The Lawfare Podcast: How Congressional Staffers Helped Our Afghan Allies

[Audio Excerpt]

Anne Meeker

One of the caseworkers I spoke to really described this in a way that just made my heart hurt, where she was saying the decisions that these caseworkers were having to make to triage the sheer number of calls coming into their offices. And when I say uneven burden, I really do mean it. Some offices were getting thousands of calls. Their whole phone lines were just flooded with people with these similar stories saying, “My passport's at the embassy and the embassy's destroying papers. I'm at the gate of the airport and I don't know what to do.” So that means these caseworkers are having to make these decisions on the fly of saying, “Who has the greatest chance of getting out? Who's at the greatest risk if I can't get them out?” It's talking about prioritizing women and children, talking about prioritizing pregnant women over other people. And that's not a decision you think you're going to sign up to have to make when you take a job as a congressional staffer. And the impact of having to make those decisions is something that has really, really stuck with a lot of these caseworkers years after the event.

[Main Podcast]

Natalie Orpett

I'm Natalie Orpett, Executive Editor of Lawfare, and this is the Lawfare Podcast, April 5^th, 2024. A new report from the POPVOX Foundation focuses on a little known and hugely unappreciated congressional effort, that of congressional staffers helping Afghan allies flee the country during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. I sat down with the report's author, Anne Meeker. We talked about what staffers did to help, the challenges they faced, and how the experience exposed both weaknesses and strengths in how Congress functions.

It's the Lawfare Podcast, April 5^th, 2024: How Congressional Staffers Helped Our Afghan Allies.

Okay. Anne, so I've invited you on because you all wrote a really fascinating report looking at the way in which particularly congressional staffers responded to the fallout from the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. And I want to start by just asking you, how did this issue come to your attention and what motivated you to really dig into the research here?

Anne Meeker

Sure. It's in part a little bit of personal bias because I am a former congressional staffer and a former congressional caseworker. So I lived a little bit of the experience of being the person on the other end of the phone when a constituent calls their member of Congress to say, “Hey, I'm having a problem with a federal agency. Can you help me?” Which is an incredible role, one that I learned so much from. So then when I came to my current role at POPVOX Foundation, our work focuses on congressional capacity, innovation, and engagement. And I really pushed for casework to continue to be part of that focus. So we created a program called Casework Navigator, intended to support congressional caseworkers, elevate the role of casework within Congress, bring it into conversations about congressional modernization. And as part of that, I was talking to tons and tons of casework teams about what are you seeing, what is your experience like? And the topic that just kept coming back up was the Afghanistan withdrawal. That for caseworkers who had been doing casework since the summer of 2021, this was the thing that just defined congressional casework today for them. And so we just felt like we couldn't continue to work on casework, talk about casework, without really getting into this and sharing that story.

Natalie Orpett

And what sorts of stories did you hear from staffers? What kinds of inquiries were they getting when they picked up the phone?

Anne Meeker

Sure. So it was it was different for some offices. So one thing that's important to note here is that not every congressional office, not every caseworker, experienced it the same way. But some kind of commonalities were as the U.S. was starting the withdrawal process from Afghanistan, caseworkers started getting these calls from veterans, people who were, connected to the ongoing military effort in Afghanistan saying, ‘Hey, if the Taliban is coming in, my translator needs to get out. My translator's family needs to get out. What can Congress do to support this individual person?” Caseworkers are really working on that individual level, the kind of individual impact of policy. So they were hearing from people saying, “I need to get out, here is where I am in the immigration process, what can I do?”

And the tenor of that changed over the Afghanistan withdrawal. The kind of first calls, were more people who are already in the immigration process, maybe waiting for an SIV, waiting for another type of visa, saying, “Hey, can I expedite my process?” And then as the situation deteriorated on the ground in Afghanistan in August of 2021, the calls got more desperate and more general.

Just instead of, “How do I get through this specific visa process?” It was, “What can you do to get me out? Is the border safe? Is this border safe? Is this border crossing safe? How do I get into the airport to try to get on a flight?”

