What are big, creative, actionable, bipartisan/nonpartisan ideas to modernize Congress?
That’s the question the Subcommittee on Modernization and Innovation of the Committee on House Administration put to congressional offices and external stakeholders, as Roll Call covered.
Not for budget and appropriations, alas. But still, we submitted a few ideas and look forward to seeing other proposals.
1. Expect committee leaders to manage laws in their jurisdictions
Description: Give leaders of congressional committees clear expectations to proactively manage the laws for which they are responsible. Federal statutes often include lapsed authorizations of appropriations, deadwood, broad delegation to the executive branch, and other outdated language and practices. Updating the laws can clean up the books, revisit prior choices with fresh eyes, and otherwise make sure that federal activities provide good value to today’s society.
Strategy: Create a duty for committee and subcommittee chairs and ranking members to regularly review and try to modernize statutes within their jurisdiction in House Republican Conference and House Democratic Caucus rules. Their performance could later be an input for colleagues’ subsequent decisions about committee and party leadership positions. Parallel adoption by both parties can reinforce each other.
Feasibility: Simple majorities of each party can add such expectations to House Republican Conference rules and House Democratic Caucus rules. Adopting the change would have minimal costs within existing funding streams, but more proactive legislative review may increase the value of expanding committee staff resources over time. To minimize the risk of crowding out emerging issues, language should provide a general direction without unduly restricting flexibility.
2. Index statutes to committee jurisdictions
Description: Congress would benefit from an index that matches committees and subcommittees to the statutes for which they are responsible. Today, common knowledge about committee jurisdictions is often thin, especially among busy members and newer staff. House Rule X(1) and Senate Rule XXV outlining jurisdictions only match committees to general subject areas. This lack of precision reduces congressional capacity by increasing the time and effort involved in figuring out which committee or subcommittee would be involved in addressing an issue.
Strategy: Responsible for referring legislation to committees, the Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate likely have the best knowledge and institutional position to lead development and updates to an index with support from the Office of the Law Revision Counsel, the House and Senate Offices of Legislative Counsel, and standing committees.
It could be organized in two lists, similar to the State Department’s Treaties in Force, such as by committee and subcommittee and by subject area. The underlying data could help train LLMs and other AI tools. The index could be a dynamic, online product rather than a printed volume, which could adapt in near-real-time as incoming feedback helps fine-tune it.
Feasibility: Indexing this information may require additional funded FTEs and further engagement with contractors. Chamber leadership may simply be able to direct the offices to commence this work and allocate funds for it. One risk could be opportunity cost: that LLMs and other tools can generate this information accurately enough that funds and personnel would be better used elsewhere. Conflicting assertions of jurisdiction could also become an issue, although designations for “shared” or “contested” jurisdiction could resolve this.
3. Let chairs bring reported legislation directly to the floor
Description: Let committee chairs take turns bringing reported legislation to the floor on their own authority. By aligning risk-reward tradeoffs with chairs instead of shifting risks to majority party leaders, chair-led scheduling would expand pathways for committee-approved legislation.
Majority party leadership sometimes faces difficulty in scheduling broadly supported bipartisan legislation without overwhelming majority party support. This hinders committees from making progress on difficult and nuanced issues, including modernizing longstanding statutes. Committee chairs could have more freedom to advance broadly bipartisan policies than majority party leadership.
Strategy: This practice is contemplated under House Rule 14(4), but an open amendment process in the Committee of the Whole could be unwieldy without rule-of-law standards to limit amendments to those with sufficient coalition support. Amending the House Rules to set boundaries on amendment consideration under this committee-led practice may be needed to create a foundation for chairs to take turns bringing reported legislation to the floor.
Feasibility: Designing Rules amendments and implementing chair-driven floor scheduling may require modest effort within existing resources. Risks may include having to redesign practices and members pressuring leaders to not let this bottom-up process play out.
4. Make committee memberships microcosms of the body
Description: The House Republican Conference and House Democratic Caucus should strive for committee memberships that are microcosms of their overall membership. Relevant dimensions may include ideology, seniority, temperament, geographic, and occupational background. Nearly all members would have trusted partners involved in all major decisions to facilitate two-way communication and more trust.
Policy expertise and stakeholder relationships are strongest on committees of jurisdiction, but committee membership often deviates substantially from the House as a whole. Such skews therefore give disproportionate weight to some voices, which can make committee-negotiated policies more difficult to obtain the support of the full chamber. This is not only due to the substance but also from some members believing that their priorities are underrepresented in deliberations. Parallel bipartisan pursuit of microcosm committees would maximize their ability to advance value-added legislation.
Strategy: Simple majorities of House Republicans and House Democrats can amend their respective rules to promote committee assignments that better reflect their overall membership, respectively.
Feasibility: Pursuing such amendments and implementing the standard would require a small amount of member and staff time, somewhat more for steering committee members to develop and apply criteria. The main risk is that committee assignments would provide less leverage to reinforce party discipline, but on the other hand, expanded space for substantive legislative work would reduce incentives for performative activities and therefore shift the balance toward consensus-building.
