Congress isn’t generally thought of as an innovative institution, but the last twenty years have brought serious efforts to modernize aspects of its operations. I thought it might be interesting to review five significant modernization efforts and the circumstances that brought them into existence.
1. The House Modernization Subcommittee is the permanent instantiation of the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, or ModCom. That committee was created in early 2019 through a bipartisan vote of the House of Representatives and intended to issue recommendations to make Congress more effective, efficient, and transparent. Unlike the vast majority of select committees, which are not successful, the “Fix Congress Committee” issued more than 200 bipartisan recommendations over four years, more than a quarter of which have been implemented or are on their way to implementation.
Today, the ModSub, which is part of the House Administration Committee, continues to hold hearings, roundtables, issue recommendations, and use its authority to endorse changes inside the House of Representatives and beyond.
2. The Office of the Whistleblower Ombuds is an independent, nonpartisan office created in the House of Representatives to advise House offices on best practices for working with whistleblowers from the public and private sectors. It was created at the start of the 116th Congress in the wake of civil society recommendations and a GAO report.
The Whistleblower Ombuds has been a resounding success, creating a manual for offices on how to work with whistleblowers, providing training, helping offices create an intake process, and providing consultations on how to address specific questions. In 2022 alone, the office provided training to 350 individuals, 189 case consultations, 129 intake process development consultations, and 12 instances of technical legislative expertise consults.
3. The Congressional Data Task Force, formerly the Bulk Data Task Force, was created by Congress in 2012 to respond to public requests for the Library of Congress to release the data behind THOMAS, its legislative information website that was the forerunner to Congress.gov. The Task Force agreed, and Congress directed the Library to reverse its decades-old opposition and instead provide legislative information as data. That alone would be important, but the Congressional Data Task Force accomplished so much more.
The Task Force brought together internal and external Congressional stakeholders to collaborate on modernizing Congressional technology and releasing legislative data to the public. Stakeholders include political offices in the House and Senate, non-political support offices and agencies, and members of the public, such as journalists, civil society representatives, businesses, and so on. The quarterly public meetings are open to all and represent the singularly most effective working group I have ever seen in Congress. You can learn more about its work at the Legislative Branch Innovation Hub website and civil society’s Congressional Data Coalition website.
4. GAO’s Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics (STAA) team was established in 2019 to build on GAO’s efforts to provide Congress with science and technology analysis. The STAA’s historical antecedent is the defunct Office of Technology Assessment, a Congressional agency focused on examining issues involving new or expanding technologies, assessing their impacts, and analyzing alternative policies. The defunding of OTA by Newt Gingrich left a hole in Congress’s ability to address technological innovations, which only in recent years has started to be addressed in a meaningful way.
In its first three years, the STAA issued 46 foresight-oriented assessments, testified 10 times on S&T issues, issued 28 audit reports, worked with 23 Congressional committees, and has grown the team to close to 200 people. Congress needs independent help and expertise on issues ranging from AI to Zero Trust Architecture.
5. The Office of Congressional Ethics was established in 2008 in the wake of severe ethical failings inside the House of Representatives. Scandals arising from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and then-Representatives Duke Cunningham, Mark Foley, Tom Delay, as well as then-Speaker Dennis Hastert were indicative of the compromised nature of the House Ethics Committee, which not only refused to investigate wrongdoing but had its own senior staff purged after they looked into wrongdoing by House leadership.
OCE is a scrappy, independent watchdog, with limited powers. It can conduct preliminary investigations into member misconduct, take complaints from the public, and must make relevant findings publicly available. However, full investigations are left to the House Ethics Committee, which still acts slowly and is at times overly deferential to lawmakers. OCE has enough bite that members who have been subject to its review have tried on several occasions to limit its scope or eliminate the office entirely.
The importance of an office like OCE is that its vigilance can help prevent small scandals from becoming larger ones. This, at times, forces leadership to deal with issues they might otherwise sweep under the rug.
Two quick honorable mentions.
The newly established House Digital Service, modeled in part after the United States Digital Service, is a team of technology experts inside the CAO focused on addressing some of the biggest challenges to the operations of Congressional offices. Established in January 2022, the HDS was created to help “solve the unique technology challenges experienced by member and committee offices.” People inside the House firewall can visit their website at digitalservice.house.gov.
The House Office of Diversity and Inclusion was established following bipartisan recommendations of the House’s ModCom with the mission of “creating and maintaining a diverse and inclusive workforce.” The House of Representatives has struggled with managing its human capital, and ODI was intended to help address this problem by creating new pathways to recruit staff from across America and provide resources and guidance to them once they’re at work.
Of particular interest to me was that the ODI was tasked with conducting studies into staff compensation, staff demographics, and witness diversity, information that otherwise was not gathered but is essential to understanding the operations of a modern House of Representatives.
The FY24 House Legislative Branch Appropriations bill directed that the independent office be incorporated into the House’s CAO, and it is not clear how the role of the office will change or who will be responsible for the reports it previously generated.
