The Top Line
This past week was insanely busy, which is not surprising considering it’s the penultimate week before Congress goes on recess for the election, not returning until November 12th.
Inside we cover everything from some great suggestions for updating the rules of the House of Representatives, a public conversion on Congress.gov, the Congressional Hackathon 6.0, the overprioritization of constituent communications by some offices, congressional unions, an odd lobbying loophole, and what happens when you read too many government documents.
There’s also an interesting article on the lack of philanthropic support for investing in democracy reform. Boy, is that true – especially for what happens in between elections. That is also an opportunity for me to shamelessly ask you to support this little newsletter, which is a lot of work.
Notable bills on the floor this week include: the CBO Data Access Act (S. 1549), the NAPA Reauthorization Act (S. 133), the GAO Database Modernization Act of 2024 (S.679), and, of course, a continuing resolution.
House Rules Member Day
The House Rules Committee held its Member Day hearing on Wednesday and I had the pleasure of attending in person. Roll Call and Politico recapped the proceedings and you can watch it here. (The witness statements do not yet appear to be online).
Parental proxy. There was a moment when time seemed to stop. Rep. Pettersen, who was advocating for the House to adopt a narrow proxy voting procedure for members on parental leave, announced she was 20 weeks pregnant. The buzzing in the room ceased and everyone focused on her. She had explained that of the 12,500 members who have served since 1789, only 12 gave birth during their term, and that there are only 37 members with children under the age of 18. But I could tell that her personal disclosure made the issue real.
Adding a Cradle Clause to the House Rules that allows for postpartum participation has come up before. Rep. Luna made a similar case in January along with Rep. Jacobs, who introduced a bipartisan resolution, H. Res. 967, with 34 co-sponsors. (Apparently Rep. Wasserman Schultz also submitted written testimony on the issue). There also are proposals to extend that capability prior to birth if health issues develop, or in some other circumstances, such as members who are being treated for major health issues like cancer.
There are pieces of this puzzle that will need to be addressed, such as whether you count a member present for quorum purposes. And we don’t want to go back to the bad old days where the chair held proxy votes in their pocket. In my view, allowing for fully remote participation – an audio-visual hookup – would go a long way to addressing a large number of the concerns.
The Committee Chair did not address the issue, but Ranking Member McGovern spoke to the need to allow flexibility for new parents and in other circumstances. The House should not be a body that operates routinely, but he expressed openness to cases of allowing proxy voting.
TS//SCI Clearances. Rep. Castro, who is a senior member of Armed Services and & House Intelligence, argued it is essential for members to have one personal office staffer who can support their classified work. For the last three years, every senator has been afforded one staffer who can obtain a Top Secret //Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS//SCI) clearance, but in the House a personal office staffer can only obtain a Top Secret clearance. As the executive branch classifies higher amounts of information and inflates the levels at which they are classified, staff are locked out of briefings, the SCIF, and providing the appropriate support work.
The request is for direction to update the House Security Manual so as to provide a process for staff to apply for a TS//SCI. This wouldn’t increase the overall number of people with clearances and the review process is the same for a TS and a TS//SCI. Rep. Castro also introduced a letter signed by many members in support of this policy change.
RM McGovern explained he understood Rep. Castro’s concerns and had worked on the issue the last time Dems came into power. For full disclosure, I’ve previously submitted testimony in favor of the policy advocated by Rep. Castro.
The interregnum. Rep. Foxx argued for a change in how members-elect become members. Traditionally, the Speaker administers the oath, although she argued it’s an open question as to whether they become members then or at noon on January 3rd, as stated in the Twentieth Amendment. A problem arose in the 118th Congress where members could not receive intelligence briefings or conduct oversight because of the interminable Speaker election process. Instead, members-elect should sign an oath-of-office card, at which point they officially become members. She noted she had introduced legislation, H.R. 1000, to this effect.
In reviewing the legislation, this seems like a good idea although an accounting would have to be made for when there are challenges to the election of a member. But as those members aren’t sworn in by the Speaker at the mass-swearing-in until the House makes a determination about who to seat, her approach would work for the vast majority of cases.
Rep. McGovern indicated this was the first time he had seen an amendment along these lines.
BUDS. Reps. Kilmer and Cleaver argued in favor of modifying the House rules so that two members could be indicated as the primary sponsors of legislation, mirroring the text of the BUDS Resolution, H Res. 668. The BUDS resolution requires one Member from the majority party and the other from the minority party.
