Congress is the least liked and perhaps least understood part of government. But it’s vital to our constitutional government. Congress is the only branch equipped to work through our diverse nation’s disagreements and decide on the law. To better understand the First Branch, join host Kevin Kosar and guests as they explain its infrastructure, culture, procedures, history, and more.
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How Does Media Affect Our Perceptions of Congress? (with Rob Oldham)
Episode 49
Monday, August 5, 2024 • Duration 27:46
The topic of this episode is, “How does media affect our perceptions of Congress?’
As listeners no doubt know, Americans are down on Congress. Public approval of Congress has averaged about 20 percent over the past 20 years, according to Gallup. Certainly, the people on Capitol Hill are partly to blame. We have legislators who behave as if they are on a reality television show and who spend a lot of time starting fights on social media. Congress also has hurt its reputation by failing to address major public policy issues, like immigration and the soaring national debt. And then there are the occasional scandals that disgust the average American.
Yet, Americans’ dour opinion of Congress also is fueled by media coverage.
To talk more about this I have with me Rob Oldham, who is a Ph.D. candidate in politics at Princeton University. This year he will be an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow, and will be spending a lot of time on Capitol Hill. His published papers investigate the relationship between supermajority rules and bipartisan policymaking. His dissertation considers congressional policymaking in response to crises during the era of polarization.
Special Books Edition: An Interview with Michael Johnson, Author of Fixing Congress: Restoring Power to the People
Episode 48
Monday, July 1, 2024 • Duration 25:12
The topic of this special episode of the Understanding Congress podcast is a recent book by Michael Johnson and Jerome Climer. The book is titled, Fixing Congress: Restoring Power to the People (Morgan James Publishing, 2024). Mr. Johnson and Mr. Climer each have spent more than four decades in Washington, DC and have had stints working inside Congress.
Today, I have with me one of the authors, Michael Johnson, who, I should add, is not to be confused with current House Speaker Mike Johnson.
He has a long resume—he has spent about a half century in or around government, with stints in the White House, Congress, and private sector. Mike also coauthored a book with Mark Strand, Surviving Inside Congress (Congressional Institute, Inc., 2017), which we previously discussed on this podcast.
How Is Congress Involved in Foreign Policy? (With Jordan Tama)
Episode 39
Monday, October 2, 2023 • Duration 26:40
The topic of this episode is, “How is Congress involved in foreign policy?”
My guest is Jordan Tama, a Provost Associate Professor at American University’s School of International Service. He is the author or editor of five books on foreign policy. They are:
· Polarization and US Foreign Policy: When Politics Crosses the Water’s Edge, co-edited with Gordon M. Friedrichs (Palgrave Macmillan, Forthcoming)
Jordan also has written many papers on foreign policy, so it seems to me he is a great person to have on the podcast to help us understand how Congress is involved in foreign policy.
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington DC.
Can Congress Access Classified Information? (with Daniel Schuman)
Episode 38
Tuesday, September 5, 2023 • Duration 28:32
The topic of this episode is, “Can Congress access classified information?”
My guest is Daniel Schuman. He is the Policy Director at Demand Progress, a grassroots, nonpartisan organization that has worked to improve the legislative branch and to make government more transparent to the public. Daniel also is the editor of the First Branch Forecast, an extraordinarily informative newsletter that you can read and subscribe to at no cost at https://firstbranchforecast.com/.
We last spoke with Daniel on episode 8 of this podcast, where he enlightened us on the process by which Congress funds itself. This time around, we will dig into the subject of Congress and classified information.
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington DC.
Daniel, welcome to the podcast.
Daniel Schuman:
Thanks so much for having me.
Kevin Kosar:
I suppose we should start by defining our subject matter: classified information. Pardon the vanity here, but I'm going to refer to a report I wrote some years ago for the Congressional Research Service, where I defined classified information as "information or material designated and clearly marked or clearly represented, pursuant to the provisions of a statute or Executive order (or a regulation or order issued pursuant to a statute or Executive order), as requiring a specific degree of protection against unauthorized disclosure for reasons of national security (50 U.S.C. 426(1))." How's that for clarity?
What Does the U.S. Government Accountability Office Do? (with Gene Dodaro)
Episode 37
Monday, August 7, 2023 • Duration 32:21
The topic of this episode is, “What does the U.S. Government Accountability Office do?”
To answer that question we have Gene Dodaro. He is the eighth Comptroller General of the United States—that means he is the head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). He has held that position since December 2010. Prior to becoming the top dog at this government watchdog agency, Gene held other executive positions at GAO, including Chief Operating Officer. Remarkably, Gene has spent a half of a century at the agency. So, with all that experience I can think of nobody better to ask the question, “What does the Government Accountability Office do?”
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It's a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I'm your host, Kevin Kosar, and I'm a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington DC.
Gene, welcome to the program.
Gene Dodaro:
It's a pleasure to be with you, Kevin.
Kevin Kosar:
Let's start at the very beginning. GAO was created a century ago. Why
Gene Dodaro:
GAO was created in 1921—right after World War I. The government had created a large debt during that time in order to promulgate the war, and there was concern about having a better, more disciplined way to handle the federal government's budget process. In the same legislation in which we were created, the —which is now known as the (OMB) in the executive office of the President—was also created, and the very first requirement was put in place for the President to to the Congress. Then GAO was in the legislative branch in order to provide a check and balance on the receipts and expenditures of federal funds and the proper application of those funds to meet the intent of the appropriation legislation for the Congress. So it was an arrangement put in place to provide more fiscal discipline to the federal government's budget process and execution.
What Is the Congressional Research Service, and What Does It Do? (with Kevin Kosar)
Episode 36
Monday, July 3, 2023 • Duration 24:09
The topic of this episode is, “What is the Congressional Research Service, and what does it do?”
The guest of this show is me, Kevin Kosar. I spent a little over a decade at the Congressional Research Service (CRS) working as a non-partisan analyst and as an acting section research manager. Subsequent to my time at the agency, I was one of the individuals who advocated that Congress make CRS reports available to the public and not just legislators. I’ve also written about CRS and the other legislative branch support agencies, like CBO and GAO.
But it would be weird for me to ask myself questions and then answer them, so I asked my AEI colleague, Jaehun Lee, to serve as my interlocutor.
