{"id":14981,"date":"2026-05-08T22:05:37","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T22:05:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/05\/08\/inside-the-effort-to-connect-congress-with-the-feds-enacting-its-policies-nextgov-fcw\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T22:05:37","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T22:05:37","slug":"inside-the-effort-to-connect-congress-with-the-feds-enacting-its-policies-nextgov-fcw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/05\/08\/inside-the-effort-to-connect-congress-with-the-feds-enacting-its-policies-nextgov-fcw\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the effort to connect Congress with the feds enacting its policies – Nextgov\/FCW"},"content":{"rendered":"

Doug Armand\/Getty Images <\/span><\/p>\n

Stay Connected
By Natalie Alms<\/a><\/span><\/span>
Congress is flying blind on the effectiveness of the laws it creates.
That\u2019s the thesis of a new project<\/a> released last week by the POPVOX Foundation, a nonpartisan nonprofit, based on the input of 50 federal employees pushed out of their government jobs last year. The intent of this work was partly to gather insights on how policy implementation works in the executive branch and what barriers exist to effective government that lawmakers may not know about.
But it\u2019s also about showing Capitol Hill what\u2019s possible, said Anne Meeker, senior advisor for the POPVOX Foundation, which collaborated with the Niskanen Center, Civil Service Strong, the Partnership for Public Service and the Foundation for American Innovation on the work, called Departure Dialogues.\u00a0
Communication between those making laws and those implementing them has been a problem for a long time, said Meeker, in part because federal employees doing the work aren\u2019t usually authorized to go talk to Congress about what they may be dealing with as they turn statute into reality. That made last year a unique opportunity, as federal employees left the government en masse under the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce.\u00a0
Typically, Congress\u2019 current mechanisms for feedback from those closest to implementation in the government are limited. Hearings \u201care performative as often as they are informative,\u201d the new report reads. Audits from the Government Accountability Office are usually retrospective, and congressionally-mandated reports are often compliance exercises.\u00a0
Federal agencies have legislative affairs offices, but the information they transmit to Congress often gets filtered down to politics and top-level priorities, not the \u201cprogram-level, operational oversights [of] what\u2019s working, what\u2019s breaking, what statutory language creates unnecessary friction,\u201d the new report reads.\u00a0
The hope is that Congress may replicate POPVOX\u2019s process, or parts of it\u00a0\u2014\u00a0including the use of AI to synthesize insights and surface patterns \u2014 so that experts have channels to communicate with lawmakers and their staff. For that reason, Departure Dialogues includes a methods report, in addition to a report on key findings and a legislative index.
One recommendation is for congressional committees to consider building structured input processes into reauthorization cycles or invite mid-level experts in for structured listening sessions.\u00a0
As for what lawmakers may find if they take on the charge of hearing more from those in government agencies, one top takeaway Departure Dialogues found is that the accumulation of policies and requirements is making it difficult to get things done. Congress usually adds requirements, but it doesn\u2019t take them away.
\u201cOne recurring challenge I encountered was the cumulative burden imposed by overlapping and sometimes conflicting legislative and reporting requirements associated with different funding streams,\u201d Vikki Stein, who worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development for 30 years, told POPVOX.\u00a0
\u201cWhile each requirement was reasonable in itself, together they created inefficiencies that reduced our ability to focus on program effectiveness,\u201d she continued. \u201cThis led to significant duplication of effort, diverting staff time and resources away from program monitoring, learning, and adaptation.\u201d
Others told POPVOX that statutory language sometimes directly prevents them from achieving what Congress intended.\u00a0
A common culprit: the Paperwork Reduction Act, a law created before the days of the internet that\u2019s meant to reduce paperwork for Americans. Detractors say the law adds bureaucracy internally to those delivering government services who want to collect data like feedback meant to help ensure that government programs work well for people \u2014 but that it doesn\u2019t ultimately always reduce burden on citizens the way it\u2019s intended to.\u00a0
Those writing the new report saw themes across workforce, contracting and internal communication: just as agencies and Congress are siloed, so too are agencies isolated from each other, and even teams within agencies are experiencing separation.
\u201cThe project was a little bit of an experiment to see if departing federal employees in this really politically tense moment were interested in participating,\u201d Meeker said of the work.
\u201cThe response that we got \u2026 was really neat to see. We had so many folks really excited about this chance to say to Congress, like, \u2018Look, forget the partisanship, forget the politics. This is just the one thing you need to know about how to make this program better,\u2019\u201d she continued. \u201cThat spirit of service was actually really kind of moving.\u201d <\/use> <\/svg>
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Doug Armand\/Getty Images Stay Connected By Natalie Alms Congress is flying blind on the effectiveness of the laws it creates.That\u2019s the thesis of a new project released last week by the POPVOX Foundation, a nonpartisan nonprofit, based on the input of 50 federal employees pushed out of their government jobs last year. The intent of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14982,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-14981","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14981\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}