I think this is generally a good idea, but I’m not a fan of requiring one Member from the majority and another from the minority. Historically, there have been multiple parties, so it could get messy, and how do you treat two independents, and yada yada. Two members would be cleaner. Rep. McGovern also pointed out that there might be reasons why you’d want two primary sponsors of legislation, such as two members from the same state.
Another possible issue can be the extent to which the House Rules provide particular privileges to the sponsor of a measure. If you have two sponsors, it could make things dicey. I think the point of having two lead sponsors is to give equal credit. Accordingly, it may make sense to designate one member as the lead sponsor, the other as the co-lead sponsor, and all other members as co-sponsors. It would allow for credit sharing but not create unanticipated changes in the ability of the co-lead sponsor to make motions on the bill.
Discharge Petitions. Rep. Foster made a fascinating argument that signers of discharge petitions should have the option of keeping their names secret while a petition is pending so that leadership cannot punish them. He argued that there are a range of matters where 70-80 percent of members agree, but they’re afraid of retaliation by the Speaker.
From my reading on the topic, IIRC who signed on to discharge petitions was not historically made publicly available while they were pending, but members could see who else had signed by looking at the physical document. This is how progressives beat the southern caucus on civil rights – by publicly disclosing members who said they supported civil rights but did not in fact sign the petition. They did this by looking at the signatories, memorizing the list, and giving it to the press. This changed IIRC in the 1970s when the House Rules were reformed.
The number of members required to sign a discharge petition has varied throughout the history of the House. The threshold was initially set at 100 in 1910, 150 in 1924 and raised to 218 in 1935. Don’t forget that these changes were not pure, but a reaction to where power lay in the chamber. In 1910, a bipartisan coalition of progressive Republicans and populist Democrats allied together to break the stranglehold of the party leadership as exercised through the Rules committee.
With the parties having a high barrier to collaboration and significant control of the Rules Committee by leadership, it would be interesting to see a lower threshold for discharge combined with a requirement that some signatories must be from a second party.
With respect to Rep. Foster’s proposal, I am wondering how this would work in practice. Would members sign the petition in person or virtually? Would leadership or the Clerk’s office be able to see who signed, or the total number of signatories, or something else?
Rep. Kilmer also testified in favor of creating a new joint committee on streamlining the legislative process to expedite legislation that has already passed one chamber; establishing a select committee on strengthening our democracy; biannual, bipartisan retreats for members of Congress; and bipartisan agenda setting retreats for every committee.
Rep. Griffith testified on a number of matters that would empower committees and the rank and file. I think his recommendation where a committee that has reported legislation can force other committees to report out their legislation within a set period of time is worth considering.
Griffith also suggested that committee size – the number of members on a committee – should be proportional to the overall chamber membership, with the possible exception of the Rules Committee. Rep. McGovern made a very salient point that the Rules Committee’s purpose is not about fairness in how legislation is presented. Presumably, he meant it was about the majority working its will.
Various other proposals. There were other proposals made, including a handful that were the subject of written testimony (which does not yet appear to be public). I am interested to see Rep. Mullen’s proposals w/r/t codifying the House Digital Service, adjusting staff pay for inflation, and reducing the number of member travel days. Also looking forward to seeing Rep. Takano’s proposal to create a House Office for Science and Technology.
House Rules Recommendations
But wait, there’s more? I know this is getting long into the rules, but I would be remiss if I did not mention that the Sunwater Institute released a series of recommendations to update the rules of the House. (Don’t forget: we at AGI released comprehensive bipartisan recommendations with the FAI on House Rules reforms back in August).
I’m not going to go through all their recs, but there are some items I’d like to point out.
Pretty much anything they have on scheduling for the floor or committees makes sense (although I probably wouldn’t start the work week on Sunday evening). So extending the workweek to five days in session, reducing overlapping committee meeting times, and so on are all sensible. Similarly, their recs to more evenly balance majority and minority staff on committees and granting subcommittee chairs control over hiring a staffer seem reasonable. It also makes sense to raise member pay, although that can’t be done through the House rules AFAICT.
As you know, I’m keeping a running list of reports that make recommendations concerning the House Rules, whether from members or civil society, on this wiki page. Let me know if I’ve missed yours.
Public Forum on Congress.gov
The Library of Congress held its fifth annual public forum on Congress.gov this past Wednesday. Around 50 people RSVP’d to attend in person and up to 500 RSVP’d to participate virtually. The first few public forums had been directed by Appropriators, and it appears that the frequency might increase to twice a year.
This is a highly scripted event with three-quarters of the 2 hour meeting featuring presentations by leadership or the senior experts from within the Library or their data partners. The focus of the presentations generally are on what has happened over the previous year, and questions from the public are generally focused on how Congress.gov should evolve in the future or enhance the services that it is providing.
