The Top Line
This week contains the International Day of Democracy (generally not celebrated in the US), Constitution Day, a House Rules Committee hearing on the chamber rules for the 119th Congress, the Congress.gov forum and Congressional Hackathon, and so much more. Keep cool and keep caffeinated.
If you want to brush up on your personal cybersecurity at an event tailored for staff, RSVP to this virtual training next Monday hosted by the American Governance Institute, the R Street Institute, and Demand Progress Education Fund.
Notable events this week
Tuesday: HSGAC hearing on politicizing federal hiring; HSGAC markup on various good government bills
Wednesday: ModCom hearing on Continuity of Congress; House Oversight markup of good government legislation; Library of Congress public meeting on Congress.gov
Thursday: Rules Committee hearing on proposed changes to House rules; Senate HELP business meeting regarding witness subpoena; Congressional Hackathon.
Rules
What should be in the House rules? The House Rules Committee announced it will hold a member day hearing on proposals for legislative text to include as part of the House Rules for the 119th Congress on September 19th at 10:00 am. Members who wish to testify must indicate their desire to the committee by Tuesday, September 17th, at 5pm, and provide a summary of the proposal and any legislative text.
The Rules of the House of Representatives are a funny beast and they’re ultimately about power. Power in the House of Representatives is exercised through control over what legislation can advance to the floor and the structure under which it is considered, which members are appointed to various committee and leadership positions, the exercise of patronage, and the flow of financial and political support to campaigns .
In the early history of the country, the House was a small chamber and its rules were short and frequently retained intact from one congress to the next. The Rules Committee initially was a select committee, responsible for proposing updates to the chamber rules but not for crafting bespoke rules governing the consideration of particular measures. In the early days, it would only exist for a few months at the start of a Congress.
About a century in, the appropriations committee had made a successful power grab. It took advantage of gridlock in the House by using its uncommon ability to move privileged bills to the floor as a vehicle to carry other bills to the floor. It extracted a high price: significant substantive control over their contents. The ability of appropriations to reach beyond its remit, plus the chaos arising from minority veto power in the House exercised through filibusters and the “disappearing quorum,” created an environment for aggressive and visionary members to centralize power in the hands of a Standing Rules Committee around 1890.
The initial result was a triumvirate of the Speaker, Appropriations Chair, and Ways and Means Chair ruthlessly ruling the chamber through their perch on the five-member committee until a bipartisan revolt of progressive Republicans and Democrats overthrew the old system. Since then, the various factions have used the House Rules Committee to rule. It is the House Rules and separate orders that establish the primacy of the House Rules Committee. The Rules Committee itself has changed significantly. It has been ruled through bipartisan coalitions, such as the insurgents (populists and progressives with agrarian or anti-monopoly orientations) and the southern coalition (anti-New Deal and anti-civil-rights). It also has been ruled by each party that at times came to be dominated by the Speaker, intra party factions, and affinity factions.
Making matters even more fascinating is that the initial overthrow of the Speaker’s triumvirate resulted in the elevation of the party – and increased the importance of party rules. Subsequently, the parties took on some of the role of the triumvirate – controlling appointments to committees, (at times) setting the policy agenda. Important functions remained with the Rules Committee, moved into the hands of the Speaker, or are shared.
The House Rules and separate orders construct the political system, in conjunction with the party steering and policy committees, and are where the various power centers and factions are accommodated. Power is simply the ability to make some things happen and prevent other things from happening, and it can be exercised in ways that are good or bad, efficient or democratic, communal or hierarchical.
This is why Member Day at the House Rules Committee is so fascinating. It provides a look into how members wish to reform the chamber, in ways big or small, to improve its operations from their perspective. I’ve compiled a list of House Rules reform proposals from Members of Congress and civil society from the last few Congresses. And I drafted a reform agenda along with Zach Graves. My interests are the proper functioning of the chamber and promoting fluid coalitions where majorities can work their will.
For 135 years, the House Rules Committee is the House at work, and House rules are the rules of the game. This process is as close as we can get, most of the time, to seeing behind the curtain.
Congressional Hackathon & Congress.gov Forum This Week
The Library of Congress is hosting a public forum on September 18th from 1-3pm to provide “an opportunity for the public to learn about recent enhancements to Congress.gov and to provide feedback about the site.” I’ll be there, you should be too. Don’t forget to RSVP.
