How to Teach Congress to Do Its Job
"the rules of the chambers are fantastically abstruse"
In March, we ran a series of interviews on America’s Afghanistan and Iraq involvements: what worked, what didn’t, and what needs to change. They were some of our most popular interviews yet.
This month, we’re running another series, this time on Congress. Specifically, we’re focusing on Congress’s support agencies, the bodies that exist to make Congress smarter, faster, and more effective at its job (theoretically). We’ll be breaking down how they work, what people get wrong about them, and how Congress can help them to better help itself.
Over the next four weeks, we’ll cover:
The Congressional Research Service (CRS)
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO)
The Government Accountability Agency (GAO)
The (now-defunct) Office of Technology Assessment (OTA)
Today’s interviewee, Kevin Kosar, spent more than a decade at the CRS as a research manager and analyst. He’s also been a think tank executive and is the author of Whiskey: A Global History. These days, he’s a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where his work focuses on Congressional reform (and he edits the invaluable website UnderstandingCongress.org).
What you’ll learn:
Why Congress needs CRS
Why congressmen don’t know how Congress works
How committee power has atrophied
Why constituents are a problem
Kevin, what specifically is the Congressional Research Service (CRS) researching?
“What is it not researching?” might be a smartalecky but accurate response. Thomas Jefferson, in arguing for the creation of a library of Congress, said, to paraphrase, “there's virtually no subject which a legislator may not need to reference and consider,” and that holds true.
The Congressional Research Service gets questions on absolutely everything. Accordingly, it’s divided by issue area: the government and finance division, the domestic and social policy division, the foreign affairs, defense and trade division, and so forth.
What areas of work would you point to as CRS’s hallmarks?
One very important thing that CRS does is teach legislators how to be a legislator. Budget process is pretty complex, so they teach classes on budget process to new members of Congress and staff. They also teach courses on legislative process generally. Whether you're in the House or the Senate, you can't be very effective unless you know the rules of the chambers, which are fantastically abstruse. Very frequently, the rules on paper do not match the rules of how things run on a day-to-day basis.
CRS wonks will also give you one-on-one consultations about particular moments. Say you're on a committee. You think that the committee is going to be swapping in a manager's amendment to replace the current bill. What's your authority as a junior member to try to offer an amendment to alter that bill? They can coach you on all that sort of stuff. Hardly anybody knows that. But it's really important.
What does the interaction between a congressman and CRS look like procedurally?
Most frequently, you the legislator would delegate the issue to one of your staff, according to how important it is to you and how fast you want a response. If it’s super important, then you would give it to your staff director or your policy director and have them go to CRS and ask, or if it's less important, you might kick it down to a legislative correspondent or legislative assistant. Certainly, you are free to call CRS up. If you want to pick up the phone, shoot an email, or just lope over to the Madison building and knock on somebody’s door, you can.
If I remember correctly, other congressional support agencies, like the Government Accountability Office (GAO), don't have to be as responsive in the same manner.
Yes. By statutory direction, CRS has to respond to individual members and committees.
Meanwhile, GAO only initiates their studies by direction of a statute or a request from a chairman of a committee. The Congressional Budget Office primarily works for the budget committees in each chamber. They'll take calls from a member, but neither they nor GAO are structured to provide that sort of customer service. CRS has 600 employees, all of whom understand that their agency is titled the Congressional Research Service.
At 600 employees, that's roughly one employee per customer in terms of representatives and senators.
Yeah, although I guess the question is, who is a customer? Ostensibly the member of Congress is, but Congress employs thousands of staff who are also customers.
And the staff are frequently responding to the public. You're a citizen, and you read something in the newspaper about some agricultural subsidy that's ending up in the pockets of some corporation, and you get aggrieved and you write to your member of Congress. The Congressional staffer who gets that letter, unless they happen to know that issue, is going to turn to the Congressional Research Service and ask, “What is this constituent talking about and how do I respond?” With each member of the House of Representatives having about 750,000 constituents, there are a lot of customers for CRS to respond to.
What distinguishes the qualities of a good CRS researcher from the qualities of a good academic researcher?
There's a lot of overlap. Certainly CRS has a lot of people who have advanced academic training. However, it's very different from academia insofar as your research agenda has to be clearly germane to Congress. You do not, for example, have the liberty to earn a salary at CRS and go back and do research on early committee debates in the 2nd Congress in the 1790s, unless it is somehow immediately tied to some pending issue before Congress. Academics can do pretty much whatever they want.
