What Do They Know and When Do They Know It? Health Staff on the Hill

“You could tell by their blank faces that most of them had no idea what the provisions really meant.” Using almost these identical words, two different congressional staff members described two separate groups: (a) the members of a congressional committee considering a Medicare reform provision at a committee mark-up and (b) the personal staff of these same members at a briefing on the provision prior to the mark-up. So what can we conclude about the level of information in Congress? Has the massive expansion of congressional information resources over the past two decades—including vast increases in the number of personal and committee staff and support agency personnel—been for naught?During the past three years, I have been conducting a study of the approach taken by members and staff of Congress in learning about policy issues and the implications of that approach for congressional decisionmaking. In the fall of 1984, I selected several discrete health and transportation issues which seemed likely to receive significant attention over the entire two years of the 99th Congress. My strategy was to study, for each issue, a sample of congressional “enterprises”—each made up of a member of Congress and his or her staff—as they followed and became involved in the development of the issue. My interest was in communication about these issues both within each enterprise and among all the various enterprises. At this point, nearing the conclusion of the fieldwork, I have conducted over 300 interviews, including meeting with certain key staff members as often as six times in order to monitor their evolving understanding of the issues.