk a little bit about how members of Congress view their own safety and how these repeated attacks may have changed the way that members, view and relate to one another.

Baird: I’m really glad to have a chance to talk about this. I think it’s a hugely important topic that, I think is worth doing.

First of all, is just talk about the security situation. And, sadly, there’s grim news on that front, and every member of Congress needs to understand this, as do their spouses, and families. And it’s not pretty: If someone really wants to kill a member of Congress, it’s not hard to do so. All the security measures that have been proposed -- let’s get more Capitol Police on the Capitol grounds, maybe an individual guard when you’re about your official duties. They may make some difference. Certainly, we need to secure the Capitol and the Congressional Office Buildings. But when you’re going about your daily life as a member of Congress, and as a human being, set aside the member of Congress, you still have to go grocery shopping. You still have to come in and out of your house. If you’re doing, parades or town halls or things like that, you’re in the public, and if a person really wants to hunt you down, they can do it.

I don’t say that to be alarmist. But the question is then how do we deal with that? Even just the walk to a vote, if somebody’s hanging out outside the Capitol Grounds and they’re not in that narrow perimeter where you’ve got the magnetometers, just walking up the steps somebody can approach you and shoot you.

My experience talking to members of Congress, there is a paradoxical, logical inconsistency. On the one hand, everybody talks about how we have to be more secure, but then they don’t necessarily take the individual precautions or the institutional precautions to deal with that.

As you know, one of the things that I firmly believe is we need to take measures to ensure the continuity of representation of members of Congress. The first thing we need to do, not for our individual sakes initially, but for the sake of the representative democracy, is provide mechanisms by which you can replace House members if they die through natural causes, accidents, or assassinations. We’ve done nothing to deal with that since September 11th, which is now almost 25 years ago, and the problems remain the same.

Why do I start with that? Because it’s one thing to say somebody just doesn’t like me as a person or as a representative and they want to kill me. That’s a challenge and it’s unpleasant. But it’s another thing to say, “If I kill enough of these guys, I could change the balance of power in the House or Senate.”

As I’ve said before, right now you could fit more bullets into the magazine of a single semi-automatic pistol than it would take to change the balance of power in both the House and the Senate. In one pistol, it’d be so easy to do. The first thing I would do is assure representation and secondly, I would reduce the incentive, the political incentive for assassination. If there were a way to replace members of Congress with like-minded temporary replacements who could fill the role until a special election occurred, then you could kill 30 of us and they would be replaced promptly by people who probably vote about the same way, and there’s no political gain, no chaos, no disruption, no breakage of representation.

So that’s the first point. The second point though is, okay, if you understand that, why are people not acting? And I think there’s this kind of unconscious, if you will, sense that on the one hand I’m cavalier about it -- “Well, that could happen” -- and then on the other hand, that absolves me from taking responsible measures to correct the situation.

You still have to do your job, and your staff have to do their job, and your families have to live with the unpleasantness that you could be harmed or they could be harmed even worse. But that doesn’t mean you do nothing. So, step one is take care of the institutional continuity and then remove the political incentive for harming. Step two then is what are the practical measures that you can take to protect yourself and your family and your staff and the constituents?

Really we began to see a dramatic turnaround in threats to members, just the general attitude, back in the early rise of the Tea Party and in the days of the assault weapons ban votes and some other controversies, and Obamacare.

We went from having town halls -- I had, by the way, more than 350 town halls when I was in office, I think more than almost anybody I know, and they were usually very informal affairs. We’d meet at a fire station in a rural town or at a library or a high school auditorium or something. Anybody’d show up. There were no magnetometers. There were no crazy crowds. People respected one another. Yes, they sometimes criticized me. It’s their right. I have to honor that right, but there were not massive crowds of people pushing one another to try to get in.

Back in that era, believe it or not, there were actually websites created dedicated to telling people how to disrupt town halls. You could log online and search that, and a website would come up that would say, “Get there early. Try to occupy all the spaces. Scatter your supporters around the room. If the member tries to speak, interrupt them. Shout them down. Don’t let there be a rational conversation. Call them liar. Insult...” These were strategic publicized mechanisms for creating a dangerous and threatening environment and disrupting legitimate and essential dialogue between members of Congress and their constituents. It’s only gotten worse.

