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Chair Bice's full opening statement as prepared for delivery:
The title of today's hearing is "Modernizing Public Access to Legislative Data and Information."
Last December, the Subcommittee held a hearing on the future of constituent engagement, and the big takeaway was that we need to keep pace with the way people communicate outside of Congress or we risk losing the ability to connect with the people we need to hear from most.
I think we can all agree that sending form letters and emails to constituents who are using the latest AI tools and technologies doesn't cut it. We need to meet our constituents where they're at and communicate like they communicate.
The good news is that the Subcommittee is actively working with the House Digital Service to make that happen. Following our hearing in December, the Subcommittee secured funding from the Modernization Initiatives Account for a major new project that reimagines constituent engagement as dynamic rather than static and stuck in time.
The project will pave the way for Members to easily access a wide range of innovative and secure technologies for communicating with their constituents across multiple platforms.
And as the way people communicate evolves, so will the technologies and tools available to Members. I'm really excited to see this project get off the ground.
At the same time, I know we need to do a lot more to better connect with the people we serve to the People's House. It's one thing for us to reach out to our constituents, but it's another thing for them to reach out to the House or Congress to find information and answers to their questions.
We need to think about their "user journey" and what it looks like. They will probably begin with a search engine query that directs them to House.gov or Congress.gov.
Once they get to those sites, is it easy for them to find what they're looking for?
Is information presented in a way that makes sense, regardless of how much they know about Congress?
Are the search tools on the sites powered by AI so that queries don't have to contain specific words or phrases?
I'm afraid the answer to all of these questions is no. Before the hearing today, I spent some time on both sites to get a sense of what constituents would experience and my overall impression was that they'd likely be overwhelmed by the amount of information on both landing pages and frustrated by the search tool capabilities.
This is not the experience we want them to have. You only get one chance to make a first impression, and so these "entryway" sites matter a lot. They should be the digital voice of representative democracy, not a long list of hyperlinks.
The challenge of figuring out where to find information extends to Members and staff, as well. There are over 600 sites within the House.gov domain, about 70 of which belong to House officers and House support entities.
Massive amounts of legislative data and information are spread across these sites, making it difficult to know where to find what you're looking for. And because different sites sometimes have different versions of the same data, figuring out which data to use is also confusing.
If you want the most up-to-date information available, you have to continually monitor and refresh your screen because most of these sites don't have automated, real-time alert systems. This means that staff who are tasked with tracking the floor calendar or bill status updates are tied to their screens, which strikes me as the opposite of efficiency.
These challenges explain why House staff have taken matters into their own hands and built AI tools that automate these tedious tasks and alert staff of any updates or changes in real time.
And as we learned at our recent full committee hearing on CRS and AI use, House staff have also built AI tools that summarize bills, provide non-partisan bill analysis, find related bills, and much more.
The demand is clearly there, and staff are not going to wait for the House, the Library, or CRS to build the tools they need to do their jobs better.
We want to support and encourage these efforts because they help the House stay current in a world where ongoing innovation and change are the norm.
We also want to ensure that the House and the Library are capable of adapting and innovating in ways that meet current and future user needs.
The data and information that various House websites and Congress.gov maintain are essential to legislative branch functions. But the websites risk becoming obsolete as more and more users seek platforms and tools that can perform searches, complex tasks, and analyses quicker and better.
There's a lot of opportunity here to reimagine how we make the House and the work it does make sense to the American People. I'm looking forward to learning more about current and potential efforts to enhance the public user experience and exploring some innovative ideas for making the digital voice of Congress more meaningful and accessible.
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