How Congress has managed to improve its own operations and capacity

It may not look like it, but the House of Representatives has been undergoing a steady self-modernization for the last few years. It’s managing its workforce better and has made technology strides, according to the Popvox Foundation, whose founder Marci Harris joins me now.

Interview transcript: 

Marci Harris 
Well, it’s a good question. I would say we are Congress fans. Most of our staff are former congressional staffers who continue to share love of the institution and also left with a lot of opinions about how things could work better. So we have a bipartisan crew that continues to work on connecting the dots of what’s possible and sharing new ideas and encouraging Congress to invest in itself. I just do want to flag that while it is true that the select committee on modernization in the house was not continued for the 119th Congress, that work now continues in an actual subcommittee of the Committee on House administration. So there is a modernization subcommittee now, which was actually another big modernization, and it continues the tradition of having equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats and working in a very bipartisan way.

Tom Temin 
And your most recent look at it, your foundation’s most recent look had a lot of detail about the modernization in how Congress treats its own workforce. And as most people realize, there’s committee staffs and there’s personal staffs of members, and they add up to tens of thousands of people. So tell us what some of the advances have been there in the human capital side of Congress, if you will.

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Marci Harris 
Sure. And some of these innovations, I think, for people who are not familiar with the legislative branch, you might have already thought that they existed, and they didn’t. That includes now the fact that the house has a human resources department. It’s for so long HR functions were handled primarily by each individual office with individual policies and standards. And while that is still somewhat the case, there is now within the chief administrative office a place where HR forms and tips and policies are handled. There’s a new system for workforce training and onboarding. There have been increases in the ability of the house to pay its staff and disconnecting staff pay. Remember, pay used to be that you could never pay a staffer more than a member. There’s greater pay transparency, and even small things like dedicated co working spaces within the house campus. So again, all of these things are pretty normal in almost any other workforce in America. In most cases, we’re talking specifically about the house, although the Senate has innovated in its own way. These are massive improvements.

Tom Temin 
Yeah. I was going to ask the Senate is a little bit slower, more deliberative, you might say, to make a pun, than the House is. So would you say the House is ahead of the Senate in terms of some of these HR innovations?

Marci Harris 
So definitely, they are two different bodies moving at different paces, and of course, there are many fewer offices and slower turnover in the Senate just because of the nature of the terms. So it is definitely the case that the House has been leading through its modernization efforts much more visibly to adopt some of these innovations. I would say that the Senate does move more slowly, but also, I think, has different dynamics to contend with. But we’re hopeful to see some of these ideas spread.

Tom Temin 
And among the stories that have circulated over the years was the widely differing ways in which members would treat their staffs. And in the modern workforce, the 21st century workforce, at least in countries like the United States, there are standards for how you have to treat people, regardless of the business you’re in. Would it be accurate to say that as a result of some of these innovations, that staff can expect more uniform or standardized practices across the member roster.

Marci Harris 
To a certain extent. I think that observation is very accurate, and it is also the case that in many cases, when labor standards are put into law, Congress is exempt from the very standards that it puts in place for other workforces. It is also very much, the case that the skills that make one a really great candidate are not always the same skills that make one a really great manager or even great hirer of other managers. So in some cases, having the institution augment professional development and training is a real improvement, where previously, there really were no resources for that. So it’s very difficult in the House to have top down standards. Part of the constitutional structure is that really none of the institutions within the House can actually tell individual members what to do. But to offer shared training recommendations, share best practices, etc., I think really starts to change the expectation and also open the door for staffers and managers to share information with each other.

Tom Temin 
We were speaking with Marci Harris, she’s executive director of the Popvox Foundation, and your latest report also details some of the technological advances in Congress, which has been notoriously stodgy and behind the times for many decades. What have they done more recently that reflects better on their technology base and how it affects their ability to operate in legislation.

Marci Harris 
I get a little excited about the technology advances in Congress, and that is because it really is even beyond just procuring a new system or changing the rules, I think what we’re seeing is a foundation for ongoing improvement, which is really important. We like to say that modernization is not a destination to be reached. Hello, we’re modern, and now we’re going to stop. But rather a process to put in place that allows for continuous innovation. And that’s what I think we’re seeing within the house with the creation of house digital services, which, of course, learned a lot from the efforts in the executive branch. There also was the creation and appropriation to support a modernization initiatives fund, which provides funding each year it’s been reauthorized at ten million to support innovative technology projects for the institution. I actually have to commend the house on being extremely proactive with the introduction of generative AI, they actually, very early on, so as early as June of 2023, brought on a detailee from the Government Accountability Office to handle, and this is the Committee on House administration, to handle AI policies within the legislative branch. So she has put in place a system of receiving regular updates from legislative support agencies, putting out transparent reports about how these various agencies are deploying AI for their work the various use cases. And they’ve also established guidelines and guardrails for the safe and responsible deployment, so that, in itself, been watching Congress for a long time, that is the quickest I have ever seen this institution move when new technology came on the scene, and I think that they are being as deliberative, responsible and transparent as one could possibly ask for in exploring that. So that’s just an example, and I think the response to AI demonstrates how well the House learned to respond to changing conditions, which, again, is just not something that we saw in the past.

Tom Temin 
And one of the big complaints that almost everybody has that follows Congress is the publication of long PDFs of bills. Bills themselves are kind of disgraces in terms of the length that they are. Thousands of pages are common now where landmark legislation of the past was six pages long. And often they’re published in ways that are not searchable. There’s not even a link from the description to the page in the bill where it occurs, really primitive stuff that most of the executive branch has adopted. Are we going to see progress there?

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Marci Harris 
I am very optimistic about that. The Office of the Clerk, in fact, recently issued an RFI and held an information day to receive input on what it would take to build a new collaborative drafting tool, and I almost describe it as like the legislative value chain, so a way to digitize that entire value chain and allow for the many access points, whether it’s in the drafting stage or the amending stage or the publishing stage, etc, to allow each of those parties to be interacting essentially with the same system. And so that RFI is out there, they’ve received responses. Now they’re evaluating, and I think their next step is to develop a roadmap and then begin development. And again, this is a project that would be funded through the modernization initiatives account. So this example really shows, I think, the process that was put in place by the select committee on modernization. So having a system like that was a recommendation for the select committee on modernization. The modernization initiatives account was created and funded. The Office of the Clerk had this directive to look into it, and now the wheels are turning to make it happen. So it really is a demonstration of how this underlying modernization infrastructure can work.

Tom Temin 
And a final question, are there any legislatures of the same import and weight and gravity of the U.S. Congress of the House of Representatives in other countries, that are good models for where this group here might be headed?

Marci Harris 
Such a good question. I actually have spent much of the past year talking to counterparts in different countries. I had conversations with Estonia and the privilege of touring the Norwegian parliament this summer, and lots of discussions with I toured Argentina last year. And there really are lessons that we can learn from our colleagues around the world. Especially when it comes to AI and new technology. We are all at the starting gate together. So for this legislative value chain that I just talked about, Norway is going to be launching their new system in October of 2025, and incorporating for the first time, generative AI. Nobody’s done that before because it wasn’t possible before. So for us to monitor their project and learn what they are thinking as they develop and what issues they’re hitting and how they adjusted their ongoing project to adapt to new technologies is very helpful. Similarly, for Estonia, which I know gets discussed as standout parliament in many ways, or government in general, they also are updating based on what is now possible that was not possible two years ago. And similarly, around the world, there really is an opportunity for us to all learn from each other. And I know that the Committee on House Administration and the modernization subcommittee specifically, is really open to that and taking in lessons from abroad.

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