Is Congress up to the challenge - ineffective administration hampers ability to accomplish tasks - Editorial

Nation's Business, Feb, 1994

The 103rd Congress is just beginning its 1994 session, but its agenda is already crowded, perhaps overcrowded. Healthcare reform will be the dominant issue because of its potential impact--the issue involves $1 trillion of spending, ana changes would affect practically every American.

Congress will also be dealing with major legislation on crime, welfare, taxation, spending, the environment, international affairs, trade, labor-management relations, education and training, and civil-justice reform.

Is Congress sufficiently well organized to deal with those and the hundreds of other items of business on its calendar? This question is particularly germane in an election year when members will want to adjourn early to campaign. The answer, unfortunately, is no. There are serious problems in the way that Congress conducts its business, and these must be resolved if members are to deal efficiently with the growing number and complexity of public-policy issues.

Those problems arose gradually as a result of congressional actions that have had the collective effect of providing most members of that body with powerful electoral advantages. They include large staffs, such perquisites as franked mail, and the proliferation of subcommittees which allow large number of members to identify themselves as chairmen of this or that panel and suggest that status gives them enhanced power to serve their constituents.

That increased job security resulting from those and other incumbent advantages has resulted in criticism that serving the public interest has been downgraded as a priority, particularly with respect to issues affecting the economy and the business community. A member assured of election isn't going to spend much time evaluating the impact of specific bills on the enterprise system.

But the voters have given a loud and clear signal that they will not endure the status quo. The large number of newcomers elected in November 1992 and the results of various special elections since then have reinforced the demand for change.

For their part, cohgressional leaders point to their creation of a Senate-House committee to recommend major changes in the way their branch of government operates.

Establishment of the committee was indeed a welcome move, but it was largely a self-defense strategy in the wake of the House bank scandal and other disclosures that threatened the political futures of many incumbents. The committee's recommendations also will be most welcome, but it remains to be seen whether the committee's objective is truly long-range reforms or political cover while Congress survives another crisis. Developments are thus far not encouraging. The Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress is far behind schedule, and many of the proposals under discussion have drawn fire from various sectors of Congress.

The latest timetable calls for final action on a reform plan early this year, but it is unlikely that deadline will be reached. The possibility that any plan will be denounced as both too aggressive and too timid remains very real. Despite the sense of determination with which the reform committee was created, it becomes more and more controversial as the time nears for decisions on actual changes. Congressional insiders say that opposition of powerful committee chairmen to any reduction of their power or tenure is a major stumbling block to completion of the panel's recommendations and will be a major factor in floor debate.

Whatever the organization committee eventually proposes, there are specific steps that should not be abandoned, regardless of the degree of opposition. Among them:

* Terms of committee chairmen should be limited, thus curtailing the vast power that long-term heads of committees accumulate.

* Members should be restricted to a fixed number of consecutive terms that they may serve on a committee, which would assure a continuing influx of new thinking.

* Standards of acceptable usage should be set on the franking privilege, whose use by incumbents grows explosively in election years.

* Congress and the rest of the federal government should be subject to the same labor, civil-rights, environmental, and employee-benefits laws that businesses and individuals must obey. Critics have long argued that Congress' policy of exempting itself from rules and responsibilities it imposes on the private sector is one of the main reasons why it is increasingly out of touch with the real world.

It is no surprise that reform of congressional operating procedures has become highly controversial and that the entrenched Capitol Hill bureaucracy is unhappy with many aspects of it.

Rank-and-file members must remember, however, that their constituents did not send them to Washington to preserve the power of career legislators but to impose the changes needed to make Congress responsive to the American people.