Kevin Kosar Talks About CRS
Another lengthy interview with Statecraft's Santi Ruiz
Santi Ruiz has been holding interviews with former high-ups in Congressional support agencies, one of which I reposted last month. However, I missed another good one featuring Kevin Kosar, who spent many years as an analyst, then research manager for the Congressional Research Service. Kevin’s writing has been featured on BP50 before - he now is a Senior Fellow over at AEI. He also runs UnderstandingCongress, a beautiful resource for wonks and legislative staff alike. His own Substack is also highly recommended.
The interview has a wealth of information on the internal dynamics of CRS, but I’d like to highlight some particular questions1 pertaining to the relationship between Congress and CRS, and how this is shaped by Congress’ own dynamics. There are important differences between CBO and CRS, as well as between the budget process and other legislative procedures - take note of where they overlap.
What areas of work would you point to as CRS’s hallmarks?
One very important thing that CRS does is teach legislators how to be a legislator. Budget process is pretty complex, so they teach classes on budget process to new members of Congress and staff. They also teach courses on legislative process generally. Whether you're in the House or the Senate, you can't be very effective unless you know the rules of the chambers, which are fantastically abstruse. Very frequently, the rules on paper do not match the rules of how things run on a day-to-day basis.
CRS wonks will also give you one-on-one consultations about particular moments. Say you're on a committee. You think that the committee is going to be swapping in a manager's amendment to replace the current bill. What's your authority as a junior member to try to offer an amendment to alter that bill? They can coach you on all that sort of stuff. Hardly anybody knows that. But it's really important.
What does the interaction between a congressman and CRS look like procedurally?
Most frequently, you the legislator would delegate the issue to one of your staff, according to how important it is to you and how fast you want a response. If it’s super important, then you would give it to your staff director or your policy director and have them go to CRS and ask, or if it's less important, you might kick it down to a legislative correspondent or legislative assistant. Certainly, you are free to call CRS up. If you want to pick up the phone, shoot an email, or just lope over to the Madison building and knock on somebody’s door, you can.
If I remember correctly, other congressional support agencies, like the Government Accountability Office (GAO), don't have to be as responsive in the same manner.
Yes. By statutory direction, CRS has to respond to individual members and committees.
Meanwhile, GAO only initiates their studies by direction of a statute or a request from a chairman of a committee. The Congressional Budget Office primarily works for the budget committees in each chamber. They'll take calls from a member, but neither they nor GAO are structured to provide that sort of customer service. CRS has 600 employees, all of whom understand that their agency is titled the Congressional Research Service.
At 600 employees, that's roughly one employee per customer in terms of representatives and senators.
Yeah, although I guess the question is, who is a customer? Ostensibly the member of Congress is, but Congress employs thousands of staff who are also customers.
And the staff are frequently responding to the public. You're a citizen, and you read something in the newspaper about some agricultural subsidy that's ending up in the pockets of some corporation, and you get aggrieved and you write to your member of Congress. The Congressional staffer who gets that letter, unless they happen to know that issue, is going to turn to the Congressional Research Service and ask, “What is this constituent talking about and how do I respond?” With each member of the House of Representatives having about 750,000 constituents, there are a lot of customers for CRS to respond to.
What distinguishes the qualities of a good CRS researcher from the qualities of a good academic researcher?
There's a lot of overlap. Certainly CRS has a lot of people who have advanced academic training. However, it's very different from academia insofar as your research agenda has to be clearly germane to Congress. You do not, for example, have the liberty to earn a salary at CRS and go back and do research on early committee debates in the 2nd Congress in the 1790s, unless it is somehow immediately tied to some pending issue before Congress. Academics can do pretty much whatever they want.
Additionally, your research agenda is largely reactive as opposed to proactive. Sometimes you are getting hundreds of requests per year from Congress, and you are responding to what they care about. You should also be spending your time anticipating what they might care about.
Another difference is how you write. Academics tend to write for other academics. You go through a peer review process. The journals that you write for, that are so important in academia, are read by other people with advanced training.
Not so for your audience in Congress. Anything that’s particularly technical, you have to kick to an appendix in the back. You have got to have clarity of communication. Also, whereas academics have to struggle for tenure over about a five-year period, at CRS, after one successful year of employment as a civil servant, you are effectively tenured for life (absent malfeasance or terrible misbehavior).
