Dysfunction in Washington and Remedies for What Ails Congress

摘要

Anything that impedes decision making should be seen as a threat to national security. When the United States provides aid to emerging democracies around the world, it does a better job of creating critical infrastructure than it does on Capitol Hill. How do we make Congress function better, including the push to share data unimpeded and balance digital modernization with security? Several ideas expressed by congressional staff are already in the works. 1. Streamlining the process of turning bills into laws not only speeds up the process but reduces the potential of making mistakes that then need to be corrected. This can be achieved using text-generation software and AI programs that flag potentially unacceptable phrases in proposed legislation (i.e., nonconforming phrases based on the standard language employed in model laws used in training sets). 2. Understanding how the language in a proposed bill will affect established law is being addressed through rules called Posey Comparative Prints. The House Clerk's Office has built a legislative tool that can compare bills, indicate how an amendment would change current law, and how it might affect a legislative proposal. A document-to-document side-by-side comparison is available to lawmakers on a Congress-only website. A more robust tool uses natural language processing (NLP) to recognize the law being amended, indicating how an amendment changes a legislative proposal and how a bill changes current law. It will execute changes, striking through existing text and highlighting in red what's being taken out and showing in green the text that's being added. 3. Making it clear who's lobbying Congress by connecting the topics of each bill to those whose industries might be affected by the change. 4. Identifying programs expiring and the agencies in need of reauthorization in time to make those adjustments in law. 5. Making it as easy to see how members vote in committee as it now is for floor voting.