Additionally, your research agenda is largely reactive as opposed to proactive. Sometimes you are getting hundreds of requests per year from Congress, and you are responding to what they care about. You should also be spending your time anticipating what they might care about.
Another difference is how you write. Academics tend to write for other academics. You go through a peer review process. The journals that you write for, that are so important in academia, are read by other people with advanced training.
Not so for your audience in Congress. Anything that’s particularly technical, you have to kick to an appendix in the back. You have got to have clarity of communication. Also, whereas academics have to struggle for tenure over about a five-year period, at CRS, after one successful year of employment as a civil servant, you are effectively tenured for life (absent malfeasance or terrible misbehavior).
You spent a little over a decade at CRS. I'm looking at a piece you wrote in 2015 after leaving, in which you said, and I quote, “the agency's cultural dowdiness frustrated me.”
What did you mean by that phrase?
It was the 21st century, but in many ways the day-to-day operations felt like they were in the 1990s. For example, the way the divisions were carved into various subject areas hadn't been changed since the ‘90s. Everybody treated it like a fixed feature of the agency, which it’s not.
There were various internal processes — paperwork and so on — that were so out of step with the current era.
Can you give me an example?
Oh, goodness. Trying to go to, say, a professional conference required filling out an unbelievable amount of paperwork. Over the years, additional paperwork requirements had been layered on and on. It was absolutely exhausting.
What did they think they were guarding against with those requirements?
Somebody being caught doing something bad or wasting money in some way. If a scandal at some other agency somewhere erupts and is reported in a newspaper or an inspector general report, government agencies will often think, “We better make sure that never happens here.” So they create a new rule and some new forms.
Our travel process at CRS actually got even more onerous while I was there, which seems almost impossible. It was because of a scandal at the General Services Administration, where they had used government money to hire a magician for a conference they did in Las Vegas.
I remember this.
Yeah, and somehow it got out and CRS of course got anxious and created new rules.
Another thing was the review process when an analyst at CRS writes a report or a memo. It badly needed restructuring, but nobody wanted to do it because that’s the way they’ve been doing it forever.
As a professional editor, I have to ask about that review process. What did it look like?
Presumably, it should involve professional editors at all levels, all the way to the end of copy editing. But in fact, if you are an analyst at CRS, the first person who will look at your work is your section head. The section head is usually not an editor by training; they’re an academic by training. Then it’s division-level review, and they’re not editors either. They’re also academics.
Then it goes down to agency-level review, where it is reviewed by people who have some editorial skill but are primarily reading to ensure that nothing you wrote is going to have any adverse effects on the agency. Finally, if there’s time, it’ll go to the publishing department where there are actual copy editors.
CRS is basically a consulting and publishing firm. No other publishing firm I know of has an editorial process like that, where so few of the people in the review process have actual editorial training.
How much of the “dowdiness” in the institution derives from requirements placed on the agency, and how much of it is a product of internal culture?
I would say the vast majority is internal culture. I don't think the agency feels a lot of market competition, unlike a private firm that might say, “Hey, we have to get past some of this dowdiness to stay nimble and stay in business.” In fact, there is market competition, but it's not well recognized inside the agency, so people get very comfortable doing things certain ways.
There's not a lot of exogenous pressure to change. Habits form and they’re difficult to overcome. To work in a place like CRS, you have to be a person who likes to follow rules, and that's a noble characteristic, but it can also lead to the sort of “dowdiness” that becomes a little hostile to innovation.
When you say CRS has unrecognized market competition, what are you referring to?
Let's think back to before there was an internet. If you’re a congressional staffer or member of Congress and you are trying to figure out what the devil you can do when a bill is brought up in Congress — Do I have an opportunity to amend it? — How do you get that answer? Before the internet, you would walk over to CRS. You would go into the second floor room where CRS reports were stacked, and you would just pick the ones that addressed your needs, or you would call one of their legislative procedure experts.
There were other sources of expertise in society then, but they were locked up in academia where you couldn't get to them and you wouldn't even know where to look, or they might be in lobbying shops. You had limited access to the information you needed. CRS was a monopoly provider.
Fast forward to today, you're a member of Congress and you want to know something about the motion to vacate the Speaker. You can find people who know legislative procedure really well on Twitter. You can find people who know all sorts of stuff about congressional history and other relevant issues writing for The Dispatch and all sorts of publications out there. There is all this outside competition from media, from think tanks, from 501(c)(4)s, and from all sorts of organizations that have a lot of smart people producing highly intelligent, researched content.
