Building Science and Technology Expertise in Congress

At a recent Senate hearing on artificial intelligence (AI), Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal stated that the subcommittee’s goal was “to demystify and hold accountable these new technologies to avoid some of the mistakes of the past.” ¹ Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley expressed a similar view. “We could be looking at one of the most important technological innovations in human history,” he said, and cautioned that AI might be immensely destructive, analogizing it to the atomic bomb. ²

AI is just one of many highly technical issues confronting lawmakers. As Senator Blumenthal acknowledged, Congress has “failed to meet the moment on social media” — neither passing data privacy legislation nor modernizing platform regulation despite high-profile congressional hearings in 2018 that revealed not only social media’s role in election interference and data harvesting but also lawmakers’ ignorance of this technology. ³ Since then, legislation has stalled, in part due to the dubious claims of lobbyists for technology companies that such legislation would have unintended consequences.⁴

Congress has similarly struggled for at least a decade with other urgent science and technology issues.⁵ For instance, in 2009 Congress passed legislation to digitize medical records but did not address how to transfer records between hospitals, a costly oversight that slowed implementation despite a $30 billion federal investment.⁶ And in 2016 legislators drafted a bipartisan bill that received widespread criticism from technology privacy experts because it would have effectively banned end-to-end cellular encryption, which protects communications and data from hackers.⁷

Most public attention on Congress’s struggles to legislate has focused on partisan roadblocks — the increasingly sharp ideological divisions between the two parties and anachronistic procedural hurdles such as the Senate filibuster — that make decisive action a challenge, even during periods of unified party control.⁸ But a related driver of congressional dysfunction is lawmakers’ shrinking access to the high-quality research and data and nonpartisan expertise needed for them to comprehend complex technical issues. In a 2016 survey, 81 percent of senior congressional staffers said that access to high-quality, nonpartisan policy expertise was “very important,” but only 24 percent were “very satisfied” with the resources available.⁹

Congress has many in-house subject matter experts. Each member has personal staff, and each committee has staff from each party. Legislators are also assisted by a number of support agencies, including the Library of Congress and the Congressional Research Service (CRS) housed therein, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Congressional Budget Office, and the Government Publishing Office. Yet staff levels in Congress and at its support agencies have atrophied substantially over the past several decades, primarily as a result of cuts Congress has made to its own budget.¹⁰

Insufficient access to and absorption of high-quality, nonpartisan science and technology resources have many adverse consequences, including the allocation of billions of dollars in funding for technologies that do not work. These deficiencies also contribute to partisan gridlock because lawmakers increasingly rely on one-sided information from external sources — including those supported, directly and indirectly, by major political donors — making it harder to find common ground about basic facts and metrics for policy solutions.¹¹

Whether dealing with climate change, emerging AI technology, or myriad other complex issues, Congress has a need for science and technology support that continues to grow.¹² And while lawmakers have often issued broad statutory directives that defer to the expertise of executive branch agencies to fill in the gaps, the Supreme Court has put limits on the policymaking authority of those agencies.¹³ Congress itself will need to legislate with more frequency and greater detail in response to complex problems. It does not have the support it needs to fulfill this responsibility.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agree that Congress would function better if it addressed its shrinking capacity to keep up with complex technical issues.¹⁴ It has already taken some positive steps, such as expanding GAO’s Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics (STAA) department, which provides in-depth assessments of key technologies and related policies, as well as support for oversight of federal science programs.¹⁵ Congress has also created a new human resources hub and enhanced other relevant support services to improve staff recruitment and retention.¹⁶ In addition, a growing number of fellowships bring science and technology experts to Congress.¹⁷

While these measures are important, significant deficits remain, including insufficient staff, atrophied support agencies, and the absence of a systematic way to solicit expertise.

Based in part on interviews with current and former congressional staffers and scientists, this report outlines several steps Congress can take to improve its access to science and technology resources.

Many deficits can be addressed efficiently by allocating additional resources to STAA to launch a hub for collecting research and brokering relationships with experts. This hub would build on the support STAA currently offers members and staff and institutionalize a process for soliciting and absorbing technical expertise.

In addition to the expansion of in-house resources, Congress should create a bipartisan commission to consider ways to increase the use of evidence in its policymaking process, as Reps. Derek Kilmer and William Timmons propose in their recent Evidence-Based Policymaking Resolution.¹⁸

Lawmakers should also continue to fund and leverage recently added support resources, such as the new digital services team created for the House, to facilitate access to expertise across the country.¹⁹

Last, Congress should begin to institute longer-term structural reforms to better position itself to tackle complex, technical problems, for example by overhauling committee jurisdictions and investing in more staff with specialized expertise.

Congress must have the resources and support it needs to handle the nation’s most pressing contemporary challenges. These reforms will help it get there.