Natalie Orpett

Okay. So I want to start with the first, chapter of what you just described, which is really an amazing context for me. Lawfare, as I think you know, published a series called Allies, which was focusing in particular on the SIV program. And the SIV program is a piece of immigration legislation that's existed for many years to assist those who have helped U.S. military and others, particularly in conflict areas like Afghanistan, to expedite their immigration process and give them a specialized path to entering and eventually, hopefully, becoming citizens of the United States. And my main takeaway from my colleagues’ work on this series is that the SIV program is incredibly complicated, that even people who focus entirely on immigration professionally find it very difficult to navigate.

And so, I'm wondering, the congressional caseworkers, at least presumably in all offices, you don't have a person who is 100 percent focused on the immigration system. And it's amazing to me to think of people trying to help people in really desperate situations understand the SIV process and how to go about dealing with it in an emergency situation. Did you find that was a particular challenge for the staffers you spoke with?

Anne Meeker

Definitely. So I'll say, most offices do have someone who immigration casework is their specialty, but the SIV program itself was so kind of niche. And in particular, some of the challenges of immigration casework is that these are not necessarily constituents. So that means offices have a little bit of wiggle room in deciding whether or not they want to take these cases. What that means is that you often get these really uneven casework burdens across different offices, where an office maybe has a prominent veteran, a veteran a lot of connections to Afghanistan, whatever other country, whatever other visa process, will suddenly get a disproportionate number of these cases. So what that meant is you have some offices who knew the SIV process already, knew what to ask for, knew what was going on, and other offices with newer teams, caseworkers who hadn't seen SIVs cases before, who are really just stuck, saying, “Where do I go? What do I do with these cases?” Just sending them to the State Department and hoping something happened, and really feeling like they didn't have enough that they could give back to the people on the other end of the phone who are really in fear for their lives in this situation.

Natalie Orpett

Yeah, one of the examples that really stood out to me from your report was that there might be a call, for example, from someone whose visa was sitting with the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and their SIV application was being processed. I know, again, from our series, Allies, that just the sheer paperwork and logistics of dealing with this can take years and years, and there's a ton of documentation that's required. And people were calling congressional offices and saying, “I need to get out, but my passport is at the embassy, and I can't get to it. Should I leave the country?” And the report was full of specific examples like that. Were there any others that really stood out to you?

Anne Meeker

Yeah, definitely. One of the caseworkers I spoke to really described this in a way that just made my heart hurt, where she was saying the decisions that these caseworkers were having to make to triage the sheer number of calls coming into their offices. And when I say uneven burden, I really do mean it. Some offices were getting thousands of calls. Their whole phone lines were just flooded with people with these similar stories saying, “My passport's at the embassy and the embassy's destroying papers. I'm at the gate of the airport and I don't know what to do.” So that means these caseworkers are having to make these decisions on the fly of saying, “Who has the greatest chance of getting out? Who's at the greatest risk if I can't get them out?” It's talking about prioritizing women and children, talking about prioritizing pregnant women over other people. And that's not a decision you think you're going to sign up to have to make when you take a job as a congressional staffer. And like the impact of having to make those decisions is something that has really, really stuck with a lot of these caseworkers years after the event.

Natalie Orpett

And were people making those decisions individually, or were offices setting priorities as a sort of policy matter, or were there broader prioritizations happening within each chamber, or how was that all working?

Anne Meeker

Sure, so it was really individual offices. Casework is handled individually by member offices. Each member hires their caseworkers, sets priorities, is responsible for their caseworkers’ training. So we really saw a lot of variation in how offices handled this. For example, some offices let their interns take those calls, and others did not let their interns take those calls. Some offices shifted their casework teams to Kabul time so they could get some sleep in American daylight hours, and others just had their caseworkers working around the clock.

The kind of cool thing that we saw here is that caseworkers found new ways to coordinate within and across chambers that just hadn't really existed before Afghanistan. So you did have some caseworkers saying, and you're getting on big Teams chats, to say, “Hey, here's the 10 cases that have just come in for me. Has anyone else heard any details like this?” Or, more importantly, “Here's the response I just got from the State Department. Can anyone else verify if they got something similar?” So we saw some coordination, less deliberate, concerted efforts to prioritize, but some ways that caseworkers were starting to figure out how to coordinate between offices was really new here.

