Congressional Management Foundation | Congress is slow to embrace new technology

This is an excerpt from The Future of Citizen Engagement: Rebuilding the Democratic Dialogue. Most citations have been removed but can be found in the full report. Select resources are included as links at the end of this post.

Since the Taft administration, when the number of Representatives was frozen at 435, not only has the population of the country grown significantly, but technology has revolutionized work and communication. Radio, broadcast and cable TV, computers, the Internet, and mobile communications have all been invented and/or widely adopted since then. All have also dramatically changed the dynamic between Members of Congress and the People.

However, Congress as an institution has always been cautious of embracing new technology. As a result, adoption and innovation has typically occurred on an office-by-office basis. The Legislative Branch is made up of 700 independent offices and entities: Senators' and Representatives' personal offices, committees, leadership offices, institutional offices, and legislative branch agencies. For the most part, they are making technology decisions with limited coordination, largely to allow maximum choice and flexibility to perform their duties as they deem necessary. However, with no single entity responsible for planning how technology can best support Legislative Branch operations or devising a comprehensive strategy for technology's role in democracy, technological adoption in Congress is slow and piecemeal.

Though radio and television had been widely adopted by the public decades before, it was not until 1978 that routine live radio broadcast of House floor proceedings began, and cable television broadcasts followed in 1979. Cable television broadcasts of Senate floor proceedings did not begin until 1986, and the Senate resisted radio broadcasts altogether. Once both chambers were being televised, anyone with cable TV could watch their legislators live on C-SPAN and place a telephone call to comment. In a 1987 speech, then-Senate Majority Leader Robert C. Byrd commented that:

"The explosion in the electronic media and the televising of House and Senate debates have resulted in better-informed interest groups, who, in turn, more readily communicate their message to their members, legislators, and other targets. Congressional offices are frequently flooded with telegrams, telephone calls, letters and postcards (sometimes preprinted), as a 'grassroots' campaign moves into full swing, mobilized by one or another interest group on a given issue."

Senator Byrd made this observation years before the Internet came along. Once it did, the volume of messages—especially those mobilized by associations, nonprofits, and corporations—increased significantly. However, Congress has been slow to embrace technology to manage the influx of Internet-generated messages from the People. As the volume of phone calls, emails, and other communications to Senators and Representatives increased, the amount of staff time dedicated to managing and responding to them also increased.¬ Around the turn of the 21st century, tools were developed to automate some of the administrative work associated with constituent correspondence, but the volume of messages and the real-time scrutiny of Members' activities ensured that significant staff resources were still required to manage many tasks. The volume also made it virtually impossible for Senators and Representatives to keep abreast of the messages themselves without severely limiting the amount of time they could spend on legislative and other representational activities. As a result, most Senators and Representatives started to receive briefings on trends in constituent communications and samples of messages, rather than reading or hearing all of the messages themselves.

Moreover, the technology tools most widely used by Senators and Representatives to engage with constituents tend to facilitate "turning contact from citizens into data points" rather than the substantive engagement necessary to include the People in public policymaking. Though efforts are underway to envision and build a technology infrastructure that more robustly supports the legislative process, Congress and democracy are currently a long way from being truly technology-enabled, as the COVID-19 crisis made glaringly apparent. Technology is used more for information management, communications, and administrative tasks than for knowledge extraction, collaboration, and deliberation. Additionally, many of the free cloud-based platforms and apps that enable collaborative interactions and engagement are justifiably viewed as cybersecurity threats.

To date, Congress has failed to fully integrate secure and robust technology to fully facilitate our democratic processes for the 21st century. Instead, technology has helped facilitate Congress becoming more of a bureaucracy than a hub for democratic learning, engagement, and problem-solving. However, as discussed in CMF's 2020 report The Future of Citizen Engagement: Coronavirus, Congress, and Constituent Communications, the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused Congress and every other workplace in the world to integrate remote work capabilities, may have been the catalyst for rapid technological advancement in Congress. Members, staff, and the People are more primed than ever to use technology to facilitate work, civic engagement, and democracy. The House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress is also convening provocative hearings, conducting important research, and offering bipartisan recommendations to bring Congress up to date. It will be interesting to see whether Congress becomes less averse to technology in the future and more able to overcome the "'pacing problems,' that compromise Congress' ability to legislate, conduct oversight, and operate effectively."

CMF's report The Future of Citizen Engagement: Rebuilding the Democratic Dialogue explores the current challenges to engagement and trust between Senators and Representatives and their constituents; proposes 10 principles for rebuilding that fundamental democratic relationship; and describes innovative practices in federal, state, local, and international venues that Congress could look to for modernizing the democratic dialogue.

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