To give you a sense of how significant it was at the time, during the Obamacare, debates and public discussion, the crowds were so large, we actually held one town hall in an outdoor rock amphitheater and we had 3,500 people in attendance. It was totally different, and there were some pretty hostile folks there. So one of the things that has happened now is members of Congress are getting oftentimes plainclothes police officers at their town halls, and they’re getting more security. We actually had town halls in my era of Obamacare where ambulances were parked at the back of the stage in case I got shot. That’s a true story. So, we have to take those kinds of precautions.

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But somewhere along the line, and this is step three, we’ve got to restore the civility of dialogue and have members of Congress, and the President of the United States and his appointees or designees, stop demonizing people on the other side and stop endorsing hatred. When you have a president of the United States, as we have in the case of Trump, essentially, endorsing people being bullied or beaten up from the podium, when he’s saying things like that, that creates that environment.

There’s also a potential hypocrisy here and duplicity that people can say, “Well, if you criticize the president for making those remarks, then you yourself are somehow inciting violence against the president,” that’s duplicitous. I mean, the fact is if you have people who are knowingly and willfully inciting violence through their rhetoric, and condoning violence and you point that out, you are not equal in culpability. So, the first step is to acknowledge the threat, try to reduce the threat through safety mechanisms.

By the way, there’s a whole list of things members of Congress can and should do to secure their offices, to make sure that they know who’s coming in, when they’re coming in, that there is an exit strategy. Every member of Congress should do a safety audit with themselves, their staff, and their families. There should be code words that are used if we need to evacuate. There should be designated routes for evacuation. There should be precautions for your family members to take if they see anything coming. There should be ways in which you can contact them if there’s an emergency, et cetera.

And every member of Congress should make sure their local law enforcement, at all levels, sheriff, police, state patrol, they all know where the member of Congress lives. They should all have a photo of the member of Congress. I hate to say it, but it’s true, especially members of Congress of color, because there may be a default assumption that the members of Congress are going to be white, or if somebody’s not white, they’re not a member of Congress. They need to really say, “this is who I am. This is what my family looks like. Here’s where we live. If you get a call from 417 North Rogers Street, by God, get there fast. And when you get there, this is what the good guys look like.”

There should be safety audits, there should be great contact with your local law enforcement, et cetera, et cetera. I don’t know if that is being done. I’m not hearing of it being done at an organized institutional level, but I think it should be done.

I can speak to there has been progress on those lines. There’s more funding available for coordination, between, Congress, and the Capitol Police, and the local law enforcement. Whether it’s sufficient, whether it’s being done properly, we don’t have visibility into that. But there have been a lot more resources put into trying to address at least that particular concern through reimbursing local law enforcement to be incentivized to provide that kind of support. That’s great, and I encourage every member of Congress to reach out proactively to some members of their law enforcement to do just this. Don’t leave it up to the Capitol Police. That’s, that’s a key message, hardening the targets, if you will. I hate to say it that way, but that’s what you have to do.

Then there’s the issue which you contacted me with, and that is how do we cope with this risk of assault? The first is acknowledge that it’s there, try to reduce it, but don’t imagine that, that you’re going to be 100% safe.

What we found post-September 11th, when I led initiatives to try to help staff and, to some degree, members of Congress cope with the reality of being targets now, and with the massive loss of human life that was unprecedented on civilian targets at the time, we found that one of the essential ingredients was a deep sense of purpose to help people get through this. Why are we doing this? Why are we exposing ourselves to potential risk when there’s a thousand other jobs we could do that are probably less stressful, pay more, and have less risk?

It’s a tragedy that public officials at all levels now, not just members of Congress -- school board members, library officials, elections officials, almost all public officers are, both elected and hired, employed -- are now denigrated and criticized and potential targets for not only opprobrium but attacks. That’s been a concerted rhetorical effort and consequence. When people despise their own government and say that their own employees are worthless, lazy, criminal, dishonest, as frankly, the President of the United States did during COVID, implying that medical doctors and nurses were stealing or misappropriating protective equipment, well, that conduct on his part was reprehensible, but it’s also damn dangerous. And it’s destructive to the fabric of the society.