Given these pressures on CRS in the 21st century, what’s its comparative advantage? If CRS is competing on many axes, what is it still best in class at?
It’s got some core strengths, one of which is confidentiality. You, a staffer, a member, go to them and you don’t even have to think twice about your conversation or request to them ever seeing the light of day. In a town that's obsessed with leaking and terrified by it, that's a big deal.
CRS also does customized work. So you're a staffer and you're trying to get ready for a hearing. You need to write a memo to brief your member of Congress but you don’t know where to start. You ask CRS to write you a confidential memo that comes up with some background information on the issue and some suggested questions to use for the hearing. You’re not going to find think tanks offering that typically, but CRS does.
CRS also has the ability to cobble together diverse expertise very quickly to tackle issues. If you want a briefing on AI, okay. CRS can probably have a technology person who could talk about that. They can also bring in somebody who knows copyright or some other germane issue and bring that in. They can also bring in somebody who knows public administration, in case you want to talk about how AI can be used in the course of the regulatory process. They can throw that team together and have them over in your office the same day, potentially.
Again: not easy for think tanks and other outside outfits to do that sort of stuff.
The last thing is institutional memory. By hiring people as civil servants and giving them tenure for life, they have people there who can tell you what happened on this issue 10, 20 or 30 years ago. They also have files and old reports that can be mined. Who else has that?
So we’ve talked about internal dynamics and external pressures. What about Congress? How have changes in Congress, the body CRS serves, affected CRS?
CRS was created in the early seventies out of the old Legislative Reference Service, which was mostly reference librarians with some experts sprinkled in. And Congress said, we need a full-blown think tank that primarily works for the committees. They wanted them to work on creating an oversight agenda. They wanted CRS staff and experts to come and work at the committees. Don't show up in the Madison building, show up in Rayburn or wherever the committee is at, and be with them for long stretches.
That was the conception. Fast forward to today, committees are a lot weaker in the congressional process and individual members are much more like individual entrepreneurs running their own policy and politics shop. They’re less dependent on the parties as such. The individual members of Congress are now flooding CRS with requests.
Frequently it's constituent-driven questions coming in the mail and through email. That leads to a lot of CRS experts spending time focusing on smaller reference-type issues, rather than deep diving into research. It’s also the case that there are a lot of show horses in Congress now who are not really interested in research. If you have fewer people who are serious about finding the answer to difficult policy questions, they’re going to ask fewer serious questions of CRS, and CRS employees are going to have less intellectual stuff to do.
I would have expected there to be a different dynamic with centralization of power with congressional leadership. I might have expected the party to be more powerful, but you're suggesting that individual representatives now have more entrepreneurial instincts.
Yeah. And, again, usually it's tethered towards more parochial matters. You're not getting a whole lot of individual members going to CRS to try to learn up on a specific topic and then use that to try to roll leadership on it. That happens, yeah, but not as much.
Another pressure on CRS is the polarization and the intense partisan competition for maintaining or winning a majority in the chamber has led to legislators being obsessed with the narrative and messaging. CRS has frequently borne the brunt of denunciations from the very people they’re trying to help because CRS did a calculation or wrote a report that had inconvenient facts. Those facts get picked up by the media or someone outside Congress who then says, “Congress is saying it wants to do this, but CRS is saying that’s not the best way to achieve this.” Oh, controversy.
Then, of course, CRS gets kicked around and members of Congress denounce it, and the individual analysts and the agency heads can’t fight back. They just have to take the punishment. It’s not fair.
If you were advising a congressman coming in today, how would you suggest that they use CRS and other servants of Congress most effectively?
I would say getting everybody up to speed on legislative and budget process would be very important because you need to understand the flow of business: when things are happening and how things get done. You can't play chess if you don't know the moves.
The second thing would be to figure out, if you don’t already know, the top issues for your home state or district and then go to CRS and get close to the experts in those areas and get really schooled on them. Next, depending on what your committee’s jurisdiction is, go to CRS and learn those subjects and also learn committee procedure so you don’t make a fool of yourself. That would be the starting advice.
Ultimately, what you want is to find people at CRS who you can develop a long-term relationship with so you can call them or have them come over and get handed confidential advice. If they feel comfortable with you and you feel comfortable with them, that’s invaluable.
