However, it is equally important to analyze whether the undertaken governmental actions are what Congress intended and the American people want.
At Sunlight, we have a particular interest in government transparency, and this blogpost outlines some methods Congress can employ to make the executive branch more transparent, as well as how the fruits of Congressional oversight efforts can be made more readily available to the American people.
In the following section, we have identified a number of steps Congress as an institution can undertake to make executive branch actions more transparent. We also look at the steps committees could undertake as part of their oversight role. Individual member offices also play a role here, but that is a discussion for a different time. Congress receives many reports from the executive branch, some of which are required by law, others which are provided upon request or upon demand.
Often times, the reports are not provided in a timely fashion, are incomplete, or are only sent to a small unit within Congress.
To the extent possible, these reports should be aggregated and provided through a central repository to all interested members of Congress. Legislation to do that has been introduced in both chambers, under the title Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act. Congress or its constituent parts often employ researches at legislative support agencies like GAO, CBO, CRS or in academia to assist with oversight of the executive branch.
To the greatest extent possible, these reports should be aggregated and be provided through a central repository to all interested members of Congress. Legislation to aggregate and release Congressional Research Service reports has been introduced in the House this session.
Some executive branch processes, such as rulemakings, are not overseen by Congress in a systematic fashion. Congress is responsible for overseeing federal spending, but the information provided by the executive branch often is unreliable, insufficiently detailed, and diffuse. Congress should require the executive branch to use unified data standards to report all of its budget formulation and spending data. Congressional committees should create, maintain, and regularly review their agency oversight plans.
He has, for instance, recently taken unilateral steps to cut off foreign aid to countries he says are sending too many migrants to the United States.
Congress has responded by scheduling hearings and requesting documents from the administration. Presidential power to override Congress is limited to a very small set of circumstances. Oversight allows Congress to ensure the executive is properly carrying out the laws as Congress intends. Congress is asking the administration important policy questions. Are adequate rules, resources and incentives in place to reunite families who have been separated at the border?
Are student loan providers being held accountable for their failure to treat students fairly? Why have energy efficiency improvements slowed down or reversed? All federal agencies, commissions and offices that presidents direct were created by Congress. But the power of individual presidents remains constitutionally limited to the powers that Congress gives them.
George Washington only had four Cabinet officials. Lincoln had seven. Allowing longer questioning periods at the beginning of an oversight hearing or at the start of each panel of witnesses is one way to alleviate those problems.
The final bipartisan recommendation is a big one. It stems from the reality that the country is politically divided, and voters are producing narrow majorities in the House and Senate in the range of 55, 52, or 51 percent. It appears that, for the foreseeable future, those types of narrow margins could flip the majority party in a subsequent election, and flip it back again in the following election, as has happened in the Senate. Despite that political reality, the House has chosen to continue to allocate two-thirds of committee funding to the majority party and only one-third to the minority.
The current approach threatens dramatic funding changes and abrupt staffing shifts that may lead to losing staff with important institutional expertise, including staff experienced in oversight. The Senate, in contrast, long ago replaced the one third-two thirds funding split between the parties with a committee allocation process that more closely reflects the actual composition of the majority and minority parties in the Senate. Under the current Senate approach, committees first take care of shared expenses, such as administrative personnel whose compensation is typically split on a basis.
The Senate also permits committees to adopt a different allocation of funds by agreement of the chair and ranking member. The resulting division of committee funds more fairly reflects the composition of the Senate and is generally less disruptive to committees when majorities shift, including committees exercising oversight authority. To reap the same benefits, the House should consider a similar committee funding allocation process. In testimony submitted to the House Modernization Committee, the Levin Center offered several more options.
First is the recommendation that the chair and ranking member of a committee conducting an oversight investigation make a public commitment to a bipartisan investigation, including instructing committee staff on both sides of the aisle to work together in good faith to reach consensus on the facts. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation PSI , where I worked for many years, was led by Senators who repeatedly committed their staffs, publicly and privately, to joint investigations.
Leaders like Senator Coburn, Senator Levin, and others did so, because they believed that bipartisan investigations were superior to partisan inquiries.
That was my experience as well. I found that conducting an investigation with people holding similar views to my own was like investigating in an echo chamber. The staffers rarely challenged each other and often let issues slide. Investigating with people who held fundamentally different views, however, inevitably led to the investigators asking more questions, challenging each other on those facts, and engaging in more conversations about what really happened and why.
That type of constructive, bipartisan dialogue is possible only when the chair and ranking member of the investigating committee direct their staffs to work out their differences. Making a public commitment to bipartisanship is, of course, only the beginning.
Members and staff also have to figure out how to investigate together so that their understanding of the facts matures together. A variety of investigative techniques can help. They include requiring both sides of the aisle to attend joint briefings from experts and targets to ensure everyone hears the same information at the same time.
The same reasoning supports requiring both sides to attend key interviews together. At PSI, Republican and Democratic staff even shared their questions in writing before an interview so that everyone would know what questions would be asked in what order. Joint questions helped ensure that each side understood the issues of interest to the other and all key topics would be covered. Once an interview concludes, another helpful technique is to produce a post-interview summary with input from both sides.
A joint interview summary helps ensure the two sides have the same understanding of what was said. Any disagreements should be resolved as soon as possible by going back to the key witness or lawyer. Still another technique is to require committee staff to issue only joint press releases, with at least one quote from each side.
Drafting a joint press release helps uncover and resolve differences between the two sides. It may require multiple rounds of revisions, but common ground can be found if the committee leaders insist on it. A similar technique is to draft joint investigative reports to try to reach consensus on the facts or at least narrow any differences. But when we did hold hearings, they were organized, coherent, reflected both sides of the aisle, and minimized differences which meant they often had a powerful impact.
Another Levin Center recommendation is that committees and subcommittees consider holding fewer hearings. Less is more, when a committee does the hard work of conducting a bipartisan inquiry that produces at least a partial consensus on the facts, instead of holding multiple hearings on partisan issues with minimal cooperation between the two sides.
Fewer hearings would also enable Members and staff to gain more familiarity with key documents and witnesses and build a shared understanding of the problems. A related suggestion is that committees spend more time on topics that appeal to both parties and shy away from issues that exacerbate party divisions. Our two-day boot camps combine staff from the House and Senate, and from both parties, in investigative exercises that have trained more than staffers to date.
Much more can and should be done to strengthen skill sets, especially bipartisan opportunities that enable staff to discover they can work together.
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