So back to the sense of calling, members of Congress ideally should be called to serve. They shouldn’t be there to become famous or to make a lot of money, or to pave the way to their next job as a YouTube influencer or something. They should be there to serve, and, that’s a service with humility, I believe. But it’s also a service that carries with it some risk. Nobody said the job would be easy. It shouldn’t, carry mortal risk, but it is a degree of risk that one faces. So, getting at peace with that, yes, I understand there’s a risk, but I’m willing to take that risk to do my job responsibly.

One important element about that is that you not be cowed into either changing your policy judgment out of fear. And, interestingly enough, whether that’s fear of reelection or fear of assassination, at some point you have to say, “What do I think is the right thing for the good of this country, even if it means I get unelected?” It’s funny, I think I’ve talked to members who probably are more afraid of losing an election than they are about losing their lives. But neither should be the governing factor in a democratic republic. You should be able to say, “this is what I believe. Here’s why I believe it. Here’s why I’m voting this way,” and certainly be willing to risk a defeat in an election, but possibly willing to risk even your own life for it if you think it’s that important.

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Schuman: can I hone in on that for a second? I think a lot of members -- and you would know better than I do -- have the sense of calling. They have the sense of responsibility.

Baird: Members don’t pass legislation on their own. There is a collaboration that happens. You often hear people talking about the need for bipartisan collaboration. The January 6th attacks… I call it the Trump insurrection. President Trump incited a mob to go and sack the Capitol. Previously, there had been a crazy person who went and tried to kill Majority Leader Scalise and a number of other Republican members who was also motivated by ideology.

Certainly, as I talk to different folks, both members and staffers, they say that something has changed, that the willingness or ability to collaborate across the aisle for members has changed, because they view the other side as not just being the loyal opposition, but some of them as aiding and abetting, efforts to kill them. On one hand in Congress, you have to find ways to work together. On the other hand, you are afraid that some folks are inciting your death.

Schuman: Can you talk about how a member’s perspective changes in those circumstances? How do you cope with that in a body that’s supposed to be collegial but clearly is not?

Baird: Well, it doesn’t work easily. I’ve talked to so many, current members and former members as well, and their staff, and especially as you were saying, Daniel, post January 6th, things really changed. Since the Civil War, there had never been that kind of an insurrection. Prior to the Civil War there were beatings, there were duels, there were people carrying swords and guns onto the floor. But that hadn’t happened to that magnitude since the Civil War.

Post-January 6^th, you now had people who condoned, and actually who encouraged the insurrection, who perpetrated the lies upon which the insurrection was based and refused to sanction the president or the would-be assassins who entered the building calling for the execution of the Vice President of the United States and the Speaker of the House, and possibly would’ve done so if they’d have had the opportunity. So now you’re working with people who have condoned a crime, have excused people who conducted violent and destructive acts, and that’s really difficult.

In fact, I’ll be speaking at a conference in two days on how to reduce polarization, and my first point is we have to understand that not everybody wants to reduce polarization. Not everybody believes collaboration and compromise and mutual respect are not values they adhere to. They see those as weaknesses and causes for scorn and disdain. Well, that changes the calculus and the rules about how we normally interact and collaborate.

Even then, there are still often possibilities, however, where we can find common ground. Even in the presence of that vitriol and that level of animosity, we could still try to find areas of common ground. My own belief is without diminishing or denying this very problematic exculpation of threats and enticements and encouragement for threats and acts, we could still try to say, “where are some areas where we agree,” and try to start there.

It doesn’t mean you excuse the conduct that led to January 6th or followed January 6^th: But it does mean you still try to function in a positive way where you can. What it should not mean is that you get on the bandwagon of the people who call for insurrections. It should not mean that you join the chorus of people who excuse such things. That’s partly where it’s a problem, when you say to yourself, “this person who is doing that is doing things that are antithetical to the foundations of this country, and I don’t respect their values, and I don’t respect their thinking, and I don’t respect how they view this country.” Those folks you have to try to defeat in election. But that’s the key word. You have to try to defeat them in election, not try to condone violence against them.

