THE INCAPACITATED AND OBSOLETE U.S CONGRESS

Written by Lee Drutman and Steve Teles. Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the New America political reform program and author of the The Business of America Is Lobbying.

"For more than three decades the U.S. government has divested its capacity to keep up with skyrocketing numbers of lobbyists and policy institutes, well-organized partisans, and an increasingly complex social and legal context. Policymakers have increasingly turned to the information and analytical capacity provided for them by those with the biggest material and ideological stakes in the outcome. This dependence has created a power asymmetry crisis that has been quietly building for almost four decades.

Properly resourced, organized, and motivated, the institutions of government can develop the knowledge to think independently, and the resources to push back against the claims of the mobilized and wealthy in the name of the unmobilized. Government, however, cannot do this if its capacity to collect and process information has been systematically dismantled.

Today, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which provide nonpartisan policy and program analysis to lawmakers, employ 20 percent fewer staffers than they did in 1979. The same pattern of diminished in-house expertise is true throughout government.

If we can’t reduce the pressure, then we have little choice but to arm our institutions to resist it. The first step is to—finally—make Congress a place where policymaking can be informed by meritocratic expertise. America is one of the only countries in the world with a real, working legislature that is a peer to the executive.

So long as we have a congressional staff that lacks a high level of expertise, and that constantly cycles through the institution, often on their way to becoming lobbyists to help out the next class of legislative neophytes, no amount of campaign finance reform or electoral noodling will make a difference.

Policymakers do not just act; they also think. To deploy their significant capacities to tax, spend, and regulate, legislators and regulators must be able to acquire comprehensive information about social problems, weigh the merits of claims presented to them, consider a range of solutions, and anticipate the ways in which their designs could go off track. The more complexity policymakers have to deal with, the greater the strain on their ability to intelligently think before they act. With each year, the strain gets greater, because the social, political, and legal complexity all continue to grow.

With each passing year there are more products and services; there are new technologies; there is more relevant scientific knowledge. To legislate intelligently on any subject—or even to intelligently consume policy analysis—requires considerably more information and conceptual sophistication than it did at the dawn of the Reagan administration.

In 2012, there were about 1.9 million articles published in 28,000 scholarly peer-reviewed academic journals. Most of those articles are available with a few clicks of a keyboard. But information is not knowledge, which requires a high level of training in the various disciplines of social science, along with a humanistic understanding of history and a good bit of experience.

The complexity of political demands is also increasing. The number of organizations with Washington representation more than doubled between 1981 and 2006, from 6,681 to 13,776. All of these organizations are in Washington for a reason: they have policies they’d like to see enacted and/or blocked, and they want to make those demands clear. They produce information, and then take up staff time for meetings, time for responses to their queries and asks.

Lobbying expenditures have grown even more, from an estimated $200 million in 1983 to $3.24 billion in 2013—a sixfold increase, controlling for inflation. And this doesn’t count the proliferation of strategic consulting and issues management and research organizations that now fill Washington.

While many groups are indeed represented, 80 percent of lobbying spending is on behalf of business. Of the 100 organizations that spend the most on lobbying (and collectively account for about one-third of all lobbying expenditures), consistently between ninety and ninety-five of them represent business.

Washington is also now awash in privately funded policy research. The  number of Washington-based think tanks more than tripled between 1970 and 1996, from 100 to 306. There are about 1,800 think tanks in the United States . But fewer and fewer think tanks can claim the mantle of truly neutral expertise anymore. Instead, most are funded by industry, labor, or wealthy partisan donors whose official stance as “nonpartisan,” necessary for tax status, is a transparent veil for their advocacy-first work product. While such think tanks may produce much substantive analysis, their analysis is intended for (and consumed by) adherents of only one political party.

Meanwhile, outside of Washington, the internet revolution has made it easier than ever for ideological birds of a feather to share talking points and then bombard congressional offices and agency comment processes with them. Reelection-minded members of Congress devote considerable resources to responding, and have a hard time judging how representative such beliefs are.

Government is now called on to process much more information today as compared to thirty-five years ago. More different people are making more demands and producing more research and writing more analysis. Nobody can keep up.

This has consequences. Given limited time and nearly unlimited demands, policymakers have to choose who and what to pay genuine attention to. The loudest, most insistent voices have an advantage. Those who can saturate Washington by funding the most research, hiring the most lobbyists, and paying for the most elites to write op-eds highlighting and supporting their perspective are going to stay at the front of the crowd. Everyone else will recede into the background.