The Congressional Hackathon will take place on September 19th from 1-6pm. The hackathon “will bring together a bipartisan group of Members of Congress, Congressional staff, Legislative Branch agency staff, open government and transparency advocates, civic hackers, and developers from digital companies to explore the role of digital platforms in the legislative process.” Please RSVP.
Modernizing CBO
The CBO Data Sharing Act has now been passed by the House and the Senate and is on its way to the President’s desk. The legislation, co-sponsored in the House by Reps. Boyle and Arrington, will improve CBO’s ability to get relevant government data from Executive branch agencies. It says CBO can obtain data from the Executive Branch without a written agreement so long as CBO maintains the same level of confidentiality as the agency. CBO Director Phil Swagel testified before the Modernization Committee in 2021 on how obtaining data from agencies can present challenges. (See the written testimony and the QFR on page 121).
A second bill relating to CBO, the Congressional Budget Office Data Access Act, which concerns the interplay of data access and the Privacy Act, is still pending but, as we discussed last week, looks ready to go as well.
The House Budget Committee held an oversight hearing of the CBO, which turns 50 this year. Of particular interest to me was the section of Dr. Swagel’s testimony on how the Budget Committees could empower CBO could be more effective. The top suggestions: improve CBO’s access to Executive branch data, provide guidance to CBO on how it can explain its role in the budget process, and identify priorities for CBO. Here’s the hearing video.
Three House Admin Bills Advance to the Senate
By a voice vote, the House of Representatives advanced three bipartisan bills to the Senate. They are: a bill to modernize CRS’s access to data held by the Executive branch; a bill to promote electronic access to the Constitution Annotated and end unnecessary print copies; and legislation that codifies the “Congressional Observer Program,” where congressional election observers observe federal election administration procedures. (On 9/10, House Admin launched the election observer program.)
House Administration Favorably Reports A Bunch of Ops Bills
The Committee on House Administration favorably reported by voice vote a series of bills on Wednesday. They are:
– the Secure Handling of Internet Electronic Donations
– Semiquincentennial Congressional Time Capsule Act
– to procure a statue of Benjamin Franklin for the U.S. Capitol
– to create a commission to study the potential transfer of the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History to the Smithsonian Institution (and an amended version of the same bill)
– to establish additional Deputy Legislative Counsels
– to sunset the Advisory Committee on the Records of Congress
Continuity of Congress
As I write this section on 9/11, the House Admin Committee has scheduled a hearing on continuity of Congress for 9/18 at noon. This issue is close to my heart because I was on my way to an interview in the Hart Building on 9/11 and had the unpleasant experience of dealing with the anthrax attack a few weeks later. My colleague Taylor Swift has testified before the committee on this issue and I maintain an archive at continuityofcongress.org focused on the issues arising from COVID.
Zach Graves from the Foundation for American Innovation and I issued recommendations for how the House of Representatives should update its rules, which includes the recommendation that “The House should establish a special task force to explore the existing problems and propose solutions concerning security and the continuity of Congress.” Other fixes make sense, such as empowering remote committee and floor deliberations in emergency ~~ not proxy voting ~~ as well as changing the powers of the Clerk for the interregnum between the old and new Congresses. There’s a bevy of thorny questions, and I highly recommend former Rep. Brian Baird’s thoughts on continuity.
The Executive Branch’s Open Government Plan
The U.S. government put out a call for “ideas, suggestions, and recommendations for commitments that could be included in the 6th U.S. Open Government National Action Plan” on September 12. The notice, published in the Federal Register, invited everyone to submit comments by Tuesday, November. 12. Background information and directions are available on regulations.gov, and you can read the publicly posted comments here. Other countries run their own open government processes, and you can read more about them, including commitments from around the world, on the Open Government Partnership’s website. The GSA is holding a listening session on Wednesday, October 9th.
OG FAC. The GSA’s Open Government Secretariat, which leads the U.S.’s “involvement in the Open Government Partnership and works to strengthen public engagement,” recently announced the creation of an Open Government Federal Advisory Committee. This past week, the GSA Administrator named 16 individuals from civil society and government to serve on the Open Government Federal Advisory Committee, which is expected to hold its first official meeting in October. I was named chair of the advisory committee.
To learn more about the National Action Plan, visit the Open Government Secretariat’s website, join their email list, follow their LinkedIn page, and don’t forget to join the longstanding Google group.
Factions
Take a look at Sen. Cornyn’s vision to lead the Republican conference in the Senate.
Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good is expected to resign as Chair by the end of the week.
