Constituent Services in Permanent Crisis
How Executive branch chaos transfers capacity from the Legislative branch
You may have heard that in these first few weeks of President Trump’s second term, Congressional offices have been deluged with constituent calls. On February 5, Senator Murkowski [R, AK] posted that the Senate switchboard was receiving 1600 calls per minute (compared to 40 calls per minute in normal operations); the volume of outreach from constituents has actually knocked the Senate switchboard off the hook a few times so far.
Within Congressional offices, those calls are sorted into two buckets:
calls from constituents wanting to share their opinion on what’s going on, and
calls from constituents who are directly affected by problems with federal programs and services, asking for assistance.
This second bucket of pleas for help represents a sneaky way that Legislative branch capacity is transferred to the Executive branch in a crisis, depleting resources Congress sorely needs to assert its Article I authority and keep pace with rapid changes in technology and society.
Given the pace so far of the Trump Administration’s rapid government reforms, creating an ongoing crisis state for the Executive branch, this should be a giant, blinking red warning light for Congress in the next few years — and an opportunity for the First Branch to find ways to better support constituents while reclaiming its capacity.
Exec-branch Crises Transfer Capacity from Congress through Constituent Services
Under normal circumstances, Congressional offices dedicate roughly 15-20% of their staff to constituent services. Self-reported caseload ranges indicate that most House offices handle around 1,000-2,600 cases per year, with a wide variety of volume for the Senate based on state population. This work to support constituents experiencing problems with the federal government is a normal and important part of Congress’ representation and oversight activities. Constituent service teams investigate how federal agencies implement legislation, surfacing edge cases or unusual circumstances, and identify structural problems that might indicate a need for legislative clarification, additional resourcing, or deregulation.
However, casework is increasingly defined by a punctuated equilibrium of major crises that stretch constituent services teams to their breaking points. In the last decade, Congressional offices have supported constituents through multiple government shutdowns, the COVID-19 pandemic, the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan, international conflicts (including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the conflict between Israel and Hamas), and natural disasters around the country.
These events become casework crises for Congress when the agencies involved are not able to meet constituent demand. When people are desperate for answers or help and can’t get through to a federal agency, they look for other sources of support — and a significant number call their Members of Congress for help. For example, in the pandemic, the IRS had the lowest rate of answered phone calls in the agency’s history, meaning that calling a Congressional office was for many people the only way to get answers1 on urgent tax issues, including pandemic relief programs like Economic Impact Payments and Employee Retention Tax Credits.
In some longer-term crises like the pandemic or natural disaster recovery, the demand from constituents in need has been so sustained that Congressional offices end up reassigning staff slots previously used for policy, communications, and operations to casework.
In these crises, Congressional casework passes beyond normal oversight into tasks that should be part of program administration: triaging the most urgent cases, quality control and troubleshooting on bureaucratic errors, and communicating urgent information. Congressional staff essentially operate in these situations as an uncompensated surge capacity for federal agency customer service.
The impact of these crisis events is therefore to create a transfer of capacity from the Legislative branch to the Executive branch.
The absurdity of the situation is even more apparent when we look at Legislative branch funding vs. the ballooning enormity of funding for the Executive branch. Historically since 1976, the Legislative branch has received at maximum 0.48% of Federal discretionary spending. For perspective, this means that in FY2024, the entire Legislative branch — tasked with overseeing all federal spending — was funded at less than the Food and Drug Administration.2
The Blinking Warning Light for Congressional Capacity
In the past few weeks, Congressional offices have heard from small business owners and municipalities asking for their help with frozen grant funding for programs like Head Start and community health centers — still inaccessible even after the funding freeze was supposedly lifted. They’ve heard from farmers who had been counting on climate grants to reimburse upgrades like new water lines and cover crops, wondering if there might be a carve-out possible to cover what they’d already spent. They’ve heard from USAID and State Department employees and contractors stranded abroad trying to figure out how to safely get home. They’ve heard from Afghan SIV-holders and refugees who supported the US military and now fear Taliban retribution, in refugee camps overseas with no support in the refugee processing freeze. They’ve heard from Venezuelan immigrants whose Temporary Protected Status has been revoked. They’ve heard from so many federal employees (and contractors) trying to figure out the “fork in the road” deferred retirement and whether they’re eligible or whether it’s legal, who has access to their personal information, whether their programs will be cut, will their contract provisions about telework hold, are their job offers affected by the hiring freeze, and more.
For all these cases and more, sometimes the ask is specific, but often it’s just trying to figure out what’s going on. Even Republican Senators who are enthusiastic about Department of Government Efficiency reforms have expressed concerns that they are not receiving timely communication from the White House that would allow them to prepare to respond to constituent questions.
The new Administration’s approach to government reform — fast, sweeping, and figure-out-the-details-later — is creating a sustained casework crisis for Congressional offices.
If a casework crisis represents the transfer of capacity from one branch to another, then the potential impact of four years of sustained crisis could clearly be an enormous net negative for Congress’ capacity — four years of the First Branch of government acting as a duct-taper and gap-filler for the deficiencies being created by a move-fast-and-break-things approach to federal restructuring.
