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.
Little known off Capitol Hill, CRS is a hugely important agency. CRS analysts and reference librarians are an invaluable resource to legislators and staff who want to learn about legislative procedure, the ins and outs of budgeting, the history of various agencies and policies and facts and figures on just about anything.
CRS employees are an island of honesty in a town filled with partisans and special interests pushing their own narratives and “alternative facts.”
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.
In my 20-plus years in Washington, there have been many times when I met someone who either worked on the Hill or had previously served as a congressional staffer.
When I mentioned that I formerly had worked at CRS, the response inevitably was along the lines of: “Oh, I love CRS. They have saved my bacon so many times. My boss asked me about an issue that broke and neither of us knew anything about it. So I called CRS and someone there got me up to speed.”
Donfried appears very well qualified to lead the agency. She worked at CRS from 1991 to 2001 and had subsequent stints in high positions at the National Security Council, the German Marshall Fund and the Department of State. She has a Ph.D. from Tufts University’s Fletcher School.
Being the CRS director is no easy job. It requires overseeing a workforce of more than 600 people. Leading CRS also necessitates developing strong, trust-based relationships with members of the House and Senate committees that oversee the agency and appropriate its budget. And that is to say nothing of keeping happy the 535 legislators and thousands of congressional staff.
But the challenges for Donfried do not stop there.
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.
To fully leverage those superpowers will necessitate Donfried to rethink the agency’s internal organization and processes, and to continue to evolve and improve CRS’s product and service offerings.
Doing these things will not be easy, but few things worth doing are. I wish her the best of luck, and I hope that Congress supports her in her efforts to build a leadership team and execute a strategy that will make CRS the best it has ever been.
The good of the agency and Congress depends on it.
Kevin R. Kosar is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He hosts the Understanding Congress podcast and edits UnderstandingCongress.org. He worked for the Congressional Research Service for a decade.