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our Republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation.
I’m your host Kevin Kosar and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.
All right, Jaehun, take it away.
Jaehun Lee:
Let's start simple. What is the Congressional Research Service?
Kevin Kosar:
The Congressional Research Service is the rare government agency where its name actually accurately describes what it does. It is a research and reference service for Congress. Congress is its lone client. CRS is an agency in inside the Library of Congress. So it is a federal government agency—not some sort of private sector research outfit—and its job is to support Congress and to do so by providing nonpartisan research, analysis, legal opinions, and just about anything else that Congress may require.
Does the Senate Still Work? (with Marty Gold)
Episode 35
Monday, June 5, 2023 • Duration 29:26
The topic of this episode is, “Does the Senate still work?”
To answer that question, we have Martin Gold, a partner with Capital Council, LLC, a government relations firm in Washington, DC. Marty spent many years in the US Senate working for individual senators, committees, and a majority leader. He also is the author of the book, Senate Procedure and Practice (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), which explains how the Chamber operates.
So, Marty has both an inside view of the Senate and he has a long view of it, which is why I wanted to have him on the program to answer the question, “Does the Senate still work?”
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our Republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be. And that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation.
I'm your host Kevin Kosar and I'm a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.
Welcome to the program.
Martin Gold:
Thank you for having me, Kevin.
Kevin Kosar:
The subject of this episode is, “Does the Senate still work?” So it occurs to me that—to answer that question—it might be helpful if I first asked you, “What does a working Senate look like?”
Martin Gold:
A working Senate is a Senate that is mindful of its constitutional responsibilities, which it has many. Some powers are expressly stated in the Constitution and are unicameral powers, like the power over nominations, the power over treaties, or the power to run impeachment trials. And then a number of other powers that are obviously exercised on a bicameral basis.
Why Is Congressional Oversight Important, and How Can It Be Done Well? (with Elise Bean)
Episode 34
Monday, May 1, 2023 • Duration 22:02
The topic of this episode is, “Why is congressional oversight important, and how can it be done well?”
To help us tackle this subject we have Elise Bean. She is the Director of the Washington Office of Wayne State University’s Levin Center. Elise spent 30 years in Congress working as an investigator for Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) and for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Elise handled investigations, hearings, and legislation on matters involving money laundering, offshore tax abuse, corruption, shell companies, and corporate misconduct. She is also the author of the book, Financial Exposure: Carl Levin's Senate Investigations into Finance and Tax Abuse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). So who better to have on the show to discuss the topic, “Why is congressional oversight important, and how can it be done well?”
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C.
Welcome to the program.
Elise Bean:
Thank you for inviting me, Kevin.
Kevin Kosar:
All right, let's begin with something very fundamental. What is Congressional oversight, and who in Congress can do it?
Elise Bean:
Well, Congressional oversight is when members of Congress, on a committee or individually, ask questions and try to find out: What are the facts? Is a program working? Is there really an abuse? If you want good government, you need good oversight because things change over time and what worked at one time doesn't work at another. That's what Congressional oversight is.
What Are the Job Descriptions of Representatives and Senators? (with Casey Burgat)
Episode 33
Monday, April 3, 2023 • Duration 29:02
The topic of this episode is: “What are the job descriptions of representatives and Senators?”
To answer that question, we have Dr. Casey Burgat. He's the director of the Legislative Affairs program at the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University. Dr. Burgat also has had stints at the Congressional Research Service, and he worked with me back when I was at the R Street Institute. Recently, he and Professor Charlie Hunt authored the book, Congress Explained: Representation and Lawmaking in the First Branch. Casey has been studying Congress and how it operates for years, which makes him a great person to ask the question, what are the job descriptions of representatives and Senators?
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.
Dr. Casey Burgat, welcome to the program.
Casey Burgat:
Thanks for having me.
Kevin Kosar:
It's not unusual for Americans to grumble about Congress and to complain that these elected officials are not doing their jobs. But last I checked, there're no official job descriptions for the positions of representative and Senator. So in thinking about what these guys are supposed to be doing, I think we should probably start with the US Constitution. It certainly has some clues.
What Is the Congressional Debt Limit? (with Phil Wallach)
Episode 32
Monday, March 6, 2023 • Duration 22:02
The topic of this episode is: "What is the congressional debt limit?"
To answer that question we are once again speaking with Philip Wallach. He was the very first guest on this podcast, where we pondered why we need a Congress. Phil is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of the book, Why Congress, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. Phil also has written previously about the debt limit, which makes him the right person to ask: What is the congressional debt limit?
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It's a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I'm your host, Kevin Kosar, and I'm a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.
Phil, welcome back to the program.
Phil Wallach:
Thanks for having me back.
Kevin Kosar:
Let's start by getting clear on what we're talking about. There are deficits and there is debt. How do these two things differ?
Phil Wallach:
It's a stocks versus flow kind of thing. Each year, we have spending and revenue—in almost all years in recent memory, we have more spending than revenue. That creates a deficit. So the accumulation of all of the past deficits is the debt. So the debt is our total of all the spending we've done minus the revenue we've taken in, and it is now officially north of $30 trillion.
Welcome to the podcast.
Jordan Tama:
Thanks so much for having me on, Kevin.
Kevin Kosar:
Some months ago, our listeners heard me chat with Alissa Ardito about the formal powers of Congress in foreign affairs. We talked about things like how the Senate has the authority to approve treaties and to consider nominees to fill high positions in the State Department, the military, and other agencies that are involved in foreign affairs. We also talked about the fact that Congress has the power to declare war and the discretion to fund and create agencies that deal with matters overseas, like the United States Agency for International Development. And we also pondered in a philosophical manner about how we're supposed to have a representative democracy influencing foreign affairs.
But I wanted to bring you in because you're so well prepared, well-studied, and scholarly on the matter of where the rubber hits the road and how the wheels actually turn. So let me start by asking, where should the bewildered citizen first look when trying to understand how Congress is involved in foreign policy?
Jordan Tama:
Congress is involved in foreign policy in a lot of ways, more than most Americans realize. This includes both Congress exercising its formal powers and Congress exercising influence in more informal ways. I'll say a quick word about both of those areas, the formal and informal powers.