Natalie Orpett

And in addition to the volume disparities, did you find that there were disparities in how many resources an office was dedicating based on the individual member’s priorities as a policy matter?

Anne Meeker

Definitely. And I think sometimes this was almost more accidental than deliberate, that just members who were prominent veterans, who had positions where they'd spoken out on these issues, especially SIV cases before, just happened to be the ones that got the first calls. So a lot of those cases, the members were personally involved in this casework in a way that is pretty rare in day-to-day casework. We actually had members texting back and forth with Marines on the gates. We had members calling the State Department in a way that doesn't really happen normally. So again, it really came down to the members prioritization, just that individual member's priority.

Which also showed up in how many resources did they devote to this within their teams. Did they shift their legislative staffers into handling casework also? Did they take other casework off of the plates of the caseworkers who are handling Afghanistan casework? Again, it just really came down to individual priorities and individual management decisions.

Natalie Orpett

Just to put some numbers on it, even rough numbers, what sorts of ranges did you see with respect to staffers dedicated to this effort, or I guess, caseworkers who were assigned in the first instance, to even have a baseline to get started. What were the sort of low and high ends in terms of number of people?

Anne Meeker

Yeah, so it's actually really tough to get this kind of data for a lot of reasons. Individual member offices track their own casework data. That data is all locked away in their casework management software and there's no way to see those numbers publicly or see any kind of range across different offices. So it's all self-reported, if members are interested in reporting it at all. Just for a general sense of the volume across Congress here, I think it was the first hearing where Secretary Blinken testified to Congress after the fall of Kabul—U.S. withdrawal, was September 13th, I think—where Secretary Blinken held up a stack of paper that he said represented 26,000 congressional inquiries. So that was September 13^th, only a few weeks after the U.S.'s final withdrawal. So if you divide that among individual member offices, it's hundreds and thousands of cases for some offices.

Natalie Orpett

Okay. And who are these caseworkers? I think this is a function of congressional offices that many people are really not familiar with.

Anne Meeker

Yeah, for sure. They are frontline district-based or state office-based staff for Congress. I think former Speaker McCarthy said this is one of the few things that unites every member of Congress, that they all have dedicated staff out in the districts, out in the states, who are there to pick up the phone when a constituent is having problems. There's a huge range of backgrounds for caseworkers. Some of them are your entry level former campaign staffers just out of college. And some of them are career-long caseworkers who really build up incredible subject matter expertise in how do these big federal programs work? What goes right? What goes wrong? What causes problems? And how to get things resolved. So they can be incredibly effective on behalf of constituents, and clearly do incredible work in crises as well.

Natalie Orpett

So I want to shift to the second chapter of the inquiries that you mentioned earlier, which was less connected to the immigration system necessarily, but just the influx of calls as things were getting worse and worse. And it sounds like the types of inquiries were getting more and more diffuse. So what did that look like? Sure.

Anne Meeker

So again, a lot of this was vulnerable Afghans, folks who'd served with the U.S. military, their families, folks who'd served with just Americans in general saying, “Hey, this is really, really dire. If I can't get out of Afghanistan right now, I am concerned for my life.” That kind of took a couple of directions. So like I said, some of it was people looking to find information or verify information they were getting from other sources about options to get out. How many planes are available? Can I only take an American plane? Is the border to Kazakhstan open? And just really reaching out to Congress to verify information they were hearing from other directions.

Others of it was more direct. “Congress, I need you to help me get out.” So you had case workers trying to coordinate with aid groups, with soldiers on the ground, to say, “Hey, I have this group of people. They're led by a woman with a polka-dotted umbrella, they are going to meet you at this gas station at this time, and they need to get into the airport gates.” So just really intense logistics, trying to coordinate safe passage in a really, really dangerous situation.

Natalie Orpett

Yeah, and it seems that the ability of caseworkers to respond is necessarily wrapped up with how many contacts they have on the ground, really, in Afghanistan, in addition to how much they know and are able to navigate the bureaucracy of U.S. agencies.

