The author claims that three factors seem to be undermining its effectiveness.
- cutbacks in staff and funding
- fewer personnel in congressional offices to handle constituent service
- increased public access to information / conspiracy theories
- Click here for the article.
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.
For more on the CRS:
- Wikipedia: Congressional Research Service.
- Archive-It: Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports.
- FAS: Congressional Research Service [CRS] Reports.
- Naval Post Graduate School: Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports.