The question and answer interchange is where we can learn about what the Library might be doing or planning, although answers with respect to goals and timelines are generally kept vague. Presentations and answers from the data partners – the House Clerk, the Secretary of the Senate, the Government Publishing Office – generally go much more in depth and look towards the future. In this respect, their panel presentation, which is a loose fit for an event focused on Congress.gov, is more like a quarterly meeting of the Congressional Data Task Force, which tends to be more informal and less scripted.
Let’s start with good news. It’s been 12 years since the launch of beta.congress.gov – a refreshed THOMAS was something requested by the public for at least a decade, and it is receiving 1m hits per month. The recent-ish release of a Congress.gov API is also a big success, receiving 20-40m hits per month. And I’m glad to hear the last element of THOMAS/LIS was retired earlier this year. That’s been a long time coming.
It’s also great to hear about the success of the Constitution Annotated online, something I’ve wanted since 2009. It received 15 m pageviews in 2023, and the LC is planning on adding a new section that summarizes cases concerning constitutional issues pending before SCOTUS. As of Constitution Day – September 17th, there is now a monthly podcast on the Constitution that uses audio clips and statements by the justices explaining their decisions. This is a smart move in the right direction.
It was also great to see senior folks inside the Library speak at the event, including CIO Judith Conklin, Librarian of Congress Aslihan Bulut, Director of IT Design Jim Karamanis, Law Library Chief of External Relations Robert Brammer, and others who run particular programs or projects. I had hoped to see either the outgoing or incoming director of CRS.
I can’t underscore how much of a sea change this is. Fifteen years ago it was possible to meet with some of the offices, notably the Law Librarian of Congress, but much of the rest of the Library of Congress was closed off to the public. Now it is possible to meet with many of the decision-makers and implementers.
There remains a tension as to the extent to which Congress.gov should be the place where congressional staff and the public can find useful information about Congress, and also on how it should be made available. For example:
– Why does Congress.gov not include Roll Call vote information from the House and Senate? Surely the information can be published on the House and Senate websites and then incorporated into Congress.gov, just like committee hearings info.
– Why does Congress.gov not include information about the scheduling of floor proceedings? Surely the argument that the sources of that information are partisan is inapt, as much information about chamber activities comes from partisan sources. Heck, the Clerk is a partisan position and information from Clerk resources are readily incorporated, such as committee proceedings, which themselves come from the partisan committees. If the Majority Leader is the most reliable source of information on the House floor, shouldn’t information from that source be incorporated? We can’t pretend that the House and Senate are not partisan institutions.
– Will Congress.gov allow people to request copies of CRS reports via the Congress.gov API, or make available the historical reports? The answer that CRS is busy publishing its reports as HTML and thus cannot do anything else until that is done doesn’t make a lot of sense. The request for improvements w/r/t public and Congressional access to historical CRS reports is longstanding, having been raised for decades. It would make sense to have a long term roadmap for how to manage CRS reports– striving to make them available in various formats, through various technologists, and in as complete a fashion as possible.
– Why can’t the appropriations tracking resources include legislation as soon as it’s available from the appropriations committee and not wait until it’s been introduced and available from GPO? Appropriations legislation moves quickly and by the time it’s on Congress.gov the legislation often has moved forward considerably. CRS has the editorial responsibility about what to include – so is this something they have considered and what was their conclusion?
– Is there a reason why a curated version of the internal feedback repository cannot be shared with the public so we could indicate which matters are more important to us and help the LC prioritize? We understand that the Congress.gov team receives off-topic comments, so perhaps they could be filtered out? There’s a GitHub repo for the Congress.gov API, so why not for Congress.gov?
I am sure there are good answers to these questions. Maybe it’s because of insufficient resources. Or because they’re waiting for congressional direction (or because they don’t want to do it and must be directed to do it). Or there’s an internal turf war. Or because the answer would displease an important stakeholder. Or that’s how they’ve been doing things for years. Or it’s on the roadmap but they don’t want to talk about it because things might change.
Fortunately, these incentives might change based upon language included in the FY2024 House Approps bill. It says: “The Library should continue to host these public forums, both in person and virtually, at least once a year and continue to report on the recommendations it receives, including making those recommendations available to the public.” These reports contain a LC analysis of the feasibility and costs of implementing public recommendations and may help provide the feedback we need to better understand the Library’s limitations and temper our requests accordingly.