5. Have legislative support organizations prioritize committee-related work
Description: Through the committees, have legislative support operations – CRS, LoC, CBO, JCT, GAO, OLC, and others – prioritize requests related to members’ committees.
Short-term incentives to pursue news cycles with messaging legislation can divert member attention from important, if less-media-salient, issues before the committees on which they serve. They also consume scarce resources at legislative support operations, adding to backlogs, reducing the support available where it is most needed, and increasing the share of activities pursued without expectations of enactment. Prioritizing committee-related work makes better use of scarce resources to support a more effective legislature.
Strategy: Committee requests already get higher priority than individual member requests, so committee leaders could adopt members’ jurisdiction-related requests as committee business. That may not be well understood, however. A separate order in the House Rules package that committees should consider expediting on-committee, jurisdiction-related member requests could provide that clarity.
Feasibility: This should not require additional resources but would make better use of existing assets. The main risk is members assuming that this higher degree of preference for committee-related requests would trump conference committee and floor-ready priorities.
6. Readable legislation
Description: Build on the comparative print suite to require introduced legislation to show proposed changes within the full context of existing sections of statute. At the same time, reformulate bill printing to use the entire sheet of paper.
Congressional legislation is much more difficult to read and understand than most state legislation, which usually show proposed changes to statutes in the context of the entire sections proposed to be amended. Easing the review of legislation would expand capacity for offices of both parties.
Strategy: The comparative print project has built a substantial amount of the necessary architecture, but more may be needed. In addition, GPO and the Office of the Legislative Counsel may need additional tools and FTEs. Many state constitutions require full context, and the Readable Legislation Act (H.R. 3402, 116th Congress) would add a new section to Title 2, United States Code, but the two operative sentences could be placed at the end of House Rule XII(2)(a) or as a separate paragraph in House Rule XII(7). This would empower the Clerk to return legislation to the sponsor for correction before referral, which also may require additional resources for the Clerk’s office.
Feasibility: Additional costs would likely be extensions of prior work and with similar contractors. The main risk would be delays in developing and publishing legislation during the paradigm shift and adjusting resources for the offices responsible.
7. Allocate committee funds by party ratios to preserve institutional knowledge
Description: Follow the Senate’s lead since 2011 in allocating committee funds to generally reflect the ratio between the caucuses: 10 percent to the majority for administrative expenses with the remaining 90 percent divided based on the party division with a minimum 40 percent for the minority. Instead of taking from the majority’s expected allocation, however, provide additional funds to bring the minority party committee allocations up to proportionate.
Healthier incentives for committee staff and the preservation of institutional knowledge would benefit members of both parties and their ability to serve the public. House committee allocations fluctuate disproportionately when party control changes. This disrupts the maintenance of institutional knowledge by forcing a substantial number of going-into-the-minority staff to find other employment while ensuring that new-majority staff includes an inflow of less-experienced staff. These stakes reinforce partisan polarization and discourage minority party collaboration with the majority party.
Strategy: Parallel to Senate Rule XXVII, House Rule X(9)(a)(1) allows 30 professional staff per committee with, under Rule X(9)(a)(2), 10 reserved to the minority. This change could mean increasing the overall cap to 40 and subparagraph (2) amended to allocate professional staff in proportion to the partisan balance at the start of the Congress. Notably, the Senate did not formally amend its rule; it simply adopted a resolution for proportionate shares.
Feasibility: Amending Rule X(9)(a) through the Rules package for the 120th Congress – or supplanting it with a simple rule – is technically straightforward, but adding resources for the minority requires increased appropriations and the consent of the majority party. The greatest risk is that congressional dysfunction, especially through the broken budget process, continues to provide poor incentives for members of both parties to collaborate constructively on addressing America’s challenges.
8. Rule-of-law filtering for floor amendments
Description: Create rule-of-law standards to make in order amendments for the floor, namely guaranteeing a vote for a proposed amendment that meets clear thresholds for coalition building, such as a minimum number of cosponsors or a minimum number of cosponsors from each party. Clear rules would encourage members to invest more in building relationships on ad hoc policy priorities, which would deepen the bonds of affection between members generally and therefore strengthen Congress’ ability to exercise its proper constitutional powers intrinsically and with respect to other branches.
A bottom-up process to filter floor amendments would let members self-assemble on issues they care about, strengthening bipartisan coalitions and Congress overall. Decisions are opaque about which, if any, amendments will be made in order on the House floor. One member has claimed that only two kinds of amendments get votes: those that don’t matter, and those that will fail. That “black box” encourages members to prioritize their standing with majority party leaders instead of building cross-partisan coalitions to advance policies that benefit the public at large. On the other hand, a fully open amendment process exposes members to more low-value amendments and their costs of time and political exposure than the openness is worth.
