Understanding the scope, causes, and consequences of the state’s capacity to solve public problems is central to the study of American institutions. This literature is largely centered on the bureaucracy. For example, in Daniel Carpenter’s (2001) The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, executive agencies develop administrative capacity by cultivating a reputation for expertise among career officials who possess a complex set of ties to varied external stakeholders. In Martha Derthick’s (1979) Policymaking for Social Security, civil servants develop autonomy to advance programmatic goals by exploiting arcane, research-based knowledge of how a program functions.
Congress Overwhelmed, edited by Timothy LaPira, Lee Drutman, and Kevin Kosar, is a collection of essays that together represent a major undertaking to situate the study of capacity within the Congress literature. The volume documents Congress’s capacity and how it changes over time, and offers recommendations for reform. The essays share a common motivation that congressional disfunction is not only due to partisan divisiveness but also to the decline in collective knowledge and competence in the institution.
While there are notable works in the field of American political development that consider the capacity of Congress, notably Eric Schickler’s (2001) Disjointed Pluralism and Bruce Bimber’s (1996) The Politics of Expertise in Congress, the study of this kind of state capacity has nowhere near the central role in the study of Congress as it has in the study of the bureaucracy. This is likely for at least two reasons. First, agencies have Weberian-like functional specialization and expertise, while legislatures are by necessity generalist. And second, notions of representation in democratic theory center on the representatives, and generally do not envision a democratic role for the staff who serve them. Nonetheless, Congress simply could not function without the expertise and creativity provided by civil servants in its own organization. The House and Senate have dozens of standing committees, hundreds of member offices, three support agencies, a dozen administrative offices, and tens of thousands of employees that do the day-to-day work to enable lawmaking, oversight, and constituent service activities that are core legislative functions.
In their introductory chapter to the volume, the editors define congressional capacity as “the organizational resources, knowledge, expertise, time, space, and technology that are necessary for Congress to perform its constitutional role” (p. 1). Drutman and LaPira (chapt. 2) next develop a theoretical framework of “capacity regimes” to frame the empirical work that follows. Capacity regimes are defined over two dimensions of variation: the degree of organizational centralization and the degree to which the institution invests in staff resources to solve complex problems rather than simple routine tasks. Although the authors argue that regimes under each of these combinations have normative merit, they also note that the allocation of resources to address complex problem solving over simple task completion enhances congressional capacity irrespective of the degree of centralization or decentralization. This framework lends organization to the remaining chapters and foreshadows recurrent themes.
The next set of chapters documents the recent decline in knowledge and competence within the institution. Molly Reynolds (chapt. 3), examines changes over time in the correlates of capacity, showing that Congress has disinvested in its own capacity since the 1980s, and in particular after the 1994 Republican “Contract with America.” She also documents a shift in staff members at both the leadership and rank-and-file levels away from legislative staff toward communications staff, investing resources in staff that help to sell legislation to the public rather than write it in the first place. Philip Wallach (chapt. 4) documents Congress’s difficulties in keeping pace with expanded capacity in the executive branch in the postwar period.
The book also takes a deep dive into empirical descriptions of staff and their role in enhancing capacity. Alexander Furnas and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, along with Drutman, LaPira, and Kosar, (chapt. 5) summarize core findings from the Congressional Capacity Survey (CCS), administered in 2017. They document the long hours, limited bandwidth, and low pay that staff endure, and that most don’t aspire to make service in Congress a career. Kristina Miler (chapt. 6) uses the CCS to examine the levels and variation in what staff know about procedure and substantive policy. Casey Burgat and Charles Hunt (chapt. 7) show that increasing policy staff support in a committee increases the number of important pieces of legislation the committee reports. Jesse Crosson, Geoffrey Lorenz, Craig Volden, and Alan Wiseman (chapt. 13) document the importance of having experienced staff for members’ legislative effectiveness, especially for committee chairs and for new members who often have a steep learning curve.
Other chapters document changes to the organizational structure within Congress and diagnose how that structure affects capacity. In the postwar period, Congress streamlined the committee structure and invested in legislative support agencies to help generalist legislators and staff understand complex policy issues, and to reduce the legislature’s dependence on advice from the executive branch and lobbyists. Jonathan Lewallen, Sean Theriault, and Bryan Jones (chapt. 11) document the recent decline, however, in the number and quality of committee hearings, which reduces the scope and volume of information available to members. Kevin Kosar (chapt. 8) describes how Congress has disinvested in its own support agencies.
James Curry and Frances Lee (chapt. 14) argue that this decline of decentralized authority of committees is not necessarily to blame for the decline of congressional capacity, but instead is an adaptation to maintain lawmaking capacity in an era of deep partisan conflict. Leadership-driven, centralized processes confer advantages of secrecy, efficiency, and flexibility that enable Congress to do its work in the current legislative environment. Likewise, Peter Hanson (chapt. 9) documents the increase in omnibus appropriations bills as an effective instrument to ensure passage, even though the dominance of party leadership has led to a hollowing out of committees’ capacity to gather information and deliberate over spending.
Scott Adler, Stefani Langehennig, and Ryan Bell (chapt. 12) find that partisan divisiveness and the sheer size of the workload in an issue area has diminished Congress’s ability to effectively use short-term authorizations to monitor and control agencies. Laurel Harbridge-Yong (chapt. 15) shows that decreases in committee staff and increases in investment in communications staff reduce the capacity for collaboration across party divides. James Wallner (chapt. 10) argues that disfunction in the Senate stems from senators’ own willingness to acquiescence to disfunction.
Many of the authors in this volume are active in advising Congress on ideas for reforms to improve capacity. The concluding chapters offer a road map for this effort. Ruth Bloch Rubin (chapt. 16) calls attention to challenges given incentives among members created by the status quo. Anthony Madonna and Ian Ostrander (chapt. 17) argue that members’ current practice of running against Congress is not as effective as an electoral strategy as party leaders often think.
This volume should help advance current reform efforts, due both to the findings it reports and to the extent it succeeds in making capacity a core area of research for Congress scholars going forward.