I’ll publish a full summary of the various presentations and the Q&A on the Congressional Data Coalition website and link to it from a future First Branch Forecast newsletter.
Congressional Hackathon
This newsletter has already hit the point of information overload and we haven’t even talked about the 6th Congressional Hackathon, which took place on Thursday. I don’t have the time or energy to write about it in detail and still get this newsletter out at a reasonable time, so let me just say it was awesome. It had great attendance, strong support from political leaders from both parties, and tons of energy.
I’ll be writing the whole thing up and will have a summary in a future newsletter. Does that sound fair? Thanks. 🙂
Too much official communications?
Are members using tax dollars for campaign-related communications? The average member of the House spends 4.5% of their MRA on printing & reproduction and 2.1% on franked mail, according to Legistorm.
But, in the first half of the year, Rep. Mooney spent 33% of his MRA on printing and reproduction and 18% on franking. Mooney ran for the vacant West Virginia Senate seat and lost the primary election to Jim Justice. Communications sent to his constituents include items entitled “election integrity,” “stopping the invasion,” and so on.
Rep. Thanedar spent 55% towards printing and reproduction and 3% on franking. He won a contested Democratic primary election in August. Communications sent to his constituents appear to be more commonplace, and include these Facebook ads.
The House prohibits the use of official resources for campaign or political purposes and discloses franked mail at https://masscommsdisclosure.house.gov.
I’m not an expert on member communications to constituents or what crosses the line into campaign-related communications. But these tremendous expenditures for communications absent a major natural disaster are pretty fishy. The House should consider capping the amount of official money an office can spend on printing & reproduction and franked mail at some reasonable multiple of typical expenditures, with special dispensation available to be provided by the Franking Commission.
Congressional unions
Staff at Reps. Pocan and Hoyle received a significant pay bump and other benefits upon signing a MOU with their bosses while negotiations continue towards a collective bargaining agreement, Jim Saksa reported for Roll Call. Pocan’s staff received a retroactive pay bump of 8.5% on average, with junior aides receiving 10%. Eleven staff in Hoyle’s office received a 4.7% COLA backdated to May.
I haven’t looked at this in a while, but as of May 2023, eight offices had certified unions and seventeen were at some point in the process. As you might recall, nearly 80 organizations signed a letter in support of Congressional unions in 2022. The current House majority attempted to roll back union organizing in the rules package for the 118th Congress, but as Kevin Mulshine explained in this report, House staff continue to have the right to unionize.
House of Reps New AI Policy
The Committee on House Administration and CAO announced a new AI policy on September 19th. I believe this is the first AI policy of any federal legislature anywhere. I have not seen a public link to the text of HITPOL 8.0, but there is a fact sheet from the House Admin Committee.
Science and technology at GAO
Taka Ariga, the first director of GAO’s Innovation Lab, reflects on his experience. Ariga left GAO recently to serve as chief data officer at the Office of Personnel Management.
It’s also notable that Tim Persons, who joined GAO in 2008 and served as the GAO’s Chief Scientist and led the Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics team, left GAO at the start of this year to go to PWC.
Lobbying loophole
While Congress imposed strict limits on lobbyist-funded travel following the 2007 lobbying scandals, lobbyists and special interests have found ways to bypass those restrictions at a massive scale through use of nonprofits with ties to the lobby industry, according to a new report from Politico. The underlying issue the law sought to address was to prevent lobbyists from using educational events as an opportunity to build personal relationships with lawmakers, advocate on their pet issues, and set up a favor-trading dynamic. An investigation by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland reveals that U.S. representatives and their staff have taken over 17,000 privately sponsored trips since 2012, many paid for by organizations with deep ties to lobbyists, and the programming provides an opportunity for lobbyists to get to know congressional staff.
The top player is the Congressional Institute, which sponsored over 4,200 trips, with AIPAC at #2 at 800, the Louisiana Sugar Cane Foundation and Consumer Technology Association as big players. The article focused on the Congressional Institute, which funded trips primarily for Republican staff, funded by dues from private interest groups. These trips allow lobbyists and industry leaders to mingle with lawmakers and their aides, skirting restrictions intended to prevent undue influence.
The rules that bar lobbyists from arranging corporate-sponsored travel do not apply to nonprofits, which has led to concerns about loopholes in transparency and accountability. Critics, such as Anna Massoglia of OpenSecrets, Meredith McGehee, and Craig Holman of Public Citizen, call current rules worthless and argue that these trips function like legal “money laundering,” enabling lobbyists to influence Congress in informal social settings.