There is also more legal complexity: societal complexity—new technologies and new projects require new regulations. Some of it is the result of political demand complexity—many of the lobbying demands involve calls for new laws. And many of the laws are written in ways to obscure their impacts, adding a qualitative dimension to the complexity. This matters for a simple reason. To effectively make new law, one must understand existing law. To change existing law, one must understand existing law. The more expansive and complex the law, the more specialized knowledge it takes to become an expert. Government can invest in resources that would allow it to acquire this specialized knowledge, or it can rely on externally provided experts with a material stake to help it draft and enact laws. For decades, we have chosen the second.

All three types of complexity are only going to keep growing. (What intervention could possibly stop them?) If we continue on our current path of not giving the government adequate policy capacity, the gap between what our policymakers need to know to effectively govern and what they actually know will only increase. Corporate lobbyists and the most ideological of “the people” will continue to be happy to tell our government what to do, and how to do it. Lacking their own capacity, government will have no other choice but to increasingly turn to them for help. And lacking their own knowledge, policymakers will have an even harder time evaluating these analyses and suggestions on anything other than quantity and volume.

Imagine that you are a rank-and-file member of the House. Your small office of at most three or four policy staff is already stretched thin. The policy staff are also likely to predominantly be in their twenties or maybe thirties, something that shocks observers from abroad. Your staff may be bright and energetic and have genuine power (because you are too busy fund-raising or smiling before cameras somewhere, and therefore must delegate). But they don’t have the serious policy chops that can only come with years of experience.

If you want to accomplish something and raise your profile, you can turn to the armies of corporate lobbyists, who are only too happy to enlist you in their substantive policy ambitions, or you can turn to your party’s base with some symbolic position taking. You probably already chose one of these paths in your rise to getting elected. But even if you didn’t (or if we somehow reformed campaigns), you’d still find only these two paths forward to prominence.

If you are a committee leader in the House, you will have slightly more internal policy capacity, but the demands on your attention will be far greater. Everyone wants to talk to you and your staff. How will you manage these demands? If you want to accomplish anything, you will need outside help to draft and vet policy proposals.

You will also need the support of the rank-and-file members of your committee. How will you get this? Your staff is just not big enough. You will need external help. You will need to lean on either the lobbying machine of big business or the research machine of ideologically motivated or industry-funded think tanks.

Because all of your committee members have turned to outside support to develop their policy positions and proposals, you as committee chair will have less influence over them. This means that you will get a more limited set of bills and proposals out of committee. If you propose anything that goes against the preferences of big business or the ideologically mobilized, these actors will lobby the heck out of your committee members. They will deluge you with claims of the dire consequences of actions they dislike, or claim that substantial, complex measures are needed to avoid disastrous consequences. Even if you are suspicious of such claims, you are unlikely to have the knowledge to push back. If you are risk averse (and susceptible to that classic of defensive lobbying: “You don’t know what you’re doing! Section B, Subsection 48 could have unintended consequences that will cause the economy to collapse”), you will do what they suggest. This, in a nutshell, is the story of the last three decades of financial regulation, and explains why an industry that is in such bad odor still mainly succeeds at getting what it wants.

If you are in the party leadership, you are mostly in the position of choosing among the policies passed through committees. By the time you are choosing what to prioritize, the field of possible proposals is mostly limited to those that individual members and committee chairs were able to move forward—which means, essentially, those with enough outside support. From leadership’s perspectives, the more external support, the better.

The same basic situation holds in the Senate, albeit with some institutional differences. Either way, it is a formula for getting very little done—paralysis by mobilized analysis. The little that can get done will be largely limited to policies that hit the sweet spot of support from lobbyists for large corporations without intense partisans mounting serious objections, or vice versa. The rare exceptions involve scandal and societal crisis.

If you talk to lobbyists, you’ll quickly learn that a good part of what they do is help their allies with the nitty-gritty of developing and then passing policy. Some of that involves generating ideas, and some of that involves actually writing the legislation. Congressional offices rarely have the time or resources to generate their own policies—and certainly not on complex issues like derivatives.

When Congress had capacity, it had the time and resources to get together and think through legislation and oversee the rest of the government. Now it doesn’t. The time lawmakers spent in committee meetings deliberating together rose at a steady clip from the early 1960s until the late 1970s, then plummeted. The decline was partially a consequence of the time demands on members of the rise in campaign fund-raising, but the decline in staff played a critical role. So, instead of debating issues in committee meetings, members and their staff get briefed separately by lobbyists—the very people that members were now spending so much more time raising money from.

With staff numbers fixed and the demands on them increasing, the actual capacity of congressional staff to engage seriously with issues has gone down—and stayed down.

The federal government across all its branches has experienced a deterioration in its ability to acquire, process, and analyze information. But the problem is especially urgent in Congress, which is at the center of America’s current governing crisis.

