The House of Representatives is poised to provide $4 million in new spending to modernize the chamber’s internal operations. The chamber’s Subcommittee on Legislative Branch Appropriations approved the boost to the Modernization Initiatives Fund, which would become available for use on Oct. 1, when the new fiscal year begins.
That is good news for Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-OK), who sits on the Committee on House Administration and chairs the Modernization Subcommittee, which decides how to spend the money. She has been at the helm since January 2023, when the bipartisan, four-member subcommittee was established. She, along with Rep Mike Carey (R-OH), Rep. Norma Torres (D-CA), and Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY), has shepherded dozens of fixes to completion with the help of the subcommittee’s small cohort of staff.
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Bice, 52, who represents the Oklahoma City-area 5th Congressional District, did not come to Washington with dreams of upgrading the House. The former Oklahoma state legislator and businesswoman won her seat in 2020 by campaigning to secure the border, improve crumbling U.S. infrastructure, and improve aid to military veterans. An early encounter with the House’s antiquated operations set her on the path to becoming a congressional reformer.
It began at the new member orientation. She found herself sitting in an auditorium in the visitor center on Capitol Hill with other freshmen legislators, trying to learn how to do her job.
“There was not a lot of engagement — we did not engage with our Republican or Democratic counterparts,” she later reported. The program of policy and operational briefings did not strike her as “conducive to understanding or learning the things that we needed to learn.”
Rep. Bice could have shrugged it off, but the experience was deja vu for her. Bice had an underwhelming onboarding when she entered Oklahoma’s legislature in 2014. Bice tried to improve matters there by establishing a mentoring and orientation program where new state senators were paired with wizened old hands.
Her underwhelming Capitol Hill orientation experience stuck with her, and when Republicans won control of the House in November 2022, she saw an opportunity for improvement.
“I put together this very elaborate document of how I thought that the new member orientation should be laid out.” Bice approached soon-to-be-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and pitched him on it. Not long afterward, she heard from one of his people that she was being appointed to chair the newly established Subcommittee on Modernization.
Her task was tall. The Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress had compiled dozens of reform recommendations over the previous four years. The House was short on capacity and suffered from outdated and inefficient operations. Employees in members’ offices, for example, lacked a reliable online database of staff contact numbers who worked in other legislators’ offices. Legislators had to fill out paper forms to cosponsor bills and accomplish various other tasks. House members often found themselves scheduled for two different committee meetings simultaneously because there was no software that could coordinate meeting times.
Bit by bit, Bice and the CHA’s Subcommittee on Modernization are pushing the House of Representatives into the 21st century. They have launched Legidex, an online Rolodex with up-to-date contact information for all House offices and staff.
The subcommittee also arranged bipartisan workspaces for congressional staff, who spend most of their time working in crowded, fluorescent, tube-lit spaces that resemble rabbit warrens. They also arranged for thousands of Hill staff with licenses for CoPilot, an artificial intelligence digital assistant.
“I actually used it today to write a nominating speech for one of my colleagues,” Bice told the Washington Examiner in late April.
One of Bice’s major priorities has been making “The People’s House” more open, welcoming, and responsive to the public. The buildings where people can visit their legislators’ offices and attend congressional hearings are notoriously labyrinthine.
“I remember when my dad came to visit me right after I got elected,” Bice recalled. “We got lost a couple of times.” So, the subcommittee is looking to launch a “digital wayfinding” app to help visitors find the fastest routes to reach their destinations. To help the public know when Congress is at work, the subcommittee helped develop a House Voting Days Calendar.
Bice was particularly incensed that individuals with disabilities faced needless hurdles when they came to Congress. There were no designated areas for vehicles to drop off individuals in wheelchairs or using walkers. They got dropped in front of stone staircases leading to crowded entryways with very heavy doors. Deaf and hearing-impaired individuals who wanted to watch action on the House floor had no closed captioning to hear what was being said.
She and the subcommittee have made headway in addressing both of those problems and are working on various other upgrades to the House. The subcommittee is currently looking at options to upgrade the “constituent management systems” that legislative staff use to catalog the tens of thousands of letters, emails, phone calls, and other missives that come from voters who want to share their opinion about policies or complain about executive branch bureaucracies.
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Fixing the House’s operations often is a slog.
“It’s a little bit slower than I would like, but Congress is a slow body,” Bice said. And the work is not glamorous. “We’re not on national news publications. We’re sort of flying under the radar. But what I would tell you is that we’re making a difference for the House.”
Kevin R. Kosar (@kevinrkosar) is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and edits UnderstandingCongress.org.