Anne Meeker

Definitely. And that's a huge part of where we saw some offices just in a better position to be able to support these folks than others. And that really put caseworkers in a difficult position to say, “I'm doing everything I can. I believe you. I want you out. I am also afraid for your life, but just, I have fewer contacts than a colleague might.” There's a lot of guilt there for some offices who really tried everything they could and felt that they were less effective for whatever reason.

Natalie Orpett

Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about some of the stories you heard? I guess I would love to hear both the stories of how people failed and didn't feel good about what they were able to accomplish, but also maybe some success stories.

Anne Meeker

I talked to one caseworker who, this is pretty common for offices, but I love this. They have a wall of casework successes up in their district office where they have photos of constituents they've been able to help and just, little stories. Hey, this person got their benefit. They were able to get back on their feet, whatever. And so, she talked about how she has a few photos of Afghans who made it to the U.S., who are starting their lives. But she contrasted that wall with those pictures to a hidden mental wall where she thinks about the Afghans who weren't able to make it out. Some caseworkers talked about after the suicide bomb at the airport. “This person that I was in really close touch with, we were texting, we were on WhatsApp every couple hours, they went silent.

And I don't know if that's because their phone died and there was no way to charge it in the crowd at the airport, or if they were armed, if they were killed.” Just a huge range of absolutely beautiful successes, people who served our country, who are here now, contributing as part of our society to some of the hardest ones are the ones where caseworkers just don't have a resolution. They don't know if that person went into hiding, if they're dead, what happens now?

Natalie Orpett

Yeah, I think that leads, unfortunately, very well to one of the issues that you all spoke about in your report, which was the trauma that's residual from working on these issues, particularly during such a discrete, and relatively speaking, short period of high intensity, emergency, high stress time. What did you find in terms of people's ability, caseworkers’ ability to be able to deal with that trauma?

Anne Meeker

This was a little bit of a bright point in some respects that, we've been calling for Congress to take casework seriously and provide resources to caseworkers that match the scope and the emotional weight of the work that they're asked to do. And we saw this happen in the Afghanistan withdrawal that the Office of Employee Assistance for the House and for the Senate—definitely the Senate, I think, took action first, but the house wasn't too far behind—really sprung into action, saying “Hey, we're hearing from all these caseworkers who are really struggling to handle this. So what can we do?” So EAP stood up some kind of group support for caseworkers. That was really exciting, that was new. And then those caseworker meetings have continued long after the Afghanistan withdrawal. So in the midst of this chaos and this crisis, caseworkers asked for what they needed. House and Senate resources stepped up to provide it and then those resources are still ongoing.

But it's still really difficult for caseworkers. Another thing that a lot of folks brought up to me was just how critically important it was that they were able to work with some outside groups, like AfghanEvac, and beyond the regular calls that AfghanEvac stood up because it was such an experience of camaraderie and saying other people from outside Congress, looking at case records and saying, “Hey, what you're doing is important. The struggle that you're handling is real and we're here for you. We recognize what you're going through.” That moment of validation was really important.

Natalie Orpett

Yeah, and I did note that you talked also about the work that caseworkers ended up doing with outside groups and with each other, bipartisan and cross-chamber, to be creative and come up with solutions. So can you speak about the range of things you learned about?

Anne Meeker

Yeah, definitely. And again, this is part of why I love working with caseworkers. They are creative and dedicated, and if you give them an obstacle, they're going to find a way under it, around it, over it, no matter what it takes to help those constituents. So this was such a great experience of that.

So in the middle of the Afghan withdrawal, one of the caseworkers who, her boss wasn't on the right committee, so she didn't have committee-level information coming, she didn't know what to do with these cases. So she started a Teams chat and invited everybody that she knew who was handling Afghanistan casework to this Teams chat. And that chat became one of the key pieces that made caseworkers effective, that was a place where caseworkers were sharing what they were getting from the State Department, where experienced caseworkers who'd handled both DOD casework and immigration casework could come in and fact check and say, “Hey, here's what I understand from this case two years ago,” or “Here's a deck of slides that I got at a training three years ago that seemed like they are the closest thing we have to a resource on refugee admissions processing.” So just creating that that space for caseworkers to share that information was hugely critical. And again, that space has continued, it's been effective, continues to be. So that was definitely one way that, that caseworkers were able to coordinate that hadn't existed before to find those creative ways to help.