Are there a lot of congressmen who don’t have that grounding in procedure?
Absolutely. I follow a lot of procedure people on Twitter and with great regularity they will post a C-SPAN clip where some member tries to do something and is getting the legislative procedure wrong, and one of the parliamentarians or a support person has to tell them they can’t do it. Then they have to correct their behavior. It’s embarrassing when members don’t know, but it’s understandable because it takes a lot of study and learning to do it right.
I think members are very harried. They often pick up the minimal amount of knowledge and then in the moment they rely upon aides or whoever’s nearby to tell them what they can do. That often doesn’t work, you just end up with mistakes.
What's the relationship between CRS and committee staff?
It varies. There are committees working on topic areas that have a very hand in glove relationship with CRS and use them throughout the whole process of studying a topic and ultimately reporting out draft legislation. There are other committees that don’t.
Are there specific committees that tend to have that good relationship?
I couldn't generalize, because it's all very episodic. It depends on who the chair and the ranking member are and how serious they are. If they view their perch as just a vehicle for messaging partisan points, then they're not going to spend much time with CRS.
If they have other ideas, then perhaps they're going to bring CRS in and have a good working relationship with them. There's also the organic connections between staff and CRS. Some committees have long staff tenure and those people have long relationships with CRS and they’re just going to keep working together. In other cases, you get turnover, those relationships are broken or they’re not re-initiated and you’re not going to have as much interaction.
Are there episodes you can point to of excellent committee-CRS coordination?
Yeah. If you go back in time a bit to the early 1990s, a classic example was Congress very seriously looking at reforming itself, to strengthen itself vis a vis the executive branch and to modernize itself. They took Walter Oleszek, a specialist at CRS, and basically embedded him in the committee. He worked so closely with them that after his committee service he ended up writing a book about it and the committee was fine with it because of his classy, honest coverage of the experience.
When I was at CRS I often had a really good relationship with House Oversight and Government Reform, not least because they covered the issue of the U.S. Postal Service, which was a topic I covered. I had any number of opportunities to work with them on preparing them for hearings and work on draft legislation. I even testified before them a couple times. Coordination happens all the time. These days CRS occasionally still details staff to various committees and the staff will stay there for two or three months (but usually for shorter periods of time).
You talked about how the reduced power of committees has, in some ways, made CRS's work less immediately relevant. Should committees be more powerful players?
What you’re seeing right now with the Speakership — and it's something that Speakers Nancy Pelosi, Paul Ryan, and John Boehner experienced, and now Mike Johnson is experiencing — is that with so much power consolidated in the Speaker's hand, not just the power to put stuff on the calendar, but this expectation that this person is supposed to almost be the decider — it makes the position almost impossible.
You’re never going to have agreement within the chamber. There are always going to be factions who are ticked off about one thing or another. Because we’re in this place now where the partisan margins are so tiny, any faction that exists is a threat to the majority. We see this with the Freedom Caucus, but they’re not the only faction who creates that sort of dynamic. The progressives drove Pelosi crazy by often withholding their votes.
Congress could devolve more power from the Speaker and have them be more deferential to committee chairs and less expected to be a partisan warrior: they’d be more willing to say, “Okay, you reported this bill out. Let’s just get it calendared.” That’s the way Congress used to work.
That takes the controversy and decenters it from the Speaker. The Speaker is the guy who controls the calendar and is going to put stuff up for a vote. That changes the incentive structure. If you're a committee Chairman, why do the hard work of breaking bread if you're never going to get a vote?
Because the Speaker says, “This thing doesn't have good political salience for the party, so we don't want to bring it up and give you a vote.” That, yeah, that kills committees’ incentive to do anything.
Anything on your mind about CRS that I haven't asked you about?
It's unfortunate for me not to mention the website congress.gov. It’s a partnership between CRS and the Library of Congress. If you want to know what’s happening in Congress, that’s the go-to site. That’s where you find write ups of bills, where they’re at in the legislative process, if there have been hearings, and all that sort of stuff. It’s a magnificent resource to the American people but also to the people who work on Capitol Hill.
This was only about half the interview, so again, do read the full thing if you are interested in CRS’ internal functioning.
With some light edits to maintain coherence.