Inside the effort to connect Congress with the feds enacting its policies

Congress is flying blind on the effectiveness of the laws it creates.

That’s the thesis of a new project released last week by the POPVOX Foundation, a nonpartisan nonprofit, based on the input of 50 federal employees pushed out of their government jobs last year. The intent of this work was partly to gather insights on how policy implementation works in the executive branch and what barriers exist to effective government that lawmakers may not know about.

But it’s also about showing Capitol Hill what’s possible, said Anne Meeker, senior advisor for the POPVOX Foundation, which collaborated with the Niskanen Center, Civil Service Strong, the Partnership for Public Service and the Foundation for American Innovation on the work, called Departure Dialogues. 

Communication between those making laws and those implementing them has been a problem for a long time, said Meeker, in part because federal employees doing the work aren’t usually authorized to go talk to Congress about what they may be dealing with as they turn statute into reality. That made last year a unique opportunity, as federal employees left the government en masse under the Trump administration's efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce. 

Typically, Congress’ current mechanisms for feedback from those closest to implementation in the government are limited. Hearings “are performative as often as they are informative,” the new report reads. Audits from the Government Accountability Office are usually retrospective, and congressionally-mandated reports are often compliance exercises. 

Federal agencies have legislative affairs offices, but the information they transmit to Congress often gets filtered down to politics and top-level priorities, not the “program-level, operational oversights [of] what’s working, what’s breaking, what statutory language creates unnecessary friction,” the new report reads. 

The hope is that Congress may replicate POPVOX’s process, or parts of it — including the use of AI to synthesize insights and surface patterns — so that experts have channels to communicate with lawmakers and their staff. For that reason, Departure Dialogues includes a methods report, in addition to a report on key findings and a legislative index.

One recommendation is for congressional committees to consider building structured input processes into reauthorization cycles or invite mid-level experts in for structured listening sessions. 

As for what lawmakers may find if they take on the charge of hearing more from those in government agencies, one top takeaway Departure Dialogues found is that the accumulation of policies and requirements is making it difficult to get things done. Congress usually adds requirements, but it doesn’t take them away.

“One recurring challenge I encountered was the cumulative burden imposed by overlapping and sometimes conflicting legislative and reporting requirements associated with different funding streams,” Vikki Stein, who worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development for 30 years, told POPVOX. 

“While each requirement was reasonable in itself, together they created inefficiencies that reduced our ability to focus on program effectiveness,” she continued. “This led to significant duplication of effort, diverting staff time and resources away from program monitoring, learning, and adaptation.”

Others told POPVOX that statutory language sometimes directly prevents them from achieving what Congress intended. 

A common culprit: the Paperwork Reduction Act, a law created before the days of the internet that’s meant to reduce paperwork for Americans. Detractors say the law adds bureaucracy internally to those delivering government services who want to collect data like feedback meant to help ensure that government programs work well for people — but that it doesn’t ultimately always reduce burden on citizens the way it’s intended to. 

Those writing the new report saw themes across workforce, contracting and internal communication: just as agencies and Congress are siloed, so too are agencies isolated from each other, and even teams within agencies are experiencing separation.

“The project was a little bit of an experiment to see if departing federal employees in this really politically tense moment were interested in participating,” Meeker said of the work.

“The response that we got … was really neat to see. We had so many folks really excited about this chance to say to Congress, like, ‘Look, forget the partisanship, forget the politics. This is just the one thing you need to know about how to make this program better,’” she continued. “That spirit of service was actually really kind of moving.”