Certainly, the formal powers are important, and the most important of these tends to be the power of the purse. When it comes to spending on diplomacy, defense—and defense is half of the discretionary federal budget, so that's huge—and foreign aid, the president simply can't act without Congress appropriating the funds. This gives Congress a power that it exercises every single year, and in recent years, Congress has sometimes challenged the president assertively on foreign policy spending. One example of that was when Donald Trump was president. He wanted to cut the budget of the State Department and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) by a third, and Congress said no and instead maintained the budget at roughly constant levels, which was important in allowing the U.S. to continue playing an active role in the world and providing foreign assistance to other countries.
Congress also routinely influences foreign policy by passing legislation that authorizes or mandates foreign policy stances or actions. For instance, Congress has mandated sanctions in recent years on many countries, including Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. This is an area where Congress tends to be quite active legislatively.
But Congress also influences foreign policy through its informal powers, which can include public statements by members of Congress—particularly the more prominent members of Congress like the chairs or ranking members of the key foreign policy committees, or the House or Senate leaders. It also can include trips to foreign countries by members of Congress. It could include private meetings between members of Congress and senior executive branch officials. I'll just say a quick word about a couple of these informal tools.
Public statements by members of Congress on high profile foreign policy issues can sometimes be pretty important because they can generate a lot of media attention, and that can shape public attitudes. So one recent example of this is “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) Republicans in Congress along with Donald Trump and some of the MAGA Republicans running for president have been making public statements in opposition to US aid to Ukraine. And this seems to be moving Republican public opinion away from supporting US aid to Ukraine, even though legislatively the MAGA Republicans don't yet have the majority on that issue in Congress. Foreign trips can be important. A lot of members of Congress have gone to Taiwan in recent years, and this can send a strong signal to Taiwan, can infuriate China, and complicate things the Biden Administration is trying to do with regard to China. And then there're private conversations going on all the time between members of Congress and executive branch officials. Sometimes these can be important, but they're not going to be reported in the media. But that sort of thing is happening all the time.
Kevin Kosar:
One of the things you mentioned is that both individual members of Congress and the committees who have formal jurisdiction have a role to play. And that's interesting because that means you have a president and his foreign policy apparatus, but you also have 535 other people who can be getting involved in these things in one way or another, which—like you said—doesn't create a necessarily clear message all the time for foreign nations to pick up on. They instead may be getting a bit of a cacophony, right?
Jordan Tama:
That's absolutely right, and on a lot of foreign policy issues, there is no consensus position coming out of Congress—there're just a lot of different positions. When that's the case, Congress is often not going to be able to pass legislation on the issue, so all you get from Congress is a lot of different messages. But those messages can sometimes still be quite important, and there are issues where there is a prevailing position in Congress. So I'll again go back to something during the Trump Administration. Trump was very critical of NATO and he privately talked about the idea of withdrawing from NATO. Members of Congress who supported NATO heard that and they passed a resolution reiterating US support for NATO—even though there are some members of Congress who are on Trump's wavelength on NATO, the majority was not.
Now, let's make this a little more clear. Classified information, put really simply, is government information that only certain people in the executive branch can see. Is that roughly correct?
Daniel Schuman:
Yeah, it's roughly right. There are folks inside the legislative and judicial branches who have a right to have access as well. And as your excellent report actually indicated, there're two major ways in which you get classification. One is by statutory authority, which is what we did largely for atomic information. Then there's everything else, which was just sort of made up by the President through executive order. But as a general rule, 99.9%—or something pretty close to that—people with access to classified information are people inside the executive branch.
Kevin Kosar:
Okay, so a listener might be hearing this and saying, “Wait a minute, isn’t this inherently problematic for representative government? We, the people, elect the people who are supposed to make the laws and the people who make the laws are supposed to oversee the executive branch, which executes the laws. But if stuff's classified and the public can't see it and people in Congress generally can't see it, do we lose accountability? What do you think?
Daniel Schuman:
We absolutely do. There're two concepts worth separating. One is whether you have the technical right to see certain information, and the other is whether you actually have the means to see it.
Members of Congress and federal judges do not need to obtain a clearance. Nor does the President for that matter, which sometimes works out to our advantage and sometimes does not. In theory, members of Congress and the Judicial Branch, the executive orders don't apply to them and they should be able to see any information that they need to be able to see. And by extension—at least in theory—so should their staff. In Congress, that would the personal staff, the committee staff, and the support offices and agencies.
But beyond this mechanical problem of do you have or need a clearance, there’s also the issue of, “do you have this need to know?” Members of Congress don't need a clearance because they are constitutional officers, but that is a different question from, “should they be able to see this information?” Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes the answer is no, but the people who should decide that are the members of Congress themselves. It's the legislative body. They have a fundamental right to oversee the executive branch. The House of Representatives used to be known as the Inquest of the Nation. They do have a right to get answers to all the questions, including things that the executive branch says is classified.
But the executive branch plays games here a little bit. The executive branch is very large; Congressional staff are very small. So they will not necessarily provide them the information. There is a long-standing fight where the executive branch doesn't want to hand over information, so Congress has created special committees that are focused on these matters. But then they play a game with those committees as well—“Well, we'll give it the Intelligence Committee but we won't give it to Armed Services,” or, “We're going to classify it at a different level so your staff can't see it.”
One final point is that while congressional staff—at least as a matter of theory—don't need to have a clearance, as a practical matter, they do. And the people who conduct the clearance reviews are the executive branch, which is not the greatest thing in the world to have happen. Some of these clearances can happen quickly, some can happen slowly.
There's a story that in the 1970s, the executive branch went to Congress and said, “We're going to reduce the number of people in the executive branch with clearances, and you should also have fewer people in Congress.” So the head of the CIA [Stansfield Turner] made a deal with Tip O'Neill and Senate leaders at the time to reduce the number of people with clearances. But they didn't get rid of the number of clearances for people in leadership, of course. They got rid of it for the rank and file. Long story short, the number of clearances in the executive branch went up astronomically, but Congress never changed the way things work for them, so they have great trouble overseeing matters that are happening inside the executive branch.
Kevin Kosar:
From the perspective of representative government, it is a little jarring that Congress has delegated so much control over classified information, controlled information, and all the other different types of information. They've delegated so much of that to the executive branch. We’ve alluded to this, but presidents file these executive orders, which set the rules on how much information gets classified, how long it gets classified for, etc.