Again, when it came to January 6th, one of the things that’s been very difficult for people is the false equivalency. I have spoken to people and said -- and many members, sitting members have had the same experience -- “how do you possibly excuse what happened on January 6^th,” and the answer is this false equivalency. “Well, you condone Antifa.” They’re completely different, vastly different. But cognitively, the dissonance reduction is, “we haven’t done anything bad. You do bad things as well. We’re equal,” this false equivalency. There’s a vast difference between the two events and the two organizations. Antifa is not a major political party. It is not the Democratic Party. It is a bunch of ruffians in black outfits. But even then, they never did anything approximating what January 6th has done. That false equivalency becomes a problem and, and it’s very difficult to reason with folks.

I’ve got good friends on the Republican side who say, “Well, on the Democratic side, they’re inciting violence when they use words like fascist.” Well, okay, take out the word fascist, but ask yourself what is the conduct of certain members of the administration or members of Congress? What are their actions, and what does that remind you of? It’s frightening to people.

The hard part is as a psychologist, there’s a temptation to say, “Okay, a traumatic event has happened. How do you deal with that trauma?” I’ve worked with people who’ve been in combat in the military. I’ve worked with people who have been police officers. I’ve worked with people who’ve been in severe car accidents, victims of crimes, et cetera. In all of those cases, there was, there was an end point. In, in other words, the person who assaulted you is not assaulting you today. The war that you were fighting in in Fallujah, you’re not in that combat zone today. Yes, you had this terrible car wreck, but you’re, but that’s a thing of the past. There’s always an awareness after such events of our own fragility. There’s a break in the assumption of normalcy, the assumption of security, but we can begin to heal that wound as psychologists and as human beings by recognizing that those threats or those events were improbable and in the past and I can now move forward in a secure new way.

The challenge with what we’re dealing with and the risk that the members of Congress are facing is it’s not a past event. January 6th still lingers. We still have the people who promoted January 6th in power, in fact, more empowered than ever before. The people who committed the crimes of January 6th have been liberated. So now the dynamic that we usually deal with in terms of trying to help people deal with trauma, the keyword is post-traumatic stress syndrome. if it’s not post-trauma because it can still emerge and is actually being condoned and expanded, that changes how you have to deal with it.

The word that comes to my mind is resolve. It is you’re not going to become the kind of person who incites or condones violence towards the other side, but you are going to resolve yourself steadfastly to not pretend there is not a threat and to use that to channel the energy to make a difference.

In the congressional context, the trauma is not over. Members of Congress and their staff have to work with each other. Legislation passes by a majority. The Republicans, many of them are themselves in a bind where they may abhor what happened. Politically, they separate their personal views from their performative behaviors because it’s to their advantage to do so, or because they know that if they don’t it, the machine of animosity will get aimed at them either politically or personally where they themselves might be subject to threat.

Schuman: Knowing that the situation is ongoing, you talked about perseverance, what else can members and staff do to be able to do their jobs even in the wake of this ongoing trauma that they’re continuing to experience?

Baird: Well, it’s a great question. The first thing, Daniel, is every totalitarian regime in history has depended on the ability to coerce people to shut up and to not speak out, to take the side of the abuser, take the side of the aggressor out of fear of themselves. They may in private lament the choice, but justify it nevertheless. That’s not just fascists on the right, it includes Stalinists on the left. It includes dictators in Latin America on the left and the right and in Africa. The point is, people have to recognize that if you condone totalitarianism and autocracies and cults of personality, eventually you’ll become the victim of that yourself.

The first thing we need is for the people who are in the side of those condoning violence to step up and to their own side, “stop this.” Not to say, “oh, the other side does it too, so therefore,” whatever. Not to think it’s funny, not to think it’s manly, not to think it’s necessary, not to condone it, but to say, “no, this is wrong. The rhetoric is wrong, the policy is wrong, the attitude is wrong, the conduct is wrong, and I insist that you change that.”

