The House of Representatives is asking developers and the general public for ideas concerning the House’s interest in collaborative legislative drafting. Collaborative legislative drafting is where multiple political legislative offices, internal expert offices and agencies, and outside stakeholders (from federal agencies to civil society to interest groups) are able to view and make suggestions on drafts of legislation. The RFI is available here.
“The goal of this stage of this initiative is to identify individuals, organizations, and/or vendors who can assist the staff … in establishing a roadmap that revitalizes and improves the House’s legislative drafting capabilities. This includes, but is not limited to, the tools, process and workflows related to drafting legislation and the underlying technology and architecture used to support these tools, processes, and workflows.”
Key Dates:
* The Clerk is hosting an information session on July 8, 2024, and you can RSVP here.
* Responses to the RFI — statements that you are capable to complete the requirements — are due by July 24, 2024.
Focus Areas:
– Enhancing collaborative drafting tools for House Leadership, Members, Committees, and the Legislative Counsel.
– Improving document management throughout the legislative lifecycle.
– Defining “collaborative legislative drafting” for unified understanding and goals.
There have been several public-facing efforts at using collaborative legislative drafting in the U.S. Congress over the last 15 years. The now-defunct Sunlight Foundation built the website PublicMarkup.org that allowed the public to comment on draft legislation. The now-defunct Open Gov Foundation‘s Madison Project — the code is still available on GitHub — was a successor and more robust effort that supported public feedback on draft legislation. There also have been efforts from Members of Congress to allow the public to express approval of legislation, such as Eric Cantor’s Citizen Cosponsor, and the Obama administration day allowed the public to petition the administration to take positions on issues via the “We the People” app (Github Repo).
I was working in this space during the time of these various tools and one thing that became apparent to me is that allowing for public comment on legislation is insufficient. The public routinely comments on legislation by communicating with their legislators, and lobbyists provide more direct feedback to staff, but having a website where the public can comment on legislation line by line is challenging.
These efforts worked best when there was (1) an expert community interested in commenting — i.e., both domain expertise and policy-drafting expertise, (2) a narrow focus such as a specific bill, not the 10,000 bills introduced each Congress, (3) a member of Congress actively interested in and curating the feedback, (4) and some kind of a community organizer. Too many bills at one time could be overwhelming, and much of the general public feedback was unusable.
This contrasts significantly with the “We the People” app, which was successful for a time because it was a policy generation tool — not a legislative drafting tool. The administration ultimately undermined the app by refusing to respond to comments unless there were a very high threshold of upvotes on a petition, which prompted civil society organizations and others to drive upvotes, which limited its usefulness as a more organic platform that surfaced creative ideas. I suspect that the new AI tools will allow for more easy identification of related themes and collapsing similar petitions in a future effort along those lines. The Sunlight Foundation’s Docket Wrench, which allowed for this capability with respect to comments on regulations, could be retooled for this use.
A modern legislative co-drafting tool likely would need to take into account the various circles of audiences relevant for drafting legislation. For example: (1) There’s a very tight circle of a handful of staffers in one or a few legislative offices working with legislative counsel. (2) There could also be a bipartisan pair in the House or House and Senate staffers collaborating together. (3) There may also be expert input from support agencies like GAO or CRS, or even (4) from closely aligned NGO or business groups. (5) There might also be opening it up to likely allies, such as members of a particular caucus. Its likely that there would need to be various permission levels where everyone cannot necessarily see each others comments.
In addition, the tools to do this work has significantly changed. There’s now an official source of legislative data in bulk as well as the Congress.gov API to download particular bills. Congress is using a much more sophisticated legislative markup language, USLM. And, most notably, the availability House-wide of the Comparative Print Suite — it allows users to compare drafts of legislation and see how the legislation would modify existing law — would make understanding the effects of draft legislation significantly easier than in the past.
It will be interesting to see what the House has to say at the public meeting next week.
