On April 21, 2023, Demand Progress, Foundation for American Innovation (formerly Lincoln Network) and POPVOX Foundation are holding a briefing for congressional staff — in cooperation with House Digital Services — to open a discussion on the use of new AI tools in the legislative branch workflow. Thie event builds on the article “Bots in Congress: The Risks and Benefits of Emerging AI Tools in the Legislative Branch” and is the first of several related events.

Current use of these new tools in Congress

While tools like ChatGPT have not been officially approved by the House CAO or Senate Sergeant-at-Arms for official use, we have heard myriad examples of Member offices and committees experimenting.

House Digital Services recently launched an AI working group to allow forty House offices to sign up to receive free OpenAI licenses to experiment with the technology and share their experiences anonymously. Those licenses were quickly claimed and several offices chose to join the working grup even without the free license.

Overwhelming Demand

The April 21 briefing was organized simply to familiarize junior staffers — primarily legislative correspondents, caseworkers and communications staffers — with the new tools and share best practices, especially the need to protect constituent data. The response, however, has been overwhelming, with interest coming in long after RSVPs closed — from staffers at all levels, government relations firms, advocacy vendors, and media.

Congress has a “Pacing Problem”

A framework we find useful for discussions of Congress and technology is the concept of a “pacing problem” borrowed from the science literature — the growing gap between the speed at which technology and society are changing, and the ability of policymakers to keep up. For Congress, this manifests as not one but three distinct pacing problems:

External: Congress fails to keep pace with emerging innovations that are changing industries and society
Inter-branch: Congress lags the executive branch, compromising its ability to act as a co-equal branch of government
Internal: Congress modern practices and technology for its own operations.

The briefing on April 21 is intended to help address the third pacing problem. As the volume of constituent communications, information, and legislative issues has grown rapidly for years, technical/IT systems and staff resources have not kept pace. This forces staff to spend inordinate time on routine work (e.g. constituent correspondence) and leaves little time for more difficult work (e.g. policy research, oversight), diminishing the quality and depth of such work. Without intervention, this pacing problem will persist and worsen without intervention.

Congress is responding

Fortunately, Congress has taken steps over the past four years to address some of these issues. In January 2019, the House set up a temporary, bipartisan “Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress” to hear from stakeholders and experts and make recommendations. The “ModCom,” which was reauthorized for the 117th Congress (2021–2022), was instrumental in raising issues, convening experts and stakeholders and providing a forum for pushing changes that accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic [] exposed the critical impact of these pacing problems. The internal pacing problem in particular meant that, at the start of the pandemic, Congress lacked the technological infrastructure in committee and member offices and for floor proceedings, threatening the continuity of congressional operations at a time when work needed to happen remotely. At the same time, the actions taken within Congress in response to COVID-19 [] provided stark illustrations of the patterns and processes that contribute to the pacing problems—and some glimmers of hope that Congress is able to solve them. — “Congressional Modernization Jump-started by COVID-19”, Brookings TechTank (June 18, 2020)

Previously intractable process changes happened quickly (in some cases over a weekend) to allow remote office work; digital submission of bills, co-sponsorship and committee reports; remote testimony and Member participation; digital signatures; and more. In its December 2022 final report, the ModCom laid out 202 recommendations, many of which have been implemented or are underway.

The Select Committee’s recommendations built on longstanding bipartisan efforts by champions both inside and outside Capitol Hill to update and upgrade the availability of legislative data in machine-readable formats by the Bulk Data Task Force and the “Communicating with Congress” collaboration to provide a standardized write API for submission of bulk advocacy comments to congressional offices.

LLMs will accelerate the Pacing Problem but can can also help Congress keep pace

Large language models or “LLMs” have the potential to significantly improve the productivity and efficiency of lawmakers by automating many of the manual processes involved in legislative work, such as drafting legislation, analyzing data, and responding to constituent input. However, if Congress fails to adopt these new tools and processes, it risks falling further behind the pace of change in society and struggling to keep up with the demands of its constituents.

“Modernization” is a moving target

While the December 2022 ModCom recommendations and their ongoing implementation pave the way for Congress to address the internal pacing problem, they also illustrate that Congress cannot be complacent in its efforts to “modernize.” In fact, “artificial intelligence” is mentioned only twice in the report — once in the recommendation for improving constituent communication and second as the last entry in the final chapter’s discussion on “innovative approaches to fixing Congress”:

Recommendation 175: The House Digital Service should evaluate and onboard industry leading correspondence technology tools and platforms to enable offices to improve the quality and substance of constituent correspondence.
Open -
Needs Attention
Need to enable real-time tracking of constituent correspondence and satisfaction, as well as the automation of aspects of correspondence that are repetitive for staff, through adoption of intelligent tools and use of Artificial Intelligence where appropriate.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning. Several local, state, and foreign governments have recently started exploring ways to incorporate advanced computer software and analysis into the legislative process including for predictive problem-solving purposes.320 The Committee heard testimony explaining how these technologies can help government predict and prevent undesirable activities, test policies and options in real-life scenarios before adopting them, and find the best solutions by providing a set of alternatives to accelerate improved decision-making.

Of course, less than one month after the release of the recommendations, OpenAI released chatGPT and sparked a cascade of innovation leveraging large language models (LLMs) for a range of tasks. While the ModCom’s report framed AI-enabled workflow and legislative analysis as a medium-to-long-term future scenario, new LLM tools will clearly accelerate that timeframe.

I’ve frequently made the point that modernization should happen as a matter of course. Businesses and organizations build innovation into their operations because they understand that evolving with the times is necessary in order to remain relevant. By relegating reform to something it does every few decades, Congress is consistently playing catch-up. -Chair Derek Kilmer, September 14, 2022

Fortunately, the House of Representatives took steps to allow conversations about “modernizing” operations to continue with the establishment of a new House Digital Service in 2022 and a permanent Subcommittee on Modernization within the Committee on House Administration at the beginning of the 118th Congress. The new “ModSub” chaired by Rep. Stephanie Bice [R, OK] has equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats and is committed to continuing the collaborative format of the previous select committee.

While modernization efforts have been less visible in the Senate, several Members are leading the way. In 2019, Sen. Heinrich [D, NM] and then-Sen. Portman [R, OH] announced the formation of the Senate Artificial Intelligence Caucus.

Incorporating LLMs into the work of Congress

At least initially, low-level/low-risk tasks with clear and specific requirements will be best-suited to automation. These could include tasks such as processing and responding to constituent input, casework management, communications, and scheduling. By automating these tasks, LLMs can free up time and resources for staff to focus on more high-level and complex tasks.

As Congress becomes more comfortable with using LLMs and gains a better understanding of their capabilities and limitations, the House and Senate can gradually incorporate more advanced tasks into the legislative workflow. These may include tasks such as preparing for hearings, conducting research, drafting proposed legislation, and analyzing policy implications.

On April 21 we are excited to begin the conversation about how LLMs and other automated tools will change the way the legislative branch operates.

AI Tools for Congress