Now, some courageous people have done that, and some have been defeated: but there are worse things in life than be defeated in election. To really deserve the job, you have to be willing to lose the job. And if you’re willing to see a rational, deliberative, collaborative democratic republic turn into an autocratic cult of personality so you can get reelected, you don’t deserve to be reelected. You don’t deserve to have violence sent your way, but you don’t deserve to hold the seat.

Schuman: Can, can I push you on that? One of the rationalizations is if I’m not here, worse things will happen. And it’s better for me to be here to stop some of these terrible things that might otherwise emerge so that when there’s an opportunity to do the right thing, I’m the person that’s here to be able to do that. But if they replace me with some zombie, some true-eyed believer, then it’s going to be even worse. What would you say to someone who has that perspective?

Baird: Well, the nature of politics is you sometimes have to make some compromises: but you also have to draw red lines. You have to say, “this one I’m not going to cross. There are certain things I won’t, I won’t condone.” You know, my dear friend Bob Inglis from South Carolina, who was willing to lose his congressional seat because he recognized the dangerous threat to the world of climate change, has told me many times he’s talked to Republicans behind the scenes who say, “Bob, I’ve seen the droughts. I’ve seen the floods. I’ve seen the sea level rise. I’ve, I’ve lost my crops. I understand that something is happening to the climate, and I’ll give you that it’s probably human-caused. But if I say that, I’ll lose my election.” And Bob and I have both marveled at that: so you’re saying that the potential fate of the planet, you’re willing to sacrifice that for the sake of getting reelected on the belief that somehow then you can do something more important. Yeah. I mean, that’s pretty crazy. Well, there, there’s a, a phrase, “Man’s not a rational animal, he’s a rationalizing animal.” At some point you’ve got to look yourself in the mirror and say, “what do I stand for? Why am I here?” The problem is silence is condoning in many cases.

I’ve been in town halls, where folks are getting up and shouting at each other, and I’ve seen a courageous person stand up and say, “Hey, friends, I don’t agree with this man, but can’t we treat each other with respect? This is not helping. can’t we tone the rhetoric down just a little bit?” Now, sometimes they get shouted at, et cetera, but oftentimes there’s that voice of conscience that reminds us of who we need to be, and that voice is really important.

When that voice is silenced, then where are the breaks? Where are the constraints? What can we do to empower those people in this environment, because the congressional environment is a team environment. How do we empower people to act as a check, to break away from this Manichean type of dialogue.

Well, you and I have talked a lot about house rules and how important they are. You work so hard as an individual to get elected to what you think is the great deliberative body, and it turns out leadership on both sides of the aisle -- and here’s where it is not a false equivalence -- leadership in both sides of the aisle just wants you to vote the way you’re told and be a good puppy.

Now, that doesn’t mean you should be a bomb thrower demagogue yourself and a grandstander and say, “hey, look at me. I’m, I’m louder in my criticism of the other side than the other side is of me.” That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about willingness to stand up for a functional, collaborative, representative, deliberative body for rules that allow the legislative process to move forward as it was intended with real debate, time to study legislation, the opportunity to introduce and have amendments on what we would call in the business regular order, which hasn’t been regular for at least three decades almost. We need institutionalists. We need people who say, “we’ve got to make this organization work.” And yes, even if the person on the other side is going to have a policy or that I disagree with, I must have a process by which they do that and by which they can succeed.

I personally think there needs to be a significant movement before the next election to get well-intentioned people from both sides to really think about the House rules and what kind of institution they want to serve in, and put forward some reforms, that can do that.

Chris Nehls: We had the same kind of conversation with Steny Hoyer actually, where he challenged us on if changing the rules would change the culture. He was very much on the you need better people to run for office side. It sounds like you think if you have it more open, regular set of rules and processes, more members can participate, you do create an environment where the bad actors are going to get shut out. Nobody’s going to want to work with the jerks, right? They’re going to be less successful legislators, so maybe it’s a self-healing culture. What do you think about that?

Baird: Well, the great paradox of our constitutional democratic republic today and in the modern era is that the skills and behaviors that it takes to achieve the office are not the skills and behaviors that are required to function well in the office. In fact, they’re often antithetical. So right now, it’s raising money, bombast, demagoguery, grandstanding, extremism. But those skills that it takes to get elected are antithetical to what it takes to govern well. Too much of the debate has been issue-related debate and not character-related debate, and I think we really need profoundly to change that.