Defensive Measures for Congress
So what can Congress do to take defensive measures to protect its capacity?
Part of this problem comes from the fact that Congress has not acted to formalize the modern relationship between the branches in handling casework. When a Member of Congress reaches out to a federal agency on behalf of a constituent, they are clearly acting under Constitutional authority — but there is nothing corresponding on the agency side to dictate whether or how an agency should respond.3
This means, in practice, that the landscape caseworkers have to navigate to get answers for constituents is — with apologies for the technical jargon here — a hot mess.
A recent Administrative College of the United States report on casework notes that only some agencies have defined SOPs on responding to Congressional inquiries, or metrics for monitoring the quality of those responses. Some agencies prefer that Congressional staff work with local personnel in field offices and regional processing centers, others route all Congressional inquiries through DC-based liaisons and online portals. Some reliably return responses in seven days, others in ninety or longer. Some accept phone calls to check case status, and others don’t. Some play games with Privacy Act Release form requirements, rejecting inquiries on technicalities. Experienced caseworkers tell me that the overall quality of agency liaison responses has declined since the pandemic, making casework even more laborious and skill-intensive than previous generations.
The most impactful move in Congress’ defensive toolkit would be to formalize and resource agencies to be more responsive to Congressional inquiries, and less brittle in handling surges. Two starting points might include:
1. Empower and expand advocate groups already within agencies.
Some agencies already have separate high-level constituent advocate teams that play a similar role to Congressional caseworkers, as a semi-independent “extra help” level of customer service — like the Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS) at the IRS, an independent agency that reports directly to Congress, both solving individual cases and providing structural recommendations. TAS is not perfect, but additional resourcing and empowerment of TAS and similar bodies at other agencies to respond to Congressional inquiries and support agency customer service teams would be an efficient and effective way to mitigate Congress’ capacity transfer. At a 2022 Modernization Committee hearing on improving casework effectiveness, former National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson recommended that Congress consider a Taxpayer Advocate-like body for other High-Impact Service Providers (HISPs), including Social Security and the VA — Rep. Rudy Yakym [R, IN] has followed through to introduce legislation in the last Congress to create this independent body for the VA.
2. Amend the Government Service Delivery Improvement Act to designate new agency customer experience (CX) leaders as responsible for overseeing Congressional casework responsiveness.
Alternatively, Congress recently passed a law requiring HISP agencies to designate a senior executive responsible for improving government service delivery. This CX executive would seem to be a natural partner for Congress. Congress could amend this law to clarify that responsiveness to constituent service inquiries also falls under this executive’s jurisdiction, and to require agencies’ CX executives to report regularly to Congress on the content of Congressional inquiries and the actions the agency has taken to address the issues they raise. This would create a tighter feedback loop, knit into agency senior executive leadership, between Congressional office inquiries and empowered staff tasked with improving service delivery.
It’s Not Complaining to Ask for Help
To be extremely clear: I am not suggesting that Congress outsource all of its constituent services work. I am a casework evangelist.
But I think part of the problem is actually how important casework is to Members and constituents, and the under-the-radar role it plays in building trust, and demonstrating accountability.
It’s hard for Members to say that they don’t think helping constituents in a crisis should be their job. It sounds suspiciously close to incompetence to say that your team can’t handle a surge.
So last but not least, this is a messaging problem: individual Members, both parties, and the constellation of organizations advocating for Congress as an institution need to find language to talk about the problem of this capacity transfer in a way that shows that Members take this seriously — in a way that shows that this is not Congress saying “I can’t help,” but turning to the Exec branch and asking “why are people coming to me for help in the first place?”
Thinking about what that could sound like, I keep coming back to something I keep hearing in my conversations with caseworkers right now.
Caseworkers of all Congressional staff positions are the most steeped in what it means and what it feels like when government fails people — in the millions of small indignities and betrayals driving part of the anger and alienation animating our politics today. If you want a constituency within Congress fired up about the need for a top-to-bottom overhaul of how government works, caseworkers are your people. But the one phrase I keep hearing is:
“Not like this.”
When I hear it in reference to DOGE, it’s full of empathetic pain for the people caseworkers are trying to help, and an expression of worry about their own capacity to sustain this pace and workload for years to come. But shifting the tone a little bit toward boundary-setting firmness, I think it works here.
Congress is honored to serve constituents — but can’t continue like this.
Casework is valuable insight for policymaking — not like this.
Congressional offices are happy to partner with Executive branch agencies to make sure they are able to support constituents in moments of crisis — this ain’t it.
“Not like this” is cousin to “it doesn’t have to be this way,” which is one step from “it could be better,” which is the whole point of politics, right?
Correct answers – these crises are also huge opportunities for shady characters to catch constituents at their most desperate and vulnerable.
$6.4 billion to the Legislative branch and $6.7 billion to the FDA. Although I would be remiss to not also point out that Legislative branch funding also includes the US Capitol Police, Architect of the Capitol, and other Legislative branch agencies like the Library of Congress, Government Publishing Office, etc.
Separate from committee investigations, which can have their own subpoena power.