An objective look at Congress’ ability to conduct effective oversight
Interview transcript:
Terry Gerton: Well, you make a case in a recent paper that Congress has been neglecting its oversight role over the last two decades. What’s your evidence?
J.D. Rackey: Yeah. So the claim is pretty well substantiated in political science literature, and I’m trying to raise that here in the D.C. world, that there’s been a long, steady, bipartisan decline in how Congress approaches its oversight. And there’s been a decline, in particular, in the number of hearings that Congress has been holding — and oversight hearings — and that even within those hearings, if you take a look under the hood at who’s testifying, there’s been a decline in the number of executive branch witnesses appearing before Congress, as well as inspectors general and GAO entities kind of providing oversight information to the Congress.
Terry Gerton: So it’s a bipartisan affliction. Is one party better than the other at this process?
J.D. Rackey: Looking at the data across the years, it seems to be pretty equal on both sides. There’s been a turn over the past 20 or 30 years away from bipartisan, fact-based investigative oversight toward more gotcha politics that is somewhat less substantive — might be more focused on blaming individuals and officials for certain outcomes rather than focusing on identifying policy solutions for moving forward. All of those things kind of contribute to a more hollow, less informed oversight process.
Terry Gerton: What would you say makes for a good oversight committee hearing?
J.D. Rackey: So a couple things. Some of this has been identified by political scientists. A lot of it has been identified by the now-defunct Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. And there are a couple of things. One is, are the majority and minority parties engaging with each other in setting the agenda for oversight hearings? Are they coming up at the beginning of the Congress or beginning of the year, or even beginning of a month, saying these are the things we want to tackle, here are the types of questions we want to dive into, here are the types of people we want to hear from, and the issues that we’re concerned about? And so from agenda-setting through toward when they decide to have a hearing and they’re going to engage witnesses, are they asking questions that are trying to get at the substantive policy material versus trying to maybe form soundbites that go viral and feed into other incentives that members might have beyond just the policymaking?
Terry Gerton: Are there structural features that keep that from happening, or is it more of a cultural challenge?
J.D. Rackey: It’s a little bit of both. When there is divided government, there might be more incentive for engaging on a bipartisan basis, rather than when there’s a unified government. But some of the structural issues are that committee staff sizes have shrunk over the past 30 years. There’s a lot of turnover in committee staff. So you lose a lot of that institutional knowledge of how the executive branch works and how the oversight committees have engaged with the executive branch in the past. There’s also just basic technology problems. Up until the beginning of last Congress, committees didn’t have e-discovery tools, so they couldn’t process all of the information that they were getting from the executive or from other entities in a coherent manner to inform their work. And so there’s, across the board, a capacity and resource problem that Congress faces — and congressional committees face — that helps them make sense of what they should be doing on any particular issue. And there have been recommendations put forward. The bulk purchasing of e-discovery tools was one of them that has been implemented. Another one that’s been suggested is to offer bipartisan oversight training for congressional staff so that they know how to engage on a bipartisan basis in fact-based oversight.
Terry Gerton: So you mentioned this capacity challenge, but both the House and the Senate have dedicated oversight committees. The legislative branch also has GAO and the Congressional Research Service. So altogether, are those groups able to do their jobs? Are they doing their jobs?
J.D. Rackey: So the point I make in the piece is I think the inspectors general, GAO, are very much doing their jobs. There’s been 14,000 recommendations put forward by Offices of Inspector General. There’s another 5,000 put forward by GAO. The problem is that those recommendations are maybe not getting into the decision-making pipeline of Congress because of the decline in the number of hearings that oversight committees — not just the Oversight Committee, but oversight subcommittees and all committees in general — have been having. Part of that decline is the result of a shift in incentives for members of Congress away from committee work toward more leadership-centered lawmaking and legislating. So they put their time in elsewhere. Another piece of it is, as previous BPC research highlights, not only has there been a decline in hearings, but the hearings that Congress does have are all stacked on top of each other. There are time conflicts. So when you watch a hearing and you see a member pop in and pop out, it’s not that they’re not interested or going to do something else — it’s probably because they’re running between three, maybe four hearings at the same time. And so when they are engaged in oversight, it’s hard for them to really drill down into the substance of any one particular hearing because they have so many competing demands on their time.
Terry Gerton: I’m speaking with J.D. Rackey. He’s a senior policy analyst in the Structural Democracy Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. I have been a witness in many of those hearings where people pop in and pop out and three people are sitting on the dais and maybe someone else comes in and asks their questions and departs. So it really does get back to the capacity question, I think. And your paper does make some specific recommendations for reform. Scheduling is one of them. But there’s one that I’m really interested in — you recommend that Congress should establish a bipartisan, bicameral commission on evidence-based policymaking to encourage and facilitate better use in the legislative process. They passed a law for the executive branch to tell them to do that in 2018. Are you suggesting here that Congress takes a little bit of its own medicine?
J.D. Rackey: Yes, and I’m not the first to suggest this. That recommendation comes from the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, of which I was a staff member. I should be transparent about that. But BPC has long been supportive of this effort, as well as getting more evidence into policymaking work both in the executive branch and within Congress. And what the Modernization Committee found and why they recommended this commission is that, by and large, there’s a misperception that Congress just doesn’t know anything — that it doesn’t have enough expertise. The problem is not a want for information. The problem is one of operationalizing the information it does have, both internally and that it receives externally. And just as I was referencing earlier, the tools and infrastructure within Congress are so severely outdated and nonexistent that the committee recommended this Evidence-Based Policymaking Commission to do a real deep dive into what tools and structures need to be either created or shifted within the Congress to make it better able to use the data that is already being supplied to it on one hand, and as society continues to evolve and grow, how can it maybe start intaking even more information into the policymaking process?
Terry Gerton: How do you assess the odds of a commission like that being established?
J.D. Rackey: Well, the bill to create it was just reintroduced, I think like a week ago, by Mr. Timmons and Mr. Peters on a bipartisan basis. This is the third Congress that it will have been introduced on a bipartisan basis, but each time it is reintroduced, I think the conversation moves a little bit forward. Anyone in D.C. knows it takes a long time to get any forward action, particularly through Congress. So I think it’s slow going, but I continue to be hopeful that Congress is moving forward and coming around to the idea that it needs to make better use of its data. Case in point: a baby step toward that this commission could build on is the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act. This was an act passed a couple of years ago saying that Congress mandates all of these reports from the executive branch all the time, and they end up somewhere. We don’t know where. We don’t even know how many reports are mandated of agencies. So they passed this bill to create a portal where all of those reports live. And that portal is now live. It’s maintained by GPO. And so the Evidence-Based Policymaking Commission could then look at that portal, say, OK, now we have a repository of reports. What’s the next step toward getting that repository into regular, everyday use of congressional staff, of members, and things like that?
Terry Gerton: Well, as you say, baby steps, but maybe progress.
J.D. Rackey: I like to think it’s progress.
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