Now, who in Congress gets to see classified information on a regular basis? Is it particular committees? Is it any individual who's been elected? Who is it?
Daniel Schuman:
That's a good question.
Again, we have theory and practice. In theory, every member of Congress has a right to see classified matters. But the House and Senate have each adopted rules that compartmentalize this information. So things that relate to the Armed Services Committee, members of the Armed Services Committee—in theory—can see. The committee will also have cleared staff, but now you start getting into principal-agent problems. Committee staff work for the committee chair and not the members of the committee. On the Senate side—in the Senate Intelligence Committee—you have staff designees, so each member of that committee has their own staffer who is hired and fired by them, so they can actually support the members. On the House side, that's not true at all. On the House Intelligence Committee, every member who is on the committee does not have a staffer who works for them, so they’re reliant on committee staff.
There is one exception, which is that the Speaker of the House and the Minority Leader get staff designees because they are ex officio members of the committee. So you have large information asymmetries inside the chamber and then as it relates to outside. Classified information is not just shared inside the United States. We share it with our allies, sometimes we inadvertently share it with our adversaries, but there are many people who are allowed to be in access to classified information.
But Congress is where there's a real rub. Lots of people who should be able to see it, can't see it. They haven't kept up with the way that clearances have changed. A lot of information that used to be classified as secret way back in the day is now classified to being top secret, and we'll have compartmentalization on top of that.
So while interns in the executive branch can often be in access to information that is highly classified, members of Congress and their staff have real difficulty accessing this. And even when they're voting on matters that are highly classified, it's often very difficult for them to get access to that information. And the way access is...
At that time, GAO had a different name, which to some degree reflected its more limited mission at the time. What was it called back then?
Gene Dodaro:
It was the General Accounting Office. That's what it was when I first joined GAO in 1973. But at that time even, we were doing more than accounting, but that was our original name—the General Accounting Office.
Kevin Kosar:
It seems that fundamentally GAO was initially established to deal with a basic kind of principle-agent problem that Congress faces, which is: Congress as the principle passes a law puts money towards achieving the objectives in the law, but then the job of actually spending the money and doing the execution is over in the executive branch.
In terms of visibility and understanding, “Is this money going where it should go? Is it being used improperly?”, how is Congress to figure that out other than by hauling executives over and asking them, in which case you're relying upon information they provide. So GAO has the ability to get into the books of agencies, and to follow the money.
Gene Dodaro:
Absolutely, Kevin. One of the roles of GAO is to make sure that the appropriation laws enacted by the Congress are properly implemented. We audit the federal government's consolidated financial statements every year, and we’ve worked to create an arrangement where the Inspectors General of each major department and agency audit or arrange for independent audits of the books of the financial operations of each federal agency across the federal government. And then we review that work. It's done of course with our methodology, and then we audit some agencies individually, like the IRS for example. We audit all the receipts that they collect for the federal government. We audit the Bureau of Public Debt, we audit the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and then we review all these other audits across government and then issue our report on the government's consolidated financial statements. We also issue legal decisions that anyone has a question in Congress about the proper application of the funds and whether it was done in accordance with appropriation law.
So we're very much in the business of oversight. Congress is very resourced by the executive branch, and that's why they need a strong GAO in order to provide that oversight over them, so the system of checks and balances in our government work properly and that the executive branch properly executes the laws that are put in place for Congress. And we've grown over the years to not just on fiscal issues, but also looking at whether or not government programs and activities and everything the federal government does is accordance with the authorizing legislation of the federal government's activities.
Actually, only about 10% of what we do now is in the original role that we had back in 1921 in the financial management area. The vast majority is looking to see whether programs, policies, regulations, and other activities put in place by Congress are operating as intended, and to make sure the government is operating as efficiently and effectively in accordance with congressional direction as possible, or whether there's need to make refinements and regulations and to help Congress with their fundamental oversight functions as well as their appropriation and responsibilities.
Kevin Kosar:
So the listener who surfs over to gao.gov and starts scanning all the great stuff you have there, might see the term "bid protest" and say, "Huh, what is that about?" What is bid protest and what's GAO's role there?
Gene Dodaro:
We've had that role for decades through the Competition in Contracting Act (1984). Every year, the federal government spends $500 billion or more to procure certain services items, etc. If you're a contractor that bids on a government contract and you don't win and you're concerned that the federal agency or department didn't follow the laws or things weren't properly clear in their procurement process or you think you weren't treated fairly, you can come to GAO and file a bid protest and say you don't think this was followed for the following reasons. GAO will issue an opinion within 100 days as to whether or not we sustain the protest or deny the protest.
Sometimes the agencies—once the protest is made and understanding the concerns that are being had—will take immediate action to rectify the situation. And so we have a team of highly skilled procurement experts in law here at GAO in our Office of General Counsel. They'll hold hearings, they'll take documents from the protestors and agencies, and then eventually they'll render a decision. We probably get about well over 2,000 of these bid protests every year. Competition for federal contracts is key. And in some areas there's been consolidation in the industries, which makes the competition a little bit more intense.
Kevin Kosar:
So I want to talk a little more about something you alluded to already, which is that GAO had this more limited mission 100 years ago, and it's subsequently been expanded. And if memory serves, one of the first expansions occurred around 1974. This was a period when Congress as a whole had just decided to bulk up its power. It was tired of being pushed around by the executive, whether it was President Nixon or President Johnson, and it just started investing in itself. It created a Congressional Budget Office, it created a new
You think about Congress, it's comprised of regular Americans—anybody can run for Congress and anybody can become a congressional staffer. And when those people come to Washington DC, they're suddenly saddled with this immense responsibility of governing: they have to make laws, they have to oversee executive agencies, and they have to respond to lots of constituents. They have to receive interest groups who come through their doors, making demands of them related to policy and spending.
Nobody who enters that position is fully equipped to handle it. We're all amateurs when it comes to governing, and CRS plays a critical role in helping those folks govern. So if you're a brand new legislator and you're trying to figure out, “How do I introduce my first bill? Where do I even get this thing drafted?” You can call up CRS and they'll say, “Okay, here are the steps. Here's how you should reach out to legislative counsel within the chamber who can actually put your ideas into a template and grind it through.” They can help you on these sort of things. They can teach you the basics of legislative procedure: what's a filibuster? How does a congressional budget process work?