So CRS is no longer a monopolist. With ChatGPT and those sorts of engines arising, basic stuff like when Social Security was created and what the arguments were for doing it, that’s out there now. You don’t have to go to CRS for that. There’s competition now.
Separately from the internet as an obvious vehicle for a lot of this information, did the rise of the modern DC think tank change CRS's role? A lot of think tank products seem to be packaged in the same way as CRS products.
Yeah, think tanks have always competed with CRS — Brookings was first created a century ago — but they started really rising in prominence and size in the 1970s. But whenever we speak of think tanks, almost inevitably comes the association that this one leans left or this one leans right. CRS’s special sauce is that they don’t lean left or right. They are civil servants straight down the middle and they’re deathly afraid of being accused of leaning left or right, whereas with think tanks, that’s often part of the identity.
Yes, think tanks produce stuff that people on Capitol Hill want and learn from. But they’re not going to knock CRS off its perch. They certainly don’t have the budget to employ 600+ people like CRS.
Given these pressures on CRS in the 21st century, what’s its comparative advantage? If CRS is competing on many axes, what is it still best in class at?
It’s got some core strengths, one of which is confidentiality. You, a staffer, a member, go to them and you don’t even have to think twice about your conversation or request to them ever seeing the light of day. In a town that's obsessed with leaking and terrified by it, that's a big deal.
CRS also does customized work. So you're a staffer and you're trying to get ready for a hearing. You need to write a memo to brief your member of Congress but you don’t know where to start. You ask CRS to write you a confidential memo that comes up with some background information on the issue and some suggested questions to use for the hearing. You’re not going to find think tanks offering that typically, but CRS does.
CRS also has the ability to cobble together diverse expertise very quickly to tackle issues. If you want a briefing on AI, okay. CRS can probably have a technology person who could talk about that. They can also bring in somebody who knows copyright or some other germane issue and bring that in. They can also bring in somebody who knows public administration, in case you want to talk about how AI can be used in the course of the regulatory process. They can throw that team together and have them over in your office the same day, potentially.
Again: not easy for think tanks and other outside outfits to do that sort of stuff.
The last thing is institutional memory. By hiring people as civil servants and giving them tenure for life, they have people there who can tell you what happened on this issue 10, 20 or 30 years ago. They also have files and old reports that can be mined. Who else has that?
What's the ability of CRS to pick up non public information? Is there a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) equivalent?
No, CRS does not have investigative authority. Now, they can reach out to a congressional committee and say, “Hey, we’re working on this topic within your jurisdiction, can you place a request so that it comes from you but the information is ultimately delivered to CRS?” They can and do get information that way. But unlike GAO or an inspector general, CRS people can’t just go to an agency and say, “hand over those files.” As a CRS analyst, you’re always going hat in hand to the agency.
The best CRS analysts are those who develop trust-based relationships with the agencies they study, so that they can get that stuff and turn it into an even-handed research product that makes sense.
Should CRS be restructured? How would you go about making CRS better focused on its strengths?
Yeah, the CRS is right now in the process of searching for a new director, and that's something I've had some input on. It needs to find somebody who is very aware of the fact that the working environment around CRS is changing. It needs somebody who could see that, focus tightly on the core competencies they have that make them utterly invaluable to Congress, and let go of certain other things that are no longer worth doing.
This director would also have to be a very good people person. In order to make changes, not only do you have to create the internal support for employees to come along, you need to go to the committees of jurisdiction: the appropriators who put directive language on the money they give to the legislative branch, and get them all on the same page about what you are trying to achieve.
Historically, the CRS has struggled with adopting new technology. I was in the Madison building just last week and hit a massive telephone dead spot. I had no Gs. For an organization devoted to customer service where everyone carries a cell phone 24 hours a day, your own headquarters having dead spots is nuts.
They’ve got a lot of technology issues. They need someone who’s really good at government IT acquisition, implementation working at the very top echelon of the agency and fixing this stuff. Because it drives workers crazy.
Are there organizational or internal bureaucratic changes the new director should make if they want to advance this kind of improved focus?
Certainly the review process I described earlier needs to be fixed, so that more of the people who are engaged in editing are adding more value at each stage.
The second thing would be to accelerate the knowledge management improvements they're making. I referenced all that historical memory. There’s still a ton of stuff on paper in filing cabinets. Digitizing and organizing that information and making it more usable — that’s a lot of value that needs to be tapped.