Natalie Orpett

Yeah, and as you're saying that, it seems worth emphasizing that individual caseworkers trying to solve individual problems as they're coming in requires making phone calls to State or to DOD or to other more specialized groups to try to just get information. And from those agencies’ side, there are 535 members of Congress who might be calling and trying to learn individual things. How did people navigate that difficulty, in addition to sharing information on a chat? How did people address the question pure logistical challenge of so many inquiries going to the same smaller group of people and contacts?

Anne Meeker

Sure. So that was one way where caseworkers were actually able to make better use of the limited time they had with agency staff. Without that chat coordination—if any caseworker has been on one of the big agency briefings, they're pure chaos. It's a lot of time on, bless their hearts, less experienced caseworkers asking more basic questions, which kind of takes time away from the more advanced, in the weeds questions, the more kind of oversight-y, “Hey, you told me one thing, but I'm seeing another thing happen in my casework, so what's the disconnect there?” Those kinds of questions. So once caseworkers were able to coordinate better, they could make better use of those briefings to say, “Hey, let's all pool our questions in advance. Here are the ones that caseworkers themselves can answer, and then here are the ones that we really want to devote our limited time with State Department resources to.”

So a lot of the caseworkers absolutely acknowledged hey, the volume of inquiries that we were sending to State made it difficult for them, especially when normal congressional channels were overloaded, we felt like we had to go around, go up, escalate within the Department, within the administration. But again, for most of them, there was just this frustration of, “Well, what else did you want me to do? That the normal channels I use to send these inquiries, I wasn't getting anything. Our caseworkers were getting responses nine months after they submitted them when a constituent had already moved or, someone waiting in the SIV process had already moved three different countries. So the information they were getting was no longer helpful.” So really a sense of the State Department and other agencies involved did not have the resources that they needed to be able to respond to that flood of congressional inquiries.

Natalie Orpett

Yeah, and I noticed one of the things that you spoke about in the report was that sort of lack of infrastructure and coordinating mechanisms and even just shortcomings in the available technology, which was interesting to me because the State OIG report on the SIV program also attributed many of the processing delays to just an underinvestment in database management, which it's hard to get anyone excited about funding and allocating resources to making a computer program better so that the database is more effective so that everyone can do their jobs more quickly. But it seems like that was a trend that you really emphasized as being in need of attention as well.

Anne Meeker

Definitely. That was one of the biggest takeaways for me from the whole process and really digging into what went wrong here is, again, we said one of the commonalities of members of Congress is that each one does casework. Each caseworker is running up against this problem, not only with the State department, the other agencies involved in the Afghanistan withdrawal, but just everyday casework—social security, the VA, the DOD, the IRS. There are so few places in law or regulation or statute where Congress has told an agency how it wants them to respond to constituent inquiries. It hasn't told them how it wants to respond. There are no baseline standards to say, “Hey, agency whatever, you have to return a response to my inquiry within 30 days, 60 days. It has to include XYZ information. Whatever.”

And then besides setting the standards, it also hasn't resourced agencies to be able to return those responses. Part of the problem for new caseworkers is that every agency responds to Congress differently. Some route inquiries through D.C., some route them through field offices. It might vary based on the type of case depending on the agency. It's a huge inefficiency for Congress in having to train casework staff so individually to learn this huge constellation of different ways that agencies work. And it makes Congress less effective in its own right on behalf of its constituents. I think there's a built-in constituency within Congress for investing in technology and resources to provide better answers to caseworkers.

Natalie Orpett

And what would those look like?

Anne Meeker

That's a great question. And I don't want to be too prescriptive because I have my own ideas, but I've never worked in an agency. I understand how complicated it is to handle all of these congressional inquiries, each one with the member office thinking that it’s got the weight of the world behind it.