They also are a giant resource for facts and nonpartisan—and this is key, nonpartisan—analysis. Everybody in DC in the private sector to one degree or another has an angle, a perspective. Often, especially when you're talking about interest groups or lobbyists, they have specific policy goals and they are going to make arguments to persuade you to pick their policies or to support them. CRS doesn't do that. It doesn't tell Congress, “Here's the policy you should pick.” Instead, it says, “There are your options. All of them have benefits and costs. Here are the benefits. Here are the costs. Now you Congress decide.” That makes them a special resource, and that's why they are so trusted on Capitol Hill because they don't have a skin in the game. They're not pushing an agenda.
What do they do? They run training classes to teach you how to be a legislator or staffer. They'll look up facts and figures for you. They write short reports and primers that explain the history of various policies and programs so you as a legislator can understand why these programs and policies exist and how they have evolved over time. They do so much for Congress.
Jaehun Lee:
How many people work at CRS, and how are they different from staff working in the House and Senate?
Kevin Kosar:
Presently, a little over 600 people work at CRS, so that makes it a sizable think tank and reference service within the library. But I should put that number within context. About 40 years ago—during the 1980s—CRS had over 900 employees. It had a lot more people power than it does today.
How are they different from staff working in the House and the Senate? CRS staff are civil servants, meaning they are hired on nonpartisan objective criteria—the so-called KSAOs: knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics. It's a rigorous process with lots of stages where—if you want to get a job at CRS—you have to show you got the education credentials, the research chops, and the various skills that you need to do the job. One of the things that helped get me a job at CRS was the fact that I had spent four or five years reading congressional documents in the course of producing my dissertation, so I was very familiar with the committee processes for doing oversight and policymaking and the larger legislative arena and how it operates.
That's different from Capitol Hill. If you want to work for a member of the House, member of the Senate, one of the committees, you're going to be picked with some consideration of your partisanship. That doesn't happen at CRS. Not at all. Not ever. People who work on Capitol Hill, their jobs are very diverse in nature. You have some people who are just devoted to constituent service, whose job is not really to think about policy. You have people who are devoted to working on press and public communications. You have folks who do a whole lot of different things. CRS is a lot more narrow-banded; you primarily have people with academic expertise-type training and experience. And of course, you have the critical core of the reference librarians, knowledge services folks. That's what comprises the agency.
Jaehun Lee:
Why did Congress create CRS?
Kevin Kosar:
The story starts at least a hundred years ago—around 1914. To a degree, what we had going on was this recognition of an aspiration of the Enlightenment, which had happened centuries before, which is that reason, facts, analyses should come to bear on governance. Now, we all know Congress is comprised of individuals representing diverse districts and states, and they are very much influenced by parochial interests—people back home—and they're influenced and informed very much by interest groups.
CRS was created at a time when there was a broader effort to bring facts, analysis and reason into the legislative process. This got its start in Wisconsin and New York, where the legislatures there got the idea, 'Maybe we should have some experts we can rely upon who can give us the information we need to give us the ability to make smarter decisions and make policy that works better.' To a degree, that—making good policy that works and pleases voters—can help with the eternal goal of a politician getting re-elected. So that's why CRS was created in 1914. It was created as the Legislative Reference Service.
To a degree, it built off infrastructure that had been created back in 1800. I mean, why did we have a Library of Congress? Answer: there was this idea amongst the Founders that it would be good if we looked at some books, studied some facts and figures before we legislate, and so that's why the Library of Congress was created initially. But 1914 was a moment where they said, "We should have people in there who are devoted to producing materials that are useful to legislators—such as compilations of statutes about particular topic (e.g., maybe tariffs or something related to agriculture) and having them on hand—and these people should be available at the beckon call of the legislature as needed. That was the original Legislative Reference Service.
Fast forward to 1946, Congress was in the process of clawing back power. The executive branch had grown massively during the Great Depression, New Deal, and World War II. Congress in the mid-40s said, "We have to reassert ourselves as the First Branch." And they did a whole lot of things, but one of which was they beefed up the Legislative Reference Service and started requiring it to have real policy nerds on staff in particular issue areas. During the early 70s, the ballooning of the executive branch prompted Congress to reassert itself and it took the LRS,
But I think if you go beyond the text of the Constitution itself and consider the constitutional purpose of the Senate, its purpose is to slow things down and be a more deliberate body. James Madison talked about, in the Federalist Papers, the Senate being a necessary fence against the passions of the House of Representatives. The rules and the precedents of the House and the mechanisms of the House allow it to move very quickly when the majority party wants to move quickly and the minority has very little, if anything, to say about it and it can push things through on a fairly instantaneous basis. It's a legislative juggernaut.
The purpose of the Senate is to be the necessary fence against that, to slow things down, and to create a more deliberative process. And when you get beyond the stated powers of the Senate and the Constitution and look also to the purpose of why we have a bicameral legislature, I think the Senate, in fact, does serve that function quite well. It doesn’t serve it in exactly the same way as it may have served it years ago. Senates do change, not only on the basis of the people who are serving in the body but also on the national mood of the country. When people talk about polarization in the Senate. It has to be remembered that the Senate is a political institution and that the polarization in the Senate reflects the polarization of the American people. If the Senate were really out of step with the American people, query how many of those senators would remain senators as the public thought that somehow or other they really weren’t being appropriately represented in the place. So how the Senate goes about serving the constitutional functions—both formal and informal—is different perhaps than it may have been in the past. Nevertheless, I still think it is the necessary fence in the great constitutional structure we have.
Kevin Kosar:
I want to quote something from the start of your book where you write, “If one were to encapsulate the difference between House and Senate procedure in nine words, they would be ‘Dominance of the offense versus dominance of the defense.’” I think it’s useful for our listeners to get a sense of how is the Senate different from the House. Okay, they play more defense over there. They are the fence you were talking about. Why does it work that way?