The Congressional Institute is the author of the excellent “Surviving Inside Congress” book, which is distributed for free to Congressional staff. It describes itself as [hosting] “major conferences for the benefit of Members of the United States Congress as well as a number of smaller gatherings, all devoted to an examination of important policy issues and strategic planning.”
This is not a new issue, by the way. See this 2012 Roll Call report that reports the same travel loophole being used in the exact same way. There are a host of other travel issues, such as this one related to foreign governments and discussed in ProPublica in 2012.
Factions
Who will lead the party caucuses in the Senate? Politico has a good look on the jockeying for the #3 Dem spot + the GOP conference chair.
Andy Harris will serve as chair of the Freedom Caucus.
Modernizing Congress Reports
The House Administration Committee released a series of progress reports on efforts to modernize Congress. They include: quarterly report 13 for standardized formats for legislative documents; quarterly report 14 for the comparative print suite; and quarter 13 report for committee votes and tools.
Support Office Reports and Documents
Tracking technology-related labor costs at the Library of Congress is the focus of a new LC IG report, which found 3 deficiencies in the LC’s practices.
CRS released its annual report for FY 2023. Yes, FY 2025 starts in two weeks and it seems the reports are being released later and later. We’ve published CRS’s annual reports from 1970 forward on our Wiki. The report, which appears more substantive than prior reports, notes that in FY 2023, the agency:
– launched Minversa, its congressional relationship management system, which is the first new component of IRIS, a new system to track and respond to members. The previous system, by the way, was called ISIS.
– “began putting in place the infrastructure” for exploring AI and machine learning, “with the goal of expediting searches” and writing high quality bill summaries.
– focused on the needs of the workforce, opening lines of communication, increasing transparency in the decision-making process, and expanding workplace flexibility
– buried in the doc, it talkies about the success of the Congress.gov API, which is a welcome improvement and the subject of repeated public requests for almost a decade
– began an internal inventory of potential use cases for incorporating AI into CRS’s work
GPO largely complies with anti-gag provisions, according to a new GPO IG report, which made four recommendations to improve GPO’s compliance.
Excess and obsolete paper and secure documents was the focus of the GPO IG report that resulted in “three recommendations to address the secure storage of defective U.S. passport books, inventory control system reviews, and security protocol training.”
An audit of the USCP’s books for FY23-22 was published by the USCP IG this week. The December 2023 report “discusses a number of internal control deficiencies” that are of concern but “did not rise to the level necessary to be included in the report on the financial statement audit.” The document says approval for public release by the USCP Board was granted on May 14, 2024 (but obviously it did not go online until this week).
A review of anti-gag provisions in non-disclosure agreements was released by the USCP IG this week for a March 20, 2024 report that is marked as approved for public release on July 8, 2024. The two-page report says USCP does not require employees to sign nondisclosure agreements, but that the USCP has developed a draft nondisclosure agreement to apply to all new and newly promoted employees. In addition, USCP apparently has other nondisclosure agreements that apply to specific bureaus or offices, and identified four forms and one policy that failed to include the anti-gag provision.
Why do I read the documents? In the QFR from the newly released transcript on oversight of US Capitol Security, Chief Sund throws his senior team under the bus. See numbered page 209.
Q: In your opinion, as former chief, what was the primary cause of [the lack of clear communication on operational procedure, which led to a perceived discouragement from using force] other than lack of operational knowledge?
A: I think the primary cause for miscommunication was that my two assistant chiefs who oversee operations froze, due to a lack of experience and failed to appropriately deal with the situation and enact effective communications, due to a sense of shock from what they were dealing with.
Q: Based on your experience that day, what type of additional training do you recommend for leadership within the department?
A: Stress test your leaders, policies and procedures.
When reading that, I wonder who was responsible for implementing those stress tests.
Odds and Ends
Congress is the first branch of government, not a co-equal branch of government. Why do we call it co-equal? It was one of Nixon’s dirty tricks – an effort at aggrandizement of the Executive branch. And it’s the mantra of the White House as it chips away at Congress’s power.
Why is the Open Government Partnership failing to get traction in the US? Alex Howard argues the OGP is unsuccessful and it’s because Congress and the judicial branch are not involved. (That’s not the only reason, he writes.)
The National Archives is in danger of being swamped by a digital tsunami. “Not only is NARA starved for funding, understaffed and facing a mountain of 13 billion pages to digitize, it’s also about to be engulfed by a digital tsunami of new records. At the same time, backlogs persist in declassification of important chapters in history, a long-running crisis that involves not only NARA but also various national security agencies.”
But it’s not all bad news. The Archives got a close-up from 60 Minutes.