What we've called for in the report that I think will be really illuminating, if and when it happens, is for a Government Accountability Office study to put some language on that full spectrum of how do agencies respond to Congress on casework inquiries. Say, which agencies are working well, which agencies aren't working well, what can we learn from one agency that does this really well that we can apply to the others? So I think that'll be helpful.

Natalie Orpett

And will it be important to have cross-agency information sharing as well?

Anne Meeker

Definitely. That's always one of Congress's strengths with its caseworkers, that most casework portfolios cross different agencies, so you really see what is the constituent experience of handling multiple, of working with multiple agencies. And you see where, again, which agencies are working well and which ones aren't. If it's a Social Security check that starts at Social Security and then gets routed over to the Treasury and the problems with the Treasury side, there's no one you can talk to at Treasury or at Social Security that's going to have the full picture of what's happening with that check, but a caseworker does because they talk to both agencies and understand the disconnect there. So yeah, that cross-agency experience, that cross-agency expertise on Congress's side is really important.

Natalie Orpett

And another theme you focused on really was, as we touched on a little bit earlier, the sort of bipartisan working together, coming up with solutions, the working across different offices, working across different chambers. Is there room there for continued cooperation on problem solving over the longer term?

Anne Meeker

I think so. Yeah, and I should have said that in talking about those big Teams chats, that one of the really critical pieces of that is that they were absolutely nonpartisan. A lot of the caseworkers I spoke to said, “I became really close to this other caseworker, I didn't even know which party his boss was in, her boss was in until months down the road.” So Congress doesn't get a lot of credit for bipartisan work and bipartisan functionality. But that's really, casework is such a great example of where that does happen.

It's really my hope that those bipartisan relationships that caseworkers develop, digging in on really substantive problems that the American people, our allies are facing, become the basis for legislative coalitions that move forward to fix these problems.

Natalie Orpett

So let's take a minute to talk about some of those solutions because you end your report with a set of, I think, remarkably concrete, in the sense that it is always quite helpful to have concrete recommendations out of these kinds of reports. Can you talk through a couple of the ones that we haven't touched on already that you all are recommending and why?

Anne Meeker

One of them I'm really excited about, because it looks like it is poised to go forward and we always love to do, set up a recommendation and then see it move, is for Congress to find a way to develop a way to see casework trends across offices. You talked about this a little bit, that individual offices have no way of telling if what they're seeing is normal or what they're seeing is unique for their district, their state. The House digital services team is working on a pilot project that would pull some top line, totally anonymized, casework data from individual offices’ software to build a general database to say, hey, overall nationally, we're seeing a 10 percent spike in cases related to SSDI, or we're seeing nationally casework regarding the SIV program is dragging out for multiple years.

So what that does is it will let congressional offices kind of level set and figure out is what I'm seeing normal? Is it a regional problem? Is it a national problem that might require legislation to fix it? And then again, hopefully, start to be one more tool in the toolkit for building legislative coalitions to deal with the problems that people come to Congress with most frequently. So that's one where I'm really excited. I think the pilot project is on its way, but we'll be watching it over the next couple of years to see how it goes. Really excited there.

Another one that I think is important is creating a pilot office specifically focused on casework and supporting caseworkers within the CAO. Obviously, this is a pilot to just support the House side. The House has more caseworkers than the Senate, although we hope one day it would be bipartisan, or there would be equivalents in the other chamber as well. But one thing that really stands out from the process of talking to caseworkers writing this report is that casework is such a unique area of specialty among congressional staff. It is not something that has equivalencies in any D.C.-based position. It is like social work on some levels, just in the deep, sometimes really difficult relationships that caseworkers develop with constituents. It is like problem-solving. There are elements of being a paralegal to it. You have to understand all of these agency programs and rules. The uniqueness of that particular specialty requires specific support.

