These frightening new survey results describe a Congress in crisis

Even if members of Congress truly want to translate their current pique at institutional dysfunction into genuine deliberation, into a process of “regular order” where committees develop legislation, where would they begin? They’d need to build back a whole lot of lost capacity. Consider some responses from a new survey of senior staff from the Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) titled “State of the Congress: Staff Perspectives on Institutional Capacity in the House and the Senate.”

Below are the percentages of senior staff who said they were “very satisfied” with their chamber’s performance in the following benchmarks:
“The chamber’s human resource support and infrastructure is adequate to support staffers’ official duties (e.g., training, professional development, benefits, etc.)”: 5%
“Members have adequate time and resources to understand, consider, and deliberate policy and legislation”: 6%
“The technological infrastructure is adequate to support Members’ official duties”: 6%
“The chamber has adequate capacity and support (staff, research, capability, infrastructure, etc.) to perform its role in democracy”: 11%

Congress has been de-investing in its institutional capacity for decades, and congressional staff earn absurdly low salaries, leading to high turnover and consistent staff inexperience.