Martin Gold:
I should begin by explaining what that terminology means because I’ve used it for years and years and it remains true. If they got rid of the filibuster in the Senate it might not be so true, but it’s true now anyhow. The House is an institution, particularly as that has evolved over American history, where the rules and the precedents of the institution and the mechanisms of the institution—such as the House Rules Committee—all served to enhance majority party power. Meaning, in effect, that a majority that can hang together, particularly on procedural questions, can not only set up the terms for debate and consideration in the House but can really push things through on a very rapid basis without, again, much accord being given to minority perspectives or viewpoints. That’s dominance of the offense.
The Senate is exactly the opposite. The rules of the Senate and the precedents of the Senate and the absence of mechanisms such as a rules committee all serve to enhance the power of minority parties, minority coalitions, and individual senators. So it is a place where the defense really can dominate the institution. It isn't to say that the defense can just stop anything it wants to. It is to say that things take longer to get through. Sometimes they can be stopped and sometimes the defense can use its power to modify the procedures by which things will be considered. But the bottom line of it is: not only is the Senate different from the House in obvious ways such as the sense of the length of terms of the members and the way we have two per state equality of membership (as opposed to proportionality) or the just general size of the body, it is also different in terms of how it exercises its power under the Constitution.
It's one of the things in the Constitution that people tend to overlook. The framers of the Constitution did not write the rules of the Senate, nor did they write the rules of the House of Representatives. They wrote no rules at all. They, however, gave both senators and representatives the power to govern themselves however they saw fit. And so it can be argued that the rules that have developed in the House over the course of time serve the constitutional purposes that the House is supposed to serve and that the rules of the Senate—as they have evolved over time—serve the constitutional purposes of the Senate. Again, the framers did not arrange for those things. Senators could have structured rules however they wanted to structure them, same with representatives. But the evolution over time, I think does, in fact, serve the broad constitutional purposes that you have in a bicameral legislature. Otherwise, you could just have a unicameral legislature.
Kevin Kosar:
Since you mentioned rules, I figured I want to just drill down a little bit more on this. Every two years we have elections and we get a new Congress. As part of that, the House of Representatives will review its rules and they’ll vote to alter them. And this is typically a partisan exercise where whichever party has the most people gets to rewrite the rules. Senate doesn’t work that way, does it?
Martin Gold:
The Senate does not because 100% of the House of Representatives is freshly elected every two years. Therefore, the rules of one Congress do not carry over to the next Congress. There is, I should say, substantial similarity between the rules of one Congress and the rules of the next. The rules of the Pelosi Congress and the rules of the present Congress are substantially similar—although not identical because the Republicans, when they came in and had that highly-publicized rules controversy wrapped around the election of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker, did make some changes to the last set of rules that Pelosi had had as Pelosi and the Democrats made changes to the Ryan rules that preceded them. So while there is vast similarity, there are also important differences. The Senate, however, is a continuing body. Two-thirds of the senators continue over from one election to the next. It is supposed to be that way.
You could have otherwise had the framers elect the entire Senate all at once. But the framers divided the Senate into three classes, making sure there was always a quorum of the Senate present so that if you replaced every single senator who was up for election in a particular election cycle, you would still have stability in the chamber. And because of that, the rules of the Senate do carry over from one Congress to the next. They are sometimes changed, but when Mitch McConnell was the majority leader, for example, there was not a single time in his tenure as leader where he proposed a rules change. And Chuck Schumer has been the leader now going on three years, he hasn't made changes either. The last time they formally amended...
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah, we should dig into that a little bit. I think often Americans don't like to see politicians fighting amongst themselves, yet the legislative branch, last time I checked the Constitution, says that Congress makes the laws, Congress decides where the money is to be spent, but they're not the ones who actually do the execution of the law. They're not the ones actually spending the money. So does that seem to imply some sort of constitutional obligation to engage in oversight?
Elise Bean:
So the Supreme Court has said that that's exactly true, that if Congress can't do what it's supposed to do under the Constitution, unless it has some facts… I mean, wouldn't it make sense—if you're going to change your program or decide where money's going—that you have informed decision-making based on the facts? In fact, there's a 1946 law that requires all Congressional committees to do oversight within their areas of jurisdiction, and that's because they want you to find out what the facts are before you start to pass laws, give out money, and approve nominations.
Kevin Kosar:
Right. And as you hinted at earlier, when Congress says, "Hey, here's a new program we authorized and here's some new money for it, go out and do well, executive branch," sometimes the executive branch doesn't follow Congressional intent. Sometimes a program may not work as it was hoped. So Congressional oversight, we shouldn't just view it as kind of a response to some bad thing reported in the newspaper where Congress has to react, right? Rather, it sounds like it's something that they should be kind of engaged in as a matter of course.
Elise Bean:
Well, there are two kinds of oversight. One is what you were just talking about, routine oversight, where you look at the laws within your jurisdiction, see how they're working—and God knows a lot of times they don't work well—and what can you do to improve them. Other times there's a scandal, there's an earthquake, there's a hurricane, and Congress reacts to that scandal or to that event, tries to find out what's happening, and—maybe—how Congress can help.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah, I mean, it seems inherent to the concept of representative and responsible government that you've got to have that oversight component there. Otherwise, you get money spent on things that don’t work, and the tap will never be turned off and taxpayers will be aggravated, to say nothing of scandals not being addressed and bad behavior being punished—or at least curbed so it doesn't repeat.
Now, some listeners of this podcast, when they hear the words Congressional oversight, they might flinch, in part because there's a tendency amongst the media to show oversight happening in the form of a hearing with a member of the dais whose face is getting red and they're getting all worked up—it's a political conflict, often a left and right conflict. That stuff happens, but that is certainly not the whole of Congressional oversight. There's bad oversight. There's good oversight. What does good oversight site look like?
Elise Bean:
Well, to me it's when there's a good-faith effort from both parties to try to find the facts. It's a complicated world out there and getting consensus on the facts is sometimes really hard. But when you do it, it creates a foundation for change. And when you think about it, Congressional oversight is all about affecting change. We want to improve laws. We want to address abuses. It's about fixing problems. But Congress isn't the executive branch. They can't prosecute anyone. They can't throw them in jail or fine them. It's all about policy changes. And we're talking about policy changes, good oversight—to me—involves people who have really fundamentally different worldviews. That way, they challenge each other. They look at the facts differently. They look at more facts, and the end result is something that is more thoughtful, more thorough, and certainly more credible if you have both parties involved.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah, and that brings up the question of oversight and what it looks like. Again, it's forgivable that folks might think, oh, oversight, it's hearings. It's the guys on the dais asking the questions, the witnesses at the table, and that's oversight. But that's just part of a much bigger process. What does that overall process look like? What are the steps of that process?