Rearranging the divisions would be another. One of the curiosities of the CRS is that it’s got a division called the American Law Division, and it’s full of lawyers, but all these lawyers work on legal aspects of topics that are worked on by other divisions. It often creates difficult situations where, when a member of Congress wants information on something, you send it to the policy expert and you send it to the legal expert. Why not take the lawyers and embed them in the research division so we can respond more quickly to Congress? There’s a lot that can be done to strengthen the place and get it in a better position to succeed in the 21st century.
So we’ve talked about internal dynamics and external pressures. What about Congress? How have changes in Congress, the body CRS serves, affected CRS?
CRS was created in the early seventies out of the old Legislative Reference Service, which was mostly reference librarians with some experts sprinkled in. And Congress said, we need a full-blown think tank that primarily works for the committees. They wanted them to work on creating an oversight agenda. They wanted CRS staff and experts to come and work at the committees. Don't show up in the Madison building, show up in Rayburn or wherever the committee is at, and be with them for long stretches.
That was the conception. Fast forward to today, committees are a lot weaker in the congressional process and individual members are much more like individual entrepreneurs running their own policy and politics shop. They’re less dependent on the parties as such. The individual members of Congress are now flooding CRS with requests.
Frequently it's constituent-driven questions coming in the mail and through email. That leads to a lot of CRS experts spending time focusing on smaller reference-type issues, rather than deep diving into research. It’s also the case that there are a lot of show horses in Congress now who are not really interested in research. If you have fewer people who are serious about finding the answer to difficult policy questions, they’re going to ask fewer serious questions of CRS, and CRS employees are going to have less intellectual stuff to do.
I would have expected there to be a different dynamic with centralization of power with congressional leadership. I might have expected the party to be more powerful, but you're suggesting that individual representatives now have more entrepreneurial instincts.
Yeah. And, again, usually it's tethered towards more parochial matters. You're not getting a whole lot of individual members going to CRS to try to learn up on a specific topic and then use that to try to roll leadership on it. That happens, yeah, but not as much.
Another pressure on CRS is the polarization and the intense partisan competition for maintaining or winning a majority in the chamber has led to legislators being obsessed with the narrative and messaging. CRS has frequently borne the brunt of denunciations from the very people they’re trying to help because CRS did a calculation or wrote a report that had inconvenient facts. Those facts get picked up by the media or someone outside Congress who then says, “Congress is saying it wants to do this, but CRS is saying that’s not the best way to achieve this.” Oh, controversy.
Then, of course, CRS gets kicked around and members of Congress denounce it, and the individual analysts and the agency heads can’t fight back. They just have to take the punishment. It’s not fair.
If you were advising a congressman coming in today, how would you suggest that they use CRS and other servants of Congress most effectively?
I would say getting everybody up to speed on legislative and budget process would be very important because you need to understand the flow of business: when things are happening and how things get done. You can't play chess if you don't know the moves.
The second thing would be to figure out, if you don’t already know, the top issues for your home state or district and then go to CRS and get close to the experts in those areas and get really schooled on them. Next, depending on what your committee’s jurisdiction is, go to CRS and learn those subjects and also learn committee procedure so you don’t make a fool of yourself. That would be the starting advice.
Ultimately, what you want is to find people at CRS who you can develop a long-term relationship with so you can call them or have them come over and get handed confidential advice. If they feel comfortable with you and you feel comfortable with them, that’s invaluable.
Are there a lot of congressmen who don’t have that grounding in procedure?
Absolutely. I follow a lot of procedure people on Twitter and with great regularity they will post a C-SPAN clip where some member tries to do something and is getting the legislative procedure wrong, and one of the parliamentarians or a support person has to tell them they can’t do it. Then they have to correct their behavior. It’s embarrassing when members don’t know, but it’s understandable because it takes a lot of study and learning to do it right.
I think members are very harried. They often pick up the minimal amount of knowledge and then in the moment they rely upon aides or whoever’s nearby to tell them what they can do. That often doesn’t work, you just end up with mistakes.
What's the relationship between CRS and committee staff?
It varies. There are committees working on topic areas that have a very hand in glove relationship with CRS and use them throughout the whole process of studying a topic and ultimately reporting out draft legislation. There are other committees that don’t.
Are there specific committees that tend to have that good relationship?
I couldn't generalize, because it's all very episodic. It depends on who the chair and the ranking member are and how serious they are. If they view their perch as just a vehicle for messaging partisan points, then they're not going to spend much time with CRS.