I thought about writing a long thing on factions this week, but the fight over the CR is the best teacher. The Freedom Caucus-ish wing of the party seeks to create and perpetuate an ideological litmus test of what constitutes a true Republican as a cudgel to maintain power over the party. The business-centric Republicans – Appropriators – are focused on the economic pain that would be caused by a lapse or decrease in appropriations as well as a diminution of their power. The less ideologically dogmatic Republicans, many from contested districts, do not want to draw attention to their fealty to a (potentially) unpopular stance taken by their party – their goal is to survive so they can continue to support a majority that moves matters in a conservative direction. And party stalwarts simply want to keep the party in power.
Any faction within the Republican party can have power if they choose to exercise it because of the narrow margins. The traditional response when one faction tries to assert an ideological litmus test is for a small, less dogmatic faction to build a tight intraparty faction and make an alliance on particular issues with members of the other party. To the extent that Freedom Caucus Republicans can define their ideology as the only acceptable Republican ideology, defection becomes harder.
Support Office Reports and Documents
Public Release of Capitol Police IG reports is moving forward, albeit slowly, reports Justin Papp at Roll Call. 38 of the 200+ reports are now available on the USCP IG’s website, but not on oversight.gov, the repository of most agency IG reports. The decision to make the reports publicly available is not up to the IG, which is the usual practice, but instead to the Capitol Police Board. We’ve called for more independence for the USCP IG, a call echoed by union head Gus Papathanasiou and former House Admin Chair Rodney Davis. Current Admin Chair Steil plans to ask the USCP Board for a timeline – the review of a QFR suggests that the Board has no timeline, and in 2017 the Board IMO inappropriately designed all the reports as “security information” and thus unreleasable.
The Library of Congress IG posted on the Library’s website a new report on FEDLINK, “an organization of federal agencies working together to achieve optimum use of the resources and facilities of federal libraries and information centers.” The result: “we determined that FEDLINK’s internal controls adequately minimize risk in two of the four areas noted above; however, we identified improvements that could strengthen its internal controls, particularly those related to financial reporting and vendor administrative fees.” The report is not available on oversight.gov.
The GAO IG issued its semi-annual report on its activities. It notes the Senate but not the House has passed the GAO-IG Parity Act (S.1510), which would “enhance the OIG’s independence, improve transparency, and provide parity with other federal Inspectors General.” That bill has been held at the desk in the House, and House Oversight is marking up this week the GAO-IG Parity Act (H.R. 5300), which Congress.gov has identified as related to the Senate bill.
Per the IG, the bill would require “prior congressional notification upon removal, transfer, or placement of the Inspector General on non-duty status; greater budget independence; codification of the existing practice of having separate OIG counsel; and removal of a statutory limitation on staff pay.” During the six month reporting period, the IG closed ten and opened eight investigations, processed 44 substantive hotline complaints, and continued work on two performance audits.
In addition, an external review of the GAO-IG found that the office “passed” the audit – the office is “conforming in all material respects to Government Auditing Standards and applicable legal and regulatory requirements.”
The GAO gave notice of three new restricted reports: “Special Operations Forces: DOD Should Reassess Its Need to Acquire Armed Overwatch Aircraft,” “Army Personnel: Improvements Needed to Address Recruitment, Training, and Retention Challenges in Select Specialties,” and “Defense Fuel Contracts: Risks Related to Heavy Reliance on Contractors in Indo-Pacific Region Require DOD Action.” Follow this link if you’d like to request a copy of the reports.
Odds and ends
Picture it. Noted reporter and painter Pablo Manríquez has launched an effort to modernize the Capitol art collection. He proposes to donate eight paintings of Senate food workers for display in the Senate, drawing attention to often overlooked staff and bringing representation to people underrepresented on the walls of Congress.
What is excellent government? This.
USASpending.gov, the original “Google for government” designed to track federal spending, needs some work, according to POGO’s Janice Luong in an interview with Federal News Radio. She points to the bipartisan Federal Sub Award Reporting System Modernization and Expansion Act of 2024 as a way of improving data fed into that system by prompting agency stakeholders to issue annual reports on improving the system and re-empowering GSA’s IG to review the system.
How do “executive privilege” and Congress’s oversight powers intersect? The foundation for executive privilege is “largely constructed on the basis of unnecessary, ill-considered dicta,” according to a paper by Jonathan Shaub that just won the Levin Center’s annual award for excellence in oversight research.
Good luck, CRS, writes Kevin Kosar.
Congrats, GPO, for winning the 2024 service to the citizen award for making it easier for current/former military and families to renew their ID cards.