Elise Bean:
You're absolutely right, Kevin. The hearing is sort of at the end of the process. When you start it, it's first fact-finding. What happened? Get documents, do interviews, maybe go visit some sites, visit victims, and find out what happened to them. That's the fact-finding phase. The second phase is you write it up because if you don't write it up, nobody knows what you ever found out. So that's often a report or a memo or a letter writing up what you found. Then you have the hearing. If it's important enough, you have a public hearing. But then there's a fourth stage which is as important or more important than the rest, which is doing something about the problems that you uncovered. So it's a very long process, four stages. That can take a year. It can even take two years.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah. Going back to the beginning of the oversight process, how do you pick what to oversee? When I think of Congressional committees and the sheer breadth of their jurisdiction, they often have multiple agencies, and every agency has tons of programs and et cetera, et cetera. Where to begin? How do you choose amongst all these competing priorities for oversight? How do committees do that?
Elise Bean:
Well, that's the most important issue of all because you can't do a lot in a year. I mean, the most you could do is maybe once a month, and then you don't have any time to really investigate. The really best investigations, you usually do two or three a year. And to pick those, what usually happens is the staff makes some suggestions to the chairman of the committee or to the ranking member of the committee, and they decide out of that selection what they're going to do. So you think about, what promises has that member of Congress made to their constituents? What are some of the biggest problems in the subject area they have? Has there been a scandal or has there been some event that really needs to be addressed? And you have to just make some pretty hard choices about what your priorities are.
Kevin Kosar:
I can see that. It would have to be a negotiation amongst a number of competing goods with different criteria thrown into the mix. You mentioned the first stage of once you pick something, getting the facts. And you can do that through interviews and requests for documents. How easy is that, whether it's reaching out to the executive branch or the private sector? In your experience, how responsive do they tend to be when you say, "We want these documents from this file or this person, or we're insisting these guys come over and talk to us, not in a hearing, but just talk to us as staff." How tough is that?
Elise Bean:
It's not easy. I'll just tell you that. It's a very difficult process because you're...
Casey Burgat:
Yes. Always, always start with the Constitution. It takes us back to the Founding. It sets the framework for how we're supposed to think about a lot of these institutional questions. This is one of them.
The Constitution does provide at least some clues, but definitely not as many as we assume are in there—especially in regards to the actual duties of Senators and representatives. It does give eligibility requirements of who can serve: you have to be 25 years old to be in the House, 30 in the Senate, seven years a citizen, etc. But after that, it gets surprisingly and oftentimes frustratingly sparse in terms of what individuals are supposed to do once they're elected. We have to look more broadly and deduce our expectations of job descriptions.
We can take some hints about what the individual members are supposed to do based on what the Constitution says that Congress as an institution—and the individual chambers—are tasked with. So Congress-wide, all legislative powers are granted to Congress. It's right there at the top—Article I, Section 1—no debate about it: Congress is the legislative branch. Then, they itemized what other powers Congress is supposed to have: to declare war, coin money, and—Kevin, I know this is for you—establish post offices, etc. We know that they're supposed to do that. Then each of the chambers has its separate roles: the House deals with revenue legislation, impeachment, etc. The Senate has advice and consent on treaties and nominations, and exclusively conducts the impeachment trials that the House sends them. Because Congress and the individual chambers are constitutionally tasked with these types of duties, if they don't do them, no one else will—at least in theory; in practice, we know it's not always that simple.
So given that the Constitution gives them these duties—both as an institution and as individual chambers—we can at least somewhat deduce that they are part of their constitutional job descriptions. But that's about where the Constitution runs out of the details on exactly what these 535 powerful members are supposed to do every single day. In fact, the vagueness of the Constitution is intentional. The Framers explicitly punt on a lot of these specifics that we often assume they've detailed for the individual members and Congress as an institution.
For example, the Constitution says things like “each House may determine the rules of its proceedings,” so it's left up to the members to decide how to operate and organize. This means they have to decide things like what—if any—committees to have, how to elect leaders (if they will have leaders), and how to process its business through procedures, especially in regards to legislation. Despite us thinking that it's an unbending, unmovable, and slow-operating institution, Congress has changed these things over time to suit the wants and needs of its membership.
But getting back to your original question about the frustration, this ambiguity and letting Congress figure out the details of the job on its own and changing things as they see fit has absolutely contributed to the public’s frustration with Congress. It's not like throwing a job posting up on Indeed of “Senator” and “representative.” It's up to all of us to decide exactly what these powerful people should be doing with their powers and their hours. And when we don't agree, we inevitably get frustration because you can't be everything to everyone at the same time. This is nothing new and has been a constant challenge for members since the beginning.
Kevin Kosar:
Americans also tend to have conflicting feelings about representatives and Senators. On the one hand, they'll say, "You guys just need to get things done." On the other hand they'll say, "Why aren't you deliberating more? Why aren't you bargaining?" And then on another hand, they'll say, "You need to stick to your principles and quit doing all that compromising and horse-trading." The very nature of the body of Congress itself—that it pulls these people from all over the place with different interests, and throws them into a big soup bowl together—seems to create its own theoretical problems with the expectations we should have for members.
Casey Burgat:
Absolutely. We are full of contradictions and it really helps to admit it. Then we can get past the lazy answer of what they're supposed to do—the bumper sticker version of all this stuff—and have conversations about what Congress is supposed to do and what's possible given all those contradictions baked right into the system.
Every few months we'll see a survey of Americans saying the vast majority of us—90% of us—say we want Congress to get something done, find common ground, compromise on things, etc. That's the lazy version. When we get down to the individual incentives of who these people represent, the thing you might want to compromise on is the thing that I deem as a principle that is uncompromisable. And in fact, the minute that my representative compromises on an issue like that, I'm looking for someone else to take the job.
