Apps Make Pestering Congress So Easy That Politicians Can’t Keep Up

Lee Drutman was cited in Wired about the congressional staffing shortage:

Underpaid, overworked staffers don’t stick around long enough to develop deep policy expertise, says Lee Drutman, a political scientist at the New America Foundation’s Congressional Capacity Project. “If they don’t have the capacity to write policy themselves or gather feedback from constituents, Congress members end up making policy that is essentially created by corporate lobbyists,” he says.

That’s not to say that calling and emailing your representatives isn’t worthwhile. “Members care about their constituents,” says Drutman. “They want to make sure they’re not going to get voted out of office because they’re doing something deeply unpopular with their constituents...If you think about what a member of Congress is expected to do on a daily basis, they can’t do it themselves, they have to have staff,” Drutman says. “If people want members of Congress who are not just offices that turn to corporate lobbyists to develop policy, if people want their senators to actually legislate on behalf of the public, they need to give them the resources to do that.”