So we've called for the creation of a casework liaison office in the House that would do a couple of things. First of all, just be a D.C.-based beachhead for caseworkers. Say, this is someone in person in D.C. who's going to advocate for caseworkers overall, make sure they have the tools that they need, that they have the representation with agencies that they need to be effective, and be a liaison between caseworkers as a whole and the agencies. Agencies don't have access to a congressional staff directory. One doesn't really exist, which means that when agencies have updates that are important for casework, they have no way to make sure that those updates get to every caseworker. So making sure that there's someone within the institution itself, who's going to be responsible for saying, “Hey, Social Security has an update to its appeals process. This information needs to get out to every Social Security caseworker.” I think having that central point of responsibility is going to be important.

Natalie Orpett

It's shocking that doesn't exist already.

Anne Meeker

Insane, right?

Natalie Orpett

One thing that is a little bit of a discrete issue, but something that stood out to me, because of Lawfare's focus, was you mentioned in the report that sometimes a challenge with information-sharing, it sounds like, at the time and going forward, is to account for the fact that some things can't be easily shared because there's they constitute sensitive national security information. Can you talk a little bit about that challenge?

Anne Meeker

Definitely. To get into the weeds on the process of writing the report for a second. So I did all these interviews with caseworkers. Many of them asked for anonymity just so they could be as frank with me as possible. And then sent out the draft again to those caseworkers to say, did I get you right? I didn't do Afghanistan casework. I want to make absolutely sure this is as representative as it can be. And to the section in the report where we talked about the State Department and other agencies withholding information on the basis that it was sensitive was the one every single caseworker highlighted and underlined and commented and said this was the most frustrating thing that I handled. So there's definitely a sense among caseworkers, that this was a little bit of an excuse on the agency's side to say, “We don't have the real answer for what you're looking for, so we're going to tell you it's sensitive so that we don't have to give you any other information.”

And that's one where coordination between caseworkers and committee and oversight and legislative staff can be really effective. I think caseworkers don't necessarily have the training, don't have the background to be able to effectively push back on that. But committee staffers who might have clearances, who might be used to handling more sensitive information, teamed up with caseworkers can make that case back to the agency and say, ‘No, this is not actually sensitive, you need to find a way to give them some additional information here.”

The problem with that is that caseworkers and legislative staff and caseworkers and committees aren't used to coordinating. They're very separate spheres of congressional work. Caseworkers are out in the district. Legislative staff is in D.C. And as we saw in this report, there are really some challenges when coordinating is vital, but just those muscles aren't there right now. So that's something we hope committee staff, we hope caseworkers, we hope some of the institutions that provide legislative and oversight training will actually think about co-training caseworkers and oversight staff going forward so that there are those relationships, there is that shared vocabulary to say, “This is sensitive, this is classified, this you can get.”

Natalie Orpett

Okay, I think just to close us out, I'd be interested in hearing from you, based on all of your research, based on this report, even based on the responses that you've had to this report since it's come out, what are the main takeaways that you would like people to have both within Congress and others who are interested in Congress's work in this sphere?

Anne Meeker

So overall, one of the biggest things is just drawing attention to the role of caseworkers. Casework can sometimes be dismissed, modernizers and academics, political scientists, is like this thing that just happens in the district and is about keeping constituents happy in the campaign way. And casework is so much deeper than that. Casework is genuinely how Congress comes face to face with the impact of the policy decisions it makes. It is individual, personal accountability between constituents and members of Congress to say, “This is what your decision did, here is how I am living the consequences of that.” But that's how Congress should gather information to make decisions on implementation of its policies. Caseworkers are implementation experts. Where the policymaking stops, caseworkers pick up. How is the agency carrying out this policy that Congress wanted to happen?

But there's no pipeline right now, or there's not a good pipeline between casework and oversight in between casework and legislation. Congress could be so much more effective in making sure that its policies are faithfully carried out if it had a better way to recognize and tap into that expertise from caseworkers. Some of that's technical, like we've talked about, the dashboard to see what's going on from casework across the country. Some of that is relationships-based, our legislative and committee staff recognizing the value of caseworker's expertise. Do they have the relationships to be able to pull on that expertise when they need it? But it just doesn't exist right now. And there's a lot of ways that Congress can take concrete action to make that work better.

Natalie Orpett

Okay. I think we'll leave it there. Anne, thank you so much for joining us.

Anne Meeker

Thank you. Such a pleasure.

Natalie Orpett

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