I’ve talked to the local paper awhile back and said, “Look, instead of asking, where do you stand on guns, abortion, you know, gay and lesbian rights, blah, blah, blah, pick your topics, right, because, frankly, anybody of any character and capacity can tell you where they stand. That’s not what gets you good representation.” I said to the paper, “ask people this question: Name a time when you had a strongly held position but information changed your opinion, and why did it do so? Give me an example of where you have dedicated yourself to serving others at some significant personal sacrifice. Give me some examples of people you admire on the other side who you think you could work with. how do you feel about collaboration and compromise, and give us example. Tangible examples in your life, not just rhetorical flourish or promises on issues.” Because at the end of the day, it’s the character of the person, it’s how they conduct themselves, it’s their capacity to listen, to understand, and it’s most importantly of all, their commitment to service.

One way we change this is by changing what people look for when they vote for people, by really putting that forward. What have you done with your life that tells us you’re willing to play well in the sandbox and you’re willing to put somebody else’s needs over your own? Then I guess the other question is, how do you make decisions? Does somebody just tell you what to do, or do you study issues and reach rational decisions?

All of that, from how we select people to begin with, how we prepare people, how we prepare the institution through our rules package, how we conduct ourselves once we’re in there, how we relate to one another in our rhetoric and in our conduct, all of that makes a difference. So, I think all that package has to be there.

Nehls: It seems right now censure is the main way to try to bring some kind of discipline or better behavior from some members, and there’s been a big rise in the number of censure votes. What do you make of that? Some members are pushing back like this is just a waste of time. What do you think about it?

Baird: Well, if institutional norms mattered, censure matters. but the problem is that if you’re from the extremes, censure is a badge of honor. You know, it’s a it’s a campaign tactic. “I’m proud to have been censured because you’re censuring a man who tells the truth or a woman who tells the truth, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

When you achieve office by denigrating the institution you’re seeking to become a participant in, you create a vicious and destructive cycle. Now, it’s fine to say, “Congress doesn’t work, and I want to fix it,” in a sincere manner, but that’s different than saying, “it’s a corrupt and horrible institution, and everybody in it is bad,” or, “only people who agree with me are telling the truth.”

There’s some epistemology -- what does it mean to know something? How do we know? What is a fact? How do we reason together? So, you know, you still have to be able to say you are conducting yourself contrary to the norms of this institution.

But frankly, that has to come from leadership. It has to mean something. I mean, for God’s sakes, we’re in a situation with the margins so close that we have people who’ve done pretty damn bad things: breaking the law, dishonesty, misappropriation of funds, abuse of staff, et cetera, and people [in leadership are not saying, “is this the kind of person we want in the United States Congress,” they’re saying, “gee, what’s the vote count?” I get it that the margins are close, but you know what? The tragedy is the public smells that. They say, “you guys aren’t interested in integrity. You’re not interested in solving the problems. You’re just interested in who’s got the most votes.”

Censure’s important, but if somebody says, “the election was stolen,”how do you censor someone for a belief that they believe is true, but is actually inflammatory, false, and destructive, and dangerous? That’s the challenge.

Schuman: It seems like there’s two different types of credibility gaps and you’ve described them both well. One is the credibility gap between, what people campaign on and how they act behind the scenes. I still think that most members of Congress and most staff are there trying to do the right thing.

Baird: Totally agree. And they feel this obligation to play in the bombastic space. Trump is always right or Harris is, whatever, that is their public face. But then their private face is, “no, we can reason together. We can still do deals.” And a lot of, I think, where Republicans feel unhappy is they feel like Democrats are judging them by their actions and not by their intent.

Everybody wants to be judged by, of course, by what you mean to do, but the way we really judge people is by what they actually do. And the same thing is happening with voters. Most members of Congress want to do the right thing, but we see the outliers, at least what I hope are the outliers. Because the other members are not censuring them, are not punishing them in some way, separating themselves, from our perspective, they all look the same because we can’t tell that most of these people mean to do the right thing, but they’re only tolerating Congressman X because the vote margin is thin or some other functional purpose.