If they have other ideas, then perhaps they're going to bring CRS in and have a good working relationship with them. There's also the organic connections between staff and CRS. Some committees have long staff tenure and those people have long relationships with CRS and they’re just going to keep working together. In other cases, you get turnover, those relationships are broken or they’re not re-initiated and you’re not going to have as much interaction.
Are there episodes you can point to of excellent committee-CRS coordination?
Yeah. If you go back in time a bit to the early 1990s, a classic example was Congress very seriously looking at reforming itself, to strengthen itself vis a vis the executive branch and to modernize itself. They took Walter Oleszek, a specialist at CRS, and basically embedded him in the committee. He worked so closely with them that after his committee service he ended up writing a book about it and the committee was fine with it because of his classy, honest coverage of the experience.
When I was at CRS I often had a really good relationship with House Oversight and Government Reform, not least because they covered the issue of the U.S. Postal Service, which was a topic I covered. I had any number of opportunities to work with them on preparing them for hearings and work on draft legislation. I even testified before them a couple times. Coordination happens all the time. These days CRS occasionally still details staff to various committees and the staff will stay there for two or three months (but usually for shorter periods of time).
You talked about how the reduced power of committees has, in some ways, made CRS's work less immediately relevant. Should committees be more powerful players?
What you’re seeing right now with the Speakership — and it's something that Speakers Nancy Pelosi, Paul Ryan, and John Boehner experienced, and now Mike Johnson is experiencing — is that with so much power consolidated in the Speaker's hand, not just the power to put stuff on the calendar, but this expectation that this person is supposed to almost be the decider — it makes the position almost impossible.
You’re never going to have agreement within the chamber. There are always going to be factions who are ticked off about one thing or another. Because we’re in this place now where the partisan margins are so tiny, any faction that exists is a threat to the majority. We see this with the Freedom Caucus, but they’re not the only faction who creates that sort of dynamic. The progressives drove Pelosi crazy by often withholding their votes.
Congress could devolve more power from the Speaker and have them be more deferential to committee chairs and less expected to be a partisan warrior: they’d be more willing to say, “Okay, you reported this bill out. Let’s just get it calendared.” That’s the way Congress used to work.
That takes the controversy and decenters it from the Speaker. The Speaker is the guy who controls the calendar and is going to put stuff up for a vote. That changes the incentive structure. If you're a committee Chairman, why do the hard work of breaking bread if you're never going to get a vote?
Because the Speaker says, “This thing doesn't have good political salience for the party, so we don't want to bring it up and give you a vote.” That, yeah, that kills committees’ incentive to do anything.
Is there anything that Congress could do statutorily to make CRS more useful?
I’ve suggested that CRS should be separated from the Library of Congress. It’s been embedded within the Library of Congress since it was created as the Legislative Reference Service in 1914. It's the only legislative branch support agency that's stuck in another agency. GAO is freestanding, CBO is freestanding. Administratively, it creates a lot of hassles for CRS. If you want to hire somebody at CRS, you have to go through Library of Congress hoops to do it.
Another example: CRS doesn't have its own IT system. It’s piggybacking off the Library of Congress. It just complicates everything. Separating CRS and making it its own entity would be hugely helpful.
Also, they could give CRS clear investigative authority like GAO has. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same, but just give CRS greater leverage to get information from agencies so it can write its reports and serve Congress.
Another idea is that CRS should consider hiring people on renewable 10-year contracts, instead of giving lifetime tenure after a single year. There were people who would come in and do a bang up job, and then at about year six, year seven, maybe year eight, they would start to get a little burned out. Why not have a check-in conversation in year nine to say, “You're coming up on your 10th year. Do you really want to do this again? Is this working for you? Do you still have that fire in the belly and all that?”
Some of my friends at the agency get a little freaked out when I talk about this idea, because management could start firing people. Of course, that would be stupidly shortsighted because you would be taking somebody with seven, eight, or nine years of memory, knowledge, and expertise and getting rid of them. That means you have a newbie coming in who's going to need to be schooled up for a couple of years before they're fully running. As a manager, if you're smart, you're not going to get rid of somebody unless there's a real problem.
It would also give the agency a little more flexibility as issue areas change. I was at the agency when Obamacare started to come down the pipeline and it was like, “Oh my God, we need more healthcare people, economists, lawyers, healthcare this, that, and the other. We didn't have positions to repurpose. We didn't have budget authority to create more. If we had people who were going through that 10-year gut check, maybe that would have freed up some full time positions that could have been quickly repurposed to get in the people that Congress really needed.