The Rules Committee has a protocol along these lines. It, however, merely promises that the chair will give “preference” to amendments with at least 20 members of both parties and that meet certain other criteria. That threshold may not be universally appropriate, however, and it does not guarantee consideration of the amendment.
Strategy: Operationalizing minimum coalition standards would flow through the Rules Committee in partnership with the committee with primary jurisdiction over upcoming legislation. For example, the Rules Committee could announce the standards a week or two before the bill comes to the floor so members have time to self-organize, and then the report accompanying the special rule would list the amendments to be made in order, which members and others could validate against cosponsors attached to amendment proposals. To build common knowledge, a separate order in the House Rules package could direct the Rules Committee to devise options for coalition thresholds that can be adapted to upcoming legislation.
Feasibility: Dramatically expanding opportunities for ad hoc partnerships for floor amendments could, at least initially, expand an already overwhelming flow of information and requests. As members build and discover coalition networks, however, greater self-organization is likely to happen, especially as members and staff learn to use emerging digital tools to filter opportunities. Developing a separate order in the Rules Package and the options under it would require staff and member resources, likely well within existing amounts.
9. Statutorily clarify constitutional terms
Description: Chairs and ranking members of each congressional committee should direct their counsels to review the Constitution for terms and procedures in the committee’s jurisdiction that lack adequate implementing legislation and then pursue bipartisan legislation to codify them clearly by statute, or occasionally, through chamber rules.
Constitutional principles are meant to last indefinitely, and implementing legislation translates the principles into a tangible form for today’s society. Sound governance requires good definitions, especially when Congress can revise and otherwise update them as conditions change. Basic terms and processes in the Constitution often lack statutory definitions, which lets pundits and policymakers make dubious claims and counterclaims without a settled basis in law. In addition, the courts cannot help Congress check and balance executive branch overreach as well without clear definitions that allow statutory interpretation.
Strategy: The House Rules package could amend House Rule X(2)(a)(1)(B) to insert before the semicolon language like “, including implementing legislation for key terms in the U.S. Constitution.” Alternatively, a separate order could provide the instruction.
Feasibility: Depending on other priorities, many committees could pursue these codifications with existing resources, especially by leveraging requests for information from external experts. These would often take the form of independent authorizing legislation, so majority party leadership must be willing to bring them to the floor. The risk of making mistakes does not justify failing to try; the distortions from the rule-of-law void in many areas rarely could be made worse by Congress seeking clear standards.
10. Adopt congressional rules that ensure committees reauthorize agencies
Description: Congressional reauthorization of federal agencies is perhaps the best touchpoint for Congress to ensure federal agencies are conducting their business in accordance with Congress’ intentions and are modernized as needed. However, reauthorizing federal agencies seems to be a thing of the past. For example, the Federal Trade Commission has not been reauthorized since 1996, the Small Business Administration has not been reauthorized since 2000, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency hasn’t been reauthorized since 2004. While federal agencies can still function without reauthorization so long as the money keeps coming in, Congress’ failure to regularly reauthorize the agencies has led to agencies becoming “multi-billion-dollar zombie government programs.” Indeed, this failure also represents a failure by Congress to uphold one of the body’s most important functions: oversight. While Congress certainly conducts oversight through letters, subpoenas, and hearings, it often does so in a piecemeal manner that is costly and less effective than the formal reauthorization process. The reauthorization process is also conducted at the committee level, which affords numerous benefits. Regular reauthorization of federal agencies would address the piecemeal oversight problem, while also providing Congress with regular opportunities to legislate as required by the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright decision. As Congress learns to adapt to the post-Chevron world, regular and timely reauthorizations would also create direct opportunities to legislate and review regulatory agencies — all through regular order and driven by committees.
Strategy: Work with the past and present leadership of the Agriculture and Armed Services Committees—the two committees that are regularly able to reauthorize their respective agencies through the NDAA and Farm Bill—and identify the best practices for working with agencies to understand how to reauthorize the agencies under each committee’s jurisdiction in a timely and proper manner. Similarly, discussions must be held with other committees as to why they are not able to similarly reauthorize the agencies under their jurisdiction. This information collectively should provide a strong blueprint for how to establish a “how-to” manual for agencies to finally do what the law requires and ensure the agencies within their jurisdiction are authorized on time and with meaningful changes. These best practices should then be reviewed and turned into rule changes in the House and Senate that adequately modernize Congress’ internal information architecture.
Feasibility: The initial steps of discussing the problems with both the congressional committees that are able to meet their reauthorization responsibilities on time and those that have not been able to meet their reauthorization responsibilities should be straightforward. However, the larger task of actually implementing any best practices to ensure reauthorizations occur is likely to be a harder task and one that will inevitably be affected by many factors, such as the political landscape of the committee at any given time, the willingness of an agency to work in good faith with the committee, and many others. Regardless, this is the single best touchpoint for Congress to provide true oversight to the federal agencies and determine how laws should be written to remove the legislative ambiguity that poisoned the Chevron years and empowered agencies, rather than Congress, to be the chief lawmaking bodies in the country.
