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1 Maya Kornberg & Martha Kinsella, Building Science and Technology Expertise in Congress 1 (2023)

handle is hein.brennan/bdgsicadt0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Building Science and Technology Expertise in Congress By Maya Kornberg and Martha Kinsella PUBUSHED NOVEMBER 6, 2023 At a recent Senate hearing on artificial intelli- gence (AI), Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal stated that the subcommittee's goal was to de- mystify and hold accountable these new technologies to avoid some of the mistakes of the past.1 Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley expressed a similar view. We could be looking at one of the most important technological innovations in human history, he said, and cautioned that A might be immensely destructive, analogizing it to the atomic bomb.2 A is just one of many highly technical issues confront- ing lawmakers. As Senator Blumenthal acknowledged, Congress has failed to meet the moment on social media - neither passing data privacy legislation nor modernizing platform regulation despite high-profile congressional hearings in 2018 that revealed not only social media's role in election interference and data harvesting but also lawmakers' ignorance of this technol- ogy.3 Since then, legislation has stalled, in part due to the dubious claims of lobbyists for technology com- panies that such legislation would have unintended consequences.4 Congress has similarly struggled for at least a decade with other urgent science and technology issues.5 For instance, in 2009 Congress passed legislation to digitize medical records but did not address how to transfer records between hospitals, a costly oversight that slowed imple- mentation despite a $30 billion federal investment.6 And in 2016 legislators drafted a bipartisan bill that received widespread criticism from technology privacy experts because it would have effectively banned end-to-end cellu- lar encryption, which protects communications and data from hackers.7 Most public attention on Congress's struggles to legis- late has focused on partisan roadblocks - the increasingly sharp ideological divisions between the two parties and anachronistic procedural hurdles such as the Senate fili- buster - that make decisive action a challenge, even during periods of unified party control.' But a related driver of congressional dysfunction is lawmakers' shrinking access to the high-quality research and data and non- partisan expertise needed for them to comprehend complex technical issues. In a 2016 survey, 81 percent of senior congressional staffers said that access to high- quality, nonpartisan policy expertise was very important, but only 24 percent were very satisfied with the resources available.9 Congress has many in-house subject matter experts. Each member has personal staff, and each committee has staff from each party. Legislators are also assisted by a number of support agencies, including the Library of Congress and the Congressional Research Service (CRS) housed therein, the Government Accountability Office Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law 1

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