Don't Sweat the Details! Enhancing Congressional Committee Expertise Through the Use of Detailees

• Published date: 01 November 2017
• Author: Russell W. Mills,Jennifer L. Selin
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12171
• Date: 01 November 2017

RUSSELL W. MILLS

Bowling Green State University

JENNIFER L. SELIN

University of Missouri

Don’t Sweat the Details!

Enhancing Congressional

Committee Expertise Through the

Use of Detailees

In contrast to the dramatic growth in the size and influence of the executive

branch over the past 40 years, congressional committee staffing levels are at an all-time

low. Faced with growing demands to produce legislation and to conduct oversight of

executive branch policymaking, Congress can and does supplement its existing staff by

borrowing personnel, known as detailees, from federal agencies. Using an original

dataset of detailees from 1997 to 2015, we analyze the degree to which congressio-

nal committees rely on detailees to increase legislative capacity. We find that

committees in the House and Senate use detailees in different ways to further both

legislative and oversight initiatives.

The ability of Congress to provide itself with the expertise to fulf‌ill

its legislative and oversight functions is paramount to the effective func-

tioning of the US government. Congressional committee staff serves as

one of the primary sources legislators use to acquire, f‌ilter, and process

information (Adler and Wilkerson 2012; Curry 2015; Rohde 2005).

Committee staffers with specialized policy expertise conduct research

and analysis, draft legislation, f‌ilter interest-group input on policy, and

help with investigations and oversight of federal executive agencies

(Aberbach 1990; Curry 2015; Esterling 2007; Levy 2016; Patashnik and

Peck 2017; Shobe, 2017; Walker 2015). Additionally, committee staffers

provide members of Congress with expertise on the political environ-

ment, including information on the policy positions of various interest

groups, the key off‌icials and off‌ices involved in executive policy imple-

mentation, and the nature of decision making in federal agencies (Curry

2015; Levy 2016; Shobe, forthcoming; Walker 2015). Generally, Con-

gress invests in committee staff resources because such staff aids

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 42, 4, November 2017 611

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12171

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C2017 Washington University in St. Louis

individual members in addressing important matters that affect the

members’ re-election constituencies (Adler and Wilkerson 2012).

Despite the clear benef‌its of committee capacity and expertise,

members of Congress face both f‌iscal and political pressures to divert

resources from committees to personal Washington and district off‌ices

and to the off‌ices of party leadership (Baumgartner and Jones 2015; Cur-

ry 2015; Madonna and Ostrander 2014). Recently, some commentators

and scholars have argued that Congress elected to “lobotomize” its inter-

nal committee and support agency (e.g., GAO, CBO, etc.) capacity in

favor of allocating more staff to leadership and district off‌ices to support

re-election goals as well as to match the centralized and polarized policy-

making environment (Glastris 2016; Lewallen, Theriault, and Jones

2015). For example, staff‌ing levels of standing committees in the House

of Representatives are about half of their 1980 levels (Drutman and

Teles 2015). Pay for committee positions such as staff directors and

counsels have fallen by as much as 20%, leading to high turnover among

staffers, a younger and more inexperienced staff, and the so-called

revolving door effect as many f‌ind jobs with lobbying f‌irms (Drutman

2015; Jensen 2011). At the same time, Congress has reduced its policy

expertise, and the executive branch has grown drastically in both size

and inf‌luence (Burke 2000). The differences in the capacity of the

branches are staggering: Today’s executive branch employs over 4 mil-

lion and issues over 4,000 rules each year. In contrast, the legislative

branch employs 30,000 and enacts approximately 300 substantive laws

per year (Kosar et al. 2016). The decrease in congressional committee

capacity and expertise has had serious consequences for traditional mea-

sures of legislative and oversight productivity, as the raw numbers of

both bills enacted and oversight hearings conducted have decreased to

near-record lows (Kosar et al. 2016).

If members of Congress believe their individual electoral fates are

at least in part tied to the performance of the institution as a whole, then

why are members of Congress willing to reduce capacity and expertise

in congressional committees? A possible explanation is that members of

Congress and their committees have learned to be more strategic in how

they deploy and acquire resources to fulf‌ill their legislative and oversight

functions (MacDonald and McGrath 2016; Madonna and Ostrander

2014). This begs the question, given the demands to produce research

and analysis, craft legislation, and conduct oversight, how can commit-

tees supplement their existing capacity and expertise to aid the

performance of the institution as a whole?

One low-cost and often overlooked method for congressional com-

mittees to enhance their capacity and expertise involves borrowing

612 Russell W. Mills and Jennifer L. Selin