How bad is the staff pay gap between Congress and K Street? Even those in the top 90 percent of salaries in personal congressional offices are barely at $100,000. Median salaries in member offices are consistently below $50,000. Committee staff earn more, but even those in the top 90 percent are only earning about $160,000, which is what a first-year associate at a Washington law firm earns. A Sunlight Foundation analysis found that the median lobbying revenue a former government staffer generated in 2012 was $300,000. This is a good proxy for salary, since lobbyists tend to be compensated based on the business they bring in. Those with solid committee experience, however, should expect to earn well above this median.

Another  Sunlight Foundation analysis found that between 1991 and 2005, Senate chiefs of staff saw their pay increase (in constant 2010 dollars) on average from $130,000 to $164,000; legislative directors saw an increase from $105,000 to $126,000, while legislative assistants’ salaries rose from $65,000 to $71,000. While these are modest increases at the high end, Washington, D.C., has become one of the most expensive cities in the United States. It’s tough to live off the government paycheck. You make so little money. One of the big things that’s wrong with the system is that somebody finally learns their job and then they have to move on, so you have a bunch of young folks who turn to lobbyists to figure out their jobs.

In 2013, the funding for the entire Senate was about $820 million. The funding for the entire House was about $1.16 billion. That $2 billion a year is considerably less than any number of Pentagon project overruns—a problem, by the way, that could be significantly reduced with better legislative oversight driven by an expert staff. Funding for the House and Senate is only about 0.2 percent of all federal discretionary funding. So of the roughly $3,000 spent per person on government agencies and programs, we spend only $6 to oversee the other $2,994. For those concerned about the malign influence of corporate power on our democracy, increasing government’s in-house nonpartisan expertise is almost certainly a more promising path forward than doubling down on more traditional reform strategies.

Additional Remarks

The lack of shared expert knowledge capacity in the U.S. Congress has created a critical weakness in our democratic process. Along with bipartisan cooperation, many contemporary and urgent questions before our legislators require nuance, genuine deliberation and expert judgment. Congress, however, is missing adequate means for this purpose and depends on outdated and in some cases antiquated systems of information referral, sorting, communicating, and convening.

Congress is held in record low esteem by the public today. Its failings have been widely analyzed and a multitude of root causes have been identified.  The absence of basic knowledge management in our legislature is a critical weakness. Congress struggles to make policy on complex issues while it equally lacks the wherewithal to effectively compete on substance in today’s 24 hour news cycle. Congress is not so much venal and corrupt as it is incapacitated and obsolete. And, in its present state, it cannot serve the needs of American democracy in the 21st century.

Members of Congress and their staff do not lack access to information. Yet information backed by financial interests and high-decibel advocacy is disproportionately represented. Most importantly, they lack the institutional wisdom that can be built via a deliberate system that feeds broadly inclusive information through defined processes of review, context, comparison and evaluation of the implications for the nation as a whole.  Concurrently, Congress also needs more expert judgment available to it during the policymaking process, which means a focus on development of knowledge.

Today’s challenges are especially evident when U.S. national interests have global implications. Not only is Congress notoriously fixated  on domestic issues, its ability to understand complex issues in context – and understand second and third order implications – is compromised.   

Specifically, knowledge asymmetry within Congress creates an uneven playing field and obstructs forward movement on policy.  Knowledge asymmetry refers to the uneven distribution of trusted quality expertise inside the institution, which hinders the ability of policymakers to see aligned interests and distorts the policy process.  A good example of this is the disparity between subject matter information provided to committees versus personal staff in DC and back home in the state or district. Committees on Capitol Hill receive the lion’s share of expertise.

Congressional staff are disaggregated. Take a typical House member. His or her DC based staff work at the center of the largest policy eco-system in the world.  Staff back home, however, have much more direct interaction with constituents, yet receive far less substantive policy assistance. This pattern continues despite the facts that globalization has blended local and national policy concerns and that today members spend considerably more time at home.   

Meanwhile, Congress' focus on information that addresses the here and now is driven by the most influential information providers to member offices. These are typically politically-oriented groups, advocacy organizations and lobbyists that operate on electoral and budget cycle timelines.  Deliberative functions necessary for healthy governance are the casualties of this accelerated pace: comparative macro and micro-analysis, forecasting, context, and institutional memory all go lacking in today’s decision-making environment.

Ultimately, the political and partisan character of information in our contemporary Congress is not balanced, especially within the ongoing process of policymaking. This current condition contrasts with the broader vision and inclusive capacity of Congress from previous decades, a capacity that provided credible knowledge and bridge building to support the compromises necessary for most policymaking.