Awhile back, many years ago, after I left Congress, I thought it’d be fun to have a dialogue. Actually, Bob Inglis and I worked on this. We had a briefly lived podcast called A Reasonable Conversation. That was an easy domain name to buy because nobody wanted a reasonable conversation.

Everything we’ve just said about politicians is, exponentially greater among influencers and streamers. They get their bread buttered by being extreme, by not saying, “hey, here’s a different perspective that I’ve had on my show before. I realized something I said last week is inaccurate. The other people had a good case to make, and I think we should listen to that.” That’d be an almost an Onion episode.

I do believe that most members of Congress are well-intentioned. I especially believe most staff members are. And, but again, if your leadership is out there spewing hate, and you’re not there saying, “no, that’s not right,” or “well, I agree with his policies, just not the things he says,” I’m sorry, words have consequences, and it gets people killed sometimes. What’s wrong with saying, “I disagree with what he says. I don’t hate the other side. I don’t want to see people harmed”? Nobody whose conduct is detrimental to the wellbeing of the institution and the society should be exempt from, from criticism or correction. It could be respectful, but to say, “I respectfully think the President of the United States should not talk this way, or the speaker, or the minority leader, or et cetera.” If, if they’re conducting themselves in ways that are damaging, we got to call out on that. And, and if we do it ourselves, we need to say, “I sincerely regret that I...”

So now to it back to where we started, the key point I think is there was a time when people looked up to the president and to members of Congress as not just elected officials, but ideally role models, exemplars of what a constitutional democratic republic can be when we elect good people. To the extent that our conduct and our rhetoric and our attitudes deviate from that and appeal to the lowest and most base and vitriolic desires, we create an environment that raises the threat profile. So yes, we can help people cope with that threat profile, but the most important thing we should do is reduce the threat profile itself, is reduce the factors that that are leading to that. The issue of affective polarization in Congress -- affective polarization means we don’t just disagree on policy, we think the other side is evil and bad and in some way deserving of harm -- that’s the danger. We need both sides to say we got to bring that back together.

Now as you know, I really believe service is a way to do that. I believe that when people serve together, truly serve together, they can set aside their differences and find common ground because that motive of service transcends our divisions. I think trying to restore that motive of service in the general public, not necessarily through some big national program, but honoring local -- I don’t want to use the word heroes -- just local people who through their character and kindness make a difference.

I think a lot of the changes have to come at the local level, Daniel and Chris. I really think we need to start looking in our own communities and finding examples of people who are engaging in kindness and making a difference and make that the preeminent sense of who we are as people. And then from that emerge better candidates and better parties.

One last thing, I also think there are a whole package of reforms in how we conduct elections, how we redistrict or do districts, et cetera. I personally have come to believe that the response to the gerrymandering decisions of the court is a multi-member congressional district, first two pass the post because right now, one out of three voters in this country never gets to vote for somebody who is from their same party who actually gets elected. One out of three. It’s probably 30, 40 million Americans. Historically it was blocked by civil rights activists who were believing that it was diffusing minority votes. Well, that argument’s gone. But if you had multi-member districts, you could conceivably elect persons of color in the second position possibly. You would have people from different parties representing the same district with some common interests. They both need the water treatment plant, they both need the overpass, et cetera, et cetera. I think some reforms like that might help us get there in surprising ways. I think putting forward packages like that -- progressive, constructive changes to the rules package, et cetera -- can get us there.

Schuman: Well, I, on behalf of Chris, thank you so much, Congressman Baird. Incredibly helpful, really thoughtful. Thank you.

Baird: The last thing I would say, Daniel, would be we’ve got to make sure that this message gets down to the staff level. We have to help the staff say, “look, regardless of what the big public rhetoric is, you have an opportunity every single day you work in this institution to conduct yourself with kindness and respect and professionalism.” The staff can. They’re not on TV, they’re not running for election. You mentioned earlier it’s a collaborative team. They can say, “I am going to conduct myself with dignity and courtesy and respect because that’s the kind of person I want to be.” Now, not all are going to do that, but if enough do that, it makes a big difference in how the institution works.

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