We just talked to Ronnie Chatterjee, an economist who did implementation in the White House for the CHIPS Act, and he talks about a similar thing: how the areas of focus for the staff economists are determined by what the president's priorities are that year.
So you may have come in as a tax credits guy, and all of a sudden you have to get caught up on supply chains. And if you don't have that flexibility, you're not serving the principal.
Yeah. To be clear, CRS has a core value of long-term memory. I don’t want to do anything that would create some sort of regular turnover that was wiping out huge portions of the staff. This is just a gut check to possibly deal with situations where people just don’t want to work there anymore, but feel the golden handcuffs.
Did that lifetime model arise as a parallel to tenure in academia?
It’s just a generic civil service protection. CRS employees are paid on the general schedule, just like most people over in the executive branch. Other employees in the Library of Congress, people who shunt books and do cataloging, they're in the same boat as far as their tenure.
Does Congress use the other parts or features of the Library of Congress like it uses CRS?
Yes, although probably not as heavily. The Library of Congress, for example, has a law library, which employs law experts who know about aspects of foreign law and write for Congress. It also has reference desks in their various divisions. They do educational programming teaching about policy issues, history, etc. that is directed towards congressional audiences but very frequently also open to the general public. CRS is the go-to place, but the rest of the library plays a role.
Anything on your mind about CRS that I haven't asked you about?
It's unfortunate for me not to mention the website congress.gov. It’s a partnership between CRS and the Library of Congress. If you want to know what’s happening in Congress, that’s the go-to site. That’s where you find write ups of bills, where they’re at in the legislative process, if there have been hearings, and all that sort of stuff. It’s a magnificent resource to the American people but also to the people who work on Capitol Hill.
On CRS, did you want to talk about the turnover and management troubles they've had? Because they've had a couple of oversight hearings in the last few years looking at them.
Tell me about it.
CRS’s director was recently pushed out of her position due to management issues, which was interesting and overdue. Interesting insofar as it also happened to the previous director back around 2014 who ran into an issue with Congress. More recently, the management problems at CRS became publicly salient, which is a rare thing. You don't see a lot of newspaper or media articles on the Congressional Research Service, other than citing the fact that they write reports on things and they're trustworthy.
We had stories in Roll Call and other places, talking about the horrific morale problem that CRS was experiencing. The people who work there were just unhappy and large numbers of them were quitting, which is astonishing because it really is a plum position.
But the management has not been great, from the top of the agency on downward. In many instances, you have people who are really smart and academically trained being put in positions where they have to manage people, and that's just not their strength.
A manager or a leader is a fundamentally different person, more analogous to a coach than an academic, and CRS has this habit of writing evaluative criteria for its various management positions that emphasize expertise. As a result, you sometimes get people who are super smart but are insufferable to work for.
The Committee on House Administration held some hearings and called the CRS management to the carpet about the state of affairs. Eventually, the director was pushed out. Again, it's a core competency of CRS to have this long institutional memory, and you had lots of people just quitting. That's knowledge walking right out the door.
There's a lot of ways to be a bad manager. Can you say a little more about what was going on in this case that was depressing morale?
It's my belief that as a manager, your job is to enable an employee to gleefully pursue their work. The way you do that is first you look for things that are unnecessarily slowing them down and annoying them and you clear those hurdles and hassles out of their way.
The second thing you do is encourage them. You cheer them on, you brainstorm with them. You pat them on the back after they do something well. You look for opportunities to help them grow. Additionally, you care about them as humans. Nothing is more crushing to morale than feeling like nobody gives a damn about you. That if you got hit by a bus, all they would worry about is who's going to pick up my phone.
Some CRS managers, because they are often wonks and have a bureaucratic mindset, are obsessed with rule following. Rule following is important, but it's not the only value and rules are often rightly waived.
Okay, last question. We’ve interviewed folks who are DARPA project managers, and they have a very different internal institutional culture. A lot more entrepreneurial spirit is built into the structure of those institutions. Are there any ways you could make CRS more effective statutorily without compromising the academic rigor? Without all the jot and tittle rule-following?
I don’t think you have to change the statute so much as you have to recognize the inherent difference between the positions. Again, you want wonks, you want nerds, you want geeks to do the analytical work, but you want editors to do the editing and you want managers, people who have that coaching skill, to do the managing. You want to get the right types of people in the positions that match. You don’t need to pass a law to do that, you just need to be a good director.
No offense, but this seems a bit like kids "playing house".