We see this baked into campaign platforms where candidates will say this explicitly. "Send me there to stop them. Send me there to stop President Trump or President Biden.” Then this message is spun as standing up for principles. This just gets to the conflict that we've had since the beginning. We take all of these constituencies—all of these collective action problems—elect some people to be our voice, and say “Good luck.” Then we blame them when we don't feel represented on the one thing that really matters to us. It is just an incredibly hard job that leads to unrealistic expectations, which—in turn—lead to frustration that is easy to capitalize on. It's an impossible job, and I'm sympathetic to the members who have to navigate this every single day.
Kevin Kosar:
You just mentioned something that's important, which is that we have Senators whose job it is to represent whole states, whereas you have representatives who are supposed to represent districts. At the same time, they both come to Washington, DC and they're supposed to address matters of national concern—not merely local or parochial—which is another tension within there.
Let's set that aside and go to another thing that pulls at us when we think about the role of representative and Senator. Your book mentions these classic terms from political science—viewing the job of the legislator as being a
Kevin Kosar:
So when the Treasury needs to issue more debt, it's got to sell bonds—basically, these IOUs that say, "Please give us money that we can spend now, and we'll pay you back later." Is that essentially what's happening when we're taking on more debt?
Phil Wallach:
Yeah. A bond is a legally obligating instrument, and debt put out by the United States government is considered the lowest-risk kind of debt instrument in the world. So the government is not just saying, "If we feel in a good mood, we'll pay you back,” but, “we are legally obligated to pay you back with interest." That's very valuable to investors. And of course, United States bonds form the gold standard of collateral used not only in this country but around the world in the global financial system.
Kevin Kosar:
So this leads us to an important point, which is that an executive agency called the US Treasury that is issuing debt, but it doesn't do it simply at the behest of the President. The President can't say, "Well, let's just issue as much debt as we want on this day of the week or during this year." We have a law that limits the amount of debt; that is, our legislature has a role here.
We keep finding ourselves—with some frequency—in a situation where Congress will run these yearly deficits where they're spending more than the revenue coming in, and the debt grows and grows. Then, when we hit this legally mandated limit, Congress has to vote to pass a new law so that the limit is set higher so that more debt can be issued.
So let's just turn back the clock. This practice of setting a debt limit by law: why do we have it, and when did Congress first start doing it?
Phil Wallach:
Okay, so go back to the Constitution. Article I, Section 8 lists Congress's powers and pretty clearly gives the power of the purse to Congress. So Congress is responsible for making decisions about spending and taxation, and it's also, therefore, responsible for making decisions about financing deficits.
Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, whenever the Treasury wanted to sell debt, Congress would specifically vote to approve every single bond issue. Now, it didn't really think very hard about the way it did that; the Treasury Secretary pretty much came over and said, "This is what we'd like," and Congress generally said, "Okay, that sounds all right with us." But it was approving every single bond issue.
Now we come to World War I, and the federal government was spending money like never before, and Congress started to feel like this was too much of a burden for it to have to approve every single bond issue. So instead, in 1917, it put in place a ceiling, a limit. So up to this amount, Treasury can issue bonds as it sees necessary, and then once it hits that amount, it's going to have to come back to Congress. Congress will have to raise the ceiling, and the process involves the legislature again. But they put in place a dollar limit, and periodically raised that.
Somewhere around World War II, it took a modern statutory form. And ever since then, Congress has been raising the debt limit periodically, because we keep accumulating more debt such that if we didn't raise the limit, the Treasury would find itself unable to service the debt (i.e., unable to meet all of the obligations that Congress has incurred).
Kevin Kosar:
Is the United States unusual in having this debt ceiling policy where the legislature has to enact an increase to the debt periodically?
Phil Wallach:
Yes. It's not a normal thing for countries to have. In most countries, debt issuance seems to be thought of as a ministerial function of the Treasury Department, and not something that the legislature involves itself in so much. This is another aspect of America having an unusually powerful legislature that gets involved in more activities than legislatures in most countries do. But it is fairly clearly rooted in the Constitution that the US Congress has to be involved.
Now, it could just raise the limit really high. It could put in some sort of default rule that as long as we've passed spending laws, we're automatically authorizing the Treasury to sell enough debt such that we can spend all that money that we have voted in approval of. But we've never done that yet, so the debt limit has been the way we've coped with this congressional involvement for the last century.
Kevin Kosar:
It's worth pausing here to point out that the function of spending seems to have three big legislative steps. Congress passes a law to authorize spending on a program, an agency, etc. Then, Congress passes another law to appropriate the actual dollars that the executive agency can spend. But if the aggregate amount of those dollars exceeds the amount of revenues, you're going to have to take the next step to borrow. And in the olden days, as you referenced—a hundred years ago and earlier—Congress would just regularly pass these things ad hoc.
But that became such a frequent thing, it probably made very little sense to spend that much time on the floor of both chambers pushing those bills through. So they just set a higher number and put it there. That still is a third step. So instead of doing this third step every few weeks or every few months, every year or so we have to go through this debt limit situation.
Phil Wallach:
And it's not always so newsworthy, because sometimes neither party is all that interested in fighting over it—Congress puts through a raise of the limit in a bipartisan manner, and life goes on as before. So it doesn't have to be a moment of drama.
But ever since the standoff in 2011 especially, there's been a lot of attention to the debt limit, and a lot of sense that this is just a fight waiting to happen every time we come up against it.
Kevin Kosar:
We often hear the demand by some elected officials—presidents, members of Congress, etc.—that they want to "clean debt limit increase". What do they mean? And are these "clean increases" the norm?
Phil Wallach:
So a clean increase would be if legislators introduced a bill that was very short and very simple, and all it did was raise the amount of money that the debt limit is set at. Or something they've resorted to in recent years is: instead of choosing an amount, a dollar amount, they suspend the limit until a certain date. And that's a different way of getting at the same thing of saying, “We're going to be able to issue the debt we need through this time period instead of up to this amount.” And so Congress has sometimes passed bills that are more or less “clean increases.”
I wouldn't say that's the norm, though. Most of the time, whoever is not in the White House uses debt limit raises as a chance to hold the White House's feet to the fire a little bit on spending that they don't like, or on debt accumulation generically. If you go back to 2006, for example, the Democrats gave the George W. Bush administration a bit of a hard time on raising the debt limit then. It wasn't a big fight, in the end; the Republicans and Democrats got together and passed it in the end. But for example, Senators Joe Biden and Barack Obama, both voted against that increase as a
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