Last week, the Library of Congress made an important announcement: The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is getting a new director. Karen Donfried will begin her 10-year term on Sept. 23. She takes over for interim director Robert Newlen, who has led the agency since July 2023.
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Congress heavily leans on CRS to inform the legislative debate. CRS staff provided Hill staff and legislators with 479 in-person briefings, 2,754 confidential memoranda, 22,212 telephone responses and 36,222 email responses, according to the agency’s 2022 report. The agency also wrote 1,093 reports and general distribution products for Congress and 9,652 bill summaries, which the Hill and all of America can find on Congress.gov.
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Like any new leader, she will have to earn the trust of staff. Doing that will require spending a lot of time managing by walking about and encouraging staff to explain what they do along with what is working well and what isn’t. And then she will need to start remedying the troubles, which are many. For example, various technology issues hinder CRS staff’s capacity to serve Congress. Staff works on buggy software and their phones often do not work due to cellular dead spots in the Madison Building, where CRS is headquartered. Donfried also will have to address some of the management problems, which she will no doubt learn about during her listening tour. Poor leadership has driven away a lot of staff, as Congress learned at a hearing in 2023. CRS too often has placed people who are highly expert in policy analysis in management positions despite them not being people persons. Those individuals will need to be replaced. She also will need to figure out how to position CRS in the 21st century. Fifty years ago, the agency had a quasi-monopoly on the provision of expert information and analysis to Congress. These days, it faces stiff competition from think tanks, foundations, interest groups and private research firms.
As I see it, the way forward is for CRS to lean into its six core strengths: It is a nonpartisan organization with deep expertise and long institutional memory that can provide rapid responses to congressional requests with customized research products and services that draw on diverse, in-house knowledge.