CRS Problems

Daniel Schuman at Washington Monthly:

CRS employs hundreds of experts—economists, lawyers, reference librarians, and scientists—to provide Congress with research and analysis. For most of its history, the agency had a hard-won reputation for providing independent and authoritative advice. But CRS’s usefulness to Congress has suffered over the last three decades. Years of mismanagement led to an insular culture and a glacial pace of technological modernization. Right-wing political attacks drove out experienced analysts and intimidated the leadership into making the organization’s policy analysis cautious and insipid.

CRS embodies some of the worst dysfunction of the entire legislative branch. With a few notable exceptions in recent years, Republicans inspired by the Newt Gingrich-led revolution of 1995 have advanced policies that undermine their branch’s ability to function, regardless of when the GOP is in charge of one or both chambers. Since 1994, CRS and another of Congress’s support agencies, the Government Accountability Office, have each lost more than a quarter of their staff. Congress has also cut its own member and committee staff and suppressed staff pay, focusing meager resources on essentials like security and physical infrastructure. The result is a vacuum of expertise. Without reliable expertise in-house, members look outside Congress and its support agencies for basic facts and analysis, leading to an undue reliance on lobbyists, advocates, and the executive branch.

Fortunately, Congress has begun to revamp CRS as part of its larger push to modernize the entire branch. The House Administration Committee and its Senate counterpart completed the first item on this to-do list by pushing out [Mary] Mazanec and starting a search for a new leader of the 600-person-strong agency. Now, the House is moving forward with legislation to empower CRS to more easily get information from the executive branch and eliminate unnecessary expenses.