Why I quit the Congressional Research Service: how Congress's dysfunction has degraded its own in-house think tank.

AuthorKosar, Kevin R.

If there's one event that epitomizes why I quit my job last October as a researcher at the Congressional Research Service, Congress's in-house think tank, it's a phone call I got some weeks before making my decision to leave. The call was from a smart congressional staffer with a law degree. Confessing some embarrassment, he asked if, as the CRS's resident expert on the U.S. Postal Service, I could help him and his congressman boss respond to a constituent. The constituent wanted to know why the USPS was "stockpiling ammunition." The staffer forwarded the constituent's email, which had links to various blogs warning that the USPS was arming itself to the teeth, perhaps preparing for an assault on America.

I explained the facts to the staffer. The USPS had put out a public notice that it was seeking bids from ammunition sellers. It was buying the bullets for the Postal Inspection Service, its law enforcement branch, which for the past two centuries has policed the mail for scam lotteries, child pornography, and more. The USPS makes such purchases regularly because, well, postal inspectors are cops, and they carry guns.

I gave the staffer the material he needed to draft a response. He thanked me (and later consented that I share this anecdote in this article). With any luck, the constituent would come away with a better understanding of the government, and might learn to be a little less credulous of Internet stories from the fever swamps.

Calls like that didn't bother me, exactly; I didn't mind doing my bit for the promotion of sanity. But in the previous year, I'd answered that kind of phone calls repeatedly, and much of my workday was now taken up by requests that had little if anything to do with public policy. When I joined the CRS eleven years earlier, researchers had time to research proactively. We wrote reports after lengthy periods of study, often while Congress was out of town for summer or winter vacation. By the time I left, however, I was working year round mostly in a frantic, reactive research mode. Today, it is not unusual for a CRS analyst to respond to 200 or 300 congressional requests annually. I once hit 660 in one year.

The growing workload is partly the result of the agency's downsizing. Over the past decade, the CRS has gone from 730 employees to 600. My own research section shrank through retirements: after four of the thirteen researchers retired, there was not enough money to replace them all. The Internet has also had a big effect: constituents can easily email or tweet at their elected officials about every matter under the sun--Where can I access a federal grant for my cause? How much does the government spend on this program? Congressional staffers, increasingly young and inexperienced, must respond promptly, helpfully, and accurately, or their members risk losing a vote next election. "We've become a reference desk for constituents," one staffer told me. "And when we can't find the answer to the question, we call you." Thus it is that the CRS, set up as a professorial policy analysis shop, now spends a lot of time answering constituent requests.

The CRS's interactions with Congress are confidential, but members sometimes speak publicly about the agency's accomplishments, which over the years have been considerable. George Galloway of the CRS helped with congressional reorganization in 1946, and his wife, Eileen, worked with Lyndon Johnson to create NASA in 1958. In the early 1970s, Walter Kravitz, Walter Oleszek, and Louis Fisher helped Congress reorganize itself and claw back some power from the executive branch. Harold Relyea was heavily involved in Congress's opening of government agency meetings via the Government in Sunshine Act in 1976. Fisher was the research director for the House Iran-Contra Committee, and drafted much of its report. Congress's foreign affairs committees turned to Joseph Whelan to better understand Leonid Brezhnev and Soviet policy. Vee Burke spent thirty years working and reworking welfare programs, culminating in the 1996 legislation that, in Bill Clinton's famous phrase, "ended welfare as we know it."

My aspiration was to follow in the footsteps of these great researchers by using my knowledge of government organization to write the kinds of reports that might help Congress fix the USPS and other entities. Instead, more and more of my time was being diverted to helping congressional staff respond to constituent demands. In addition, thanks to growing pressure from a hyper-partisan Congress, my ability to write clearly and forthrightly about the problems of government--and possible...

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