[House Hearing, 117 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


                    ENHANCING COMMITTEE PRODUCTIVITY 
                       THROUGH CONSENSUS BUILDING

=======================================================================

                                HEARING

                               BEFORE THE

           SELECT COMMITTEE ON THE MODERNIZATION OF CONGRESS

                                 OF THE

                        HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                    ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS

                             FIRST SESSION

                               __________

                             JULY 20, 2021

                               __________

                           Serial No. 117-09

                               __________

  Printed for the use of the Select Committee on the Modernization of 
                                Congress
                                
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                    Available via http://govinfo.gov
                    
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                    U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE                    
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           SELECT COMMITTEE ON THE MODERNIZATION OF CONGRESS

                    DEREK KILMER, Washington, Chair

 ZOE LOFGREN, California              WILLIAM TIMMONS, South Carolina,
 EMANUEL CLEAVER, Missouri             Vice Chair
 ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado              BOB LATTA, Ohio
 DEAN PHILLIPS, Minnesota             RODNEY DAVIS, Illinois
 NIKEMA WILLIAMS, Georgia             DAVE JOYCE, Ohio
                                      GUY RESCHENTHALER, Pennsylvania
                                      BETH VAN DUYNE, Texas

                            COMMITTEE STAFF

                     Yuri Beckelman, Staff Director
                 Derek Harley, Republican Staff Director
                            
                            
                            C O N T E N T S

                              ----------                              

                           OPENING STATEMENTS

                                                                   Page
Chairman Derek Kilmer
    Oral Statement...............................................     1
Vice Chairman William Timmons
    Oral Statement...............................................     3

                               WITNESSES

Hon. Fred Upton, Representative, Sixth District of Michigan
    Oral Statement...............................................     6
Hon. Diana DeGette, Representative, First District of Colorado
    Oral Statement...............................................     4
Discussion.......................................................     8
Ms. Jenness Simler, Vice President, Boeing Global Services and 
    Federal Acquisition Policy
    Oral Statement...............................................    19
    Written Statement............................................    24
Mr. Warren Payne, Senior Advisor, Mayer Brown
    Oral Statement...............................................    28
    Written Statement............................................    31
Dr. Scott Adler, Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School, 
    University of Colorado Boulder Phoebe
    Oral Statement...............................................    34
    Written Statement............................................    37
Discussion.......................................................    47

 
      ENHANCING COMMITTEE PRODUCTIVITY THROUGH CONSENSUS BUILDING

                              ----------                              


                         TUESDAY, JULY 20, 2021

                  House of Representatives,
                            Select Committee on the
                                 Modernization of Congress,
                                                   Washington, D.C.
    The committee met, pursuant to call, at 1:31 p.m., in Room 
2360, House Office Building, Hon. Derek Kilmer [chairman of the 
committee] presiding.
    Present: Representatives Kilmer, Cleaver, Perlmutter, 
Phillips, Williams, Timmons, Davis, Latta, Van Duyne, and 
Joyce.
    The Chairman. The committee will come to order.
    Without objection, the chair is authorized to declare a 
recess of the committee at any time.
    I now recognize myself for 5 minutes for an opening 
statement.
    We are here today to talk about strengthening committees 
and empowering Members in their policymaking roles. But before 
we discuss how to do that, I am going to take a cue from our 
most recent hearings and attempt to first define the problem 
statement.
    The experts that we heard from last month pointed out that 
Congress spends a lot of time arguing over solutions and not 
nearly enough time defining problems. If we like a particular 
solution, we believe a problem exists. But if we don't like or 
feel threatened by a particular solution, we are more likely to 
deny that there is even a problem. This denial leads to a 
solution aversion. Members get stuck in a cycle of fighting 
over solutions to problems they haven't even taken the time to 
define.
    So I am going to talk about the problems with committees 
and policy work as I see it, and I hope my colleagues will do 
the same. Taking the time to do this up front will hopefully 
help us have a more productive discussion to find solutions 
that can actually address agreed-upon problems.
    So when I think about policymaking in Congress today, I 
think entirely too much time is spent making political noise. 
Congress also spends a lot of time on suspension bills and not 
enough time on big substantive bills. I am not suggesting that 
suspension bills aren't important. They are. Congress does 
important work using this process, but the amount of work that 
Congress does by suspension has steadily increased over the 
past couple of decades, and fewer suspensions are reported out 
by committees today than in the past.
    Twenty years ago or so, less than half of the House's work 
was done by suspension. But during the 116th Congress, 66 
percent of measures considered on the House floor were 
suspension bills. In the 115th, 64 percent of what the House 
did was by suspension. So, Congress spends a lot of time making 
political noise in taking up suspension bills. Less time is 
spent on the big policy measures that used to be the bread and 
butter of committee work. As a result, much of what gets done 
gets done in leadership offices or by omnibus.
    In 13 of the last 14 appropriations cycles, Congress has 
completed its appropriations work with an omnibus bill. And in 
most cases, the omnibus contained all 12 regular appropriations 
bills.
    Members also spend a lot of time running between committee 
hearings instead of spending time in committee hearings. Last 
year, the Bipartisan Policy Center found that one morning, 131 
Members, 30 percent of the entire House, had a conflict between 
two or more committee meetings, and in some hearings, up to 97 
percent of committee members had a conflict. As a result, some 
Members hop from one hearing to another to give 5 minutes of 
remarks aimed at social media, rather than in finding policy 
solutions.
    So I think all this is a problem, and it is a problem 
because when Members are not active participants in the 
policymaking process, when they are not engaged in the work 
they came to Congress to do, a few things happen. One, 
frustration builds, and that frustration can take Members in a 
lot of different and not always healthy directions. Some 
redirect their focus to communications where feedback is often 
instantaneous. Some seek out procedural tools to halt processes 
in which they were denied participation. And some become 
disillusioned with the process altogether and they feel they 
have no ability to effect change.
    It is also important to acknowledge that committees have 
lost a tremendous amount of capacity over the past few decades. 
By 2015, the total number of House committee staff was half of 
what it had been in 1991. As a result, committees today lack 
the deep policy expertise that they need to do the substantive 
policy work that they are meant to do, and this brain drain 
from the Hill leaves Members more dependent on lobbyists for 
help.
    There are more problems, and I hope my colleagues will 
share their thoughts, but hopefully this lets us begin the 
process of finding solutions that best fit the challenges 
committees and members face in the policymaking process.
    As with our two most recent hearings, the Select Committee 
will once again make use of our committees' rules that we 
adopted earlier this year that give us some flexibility to 
experiment with how we structure our hearings. Our goal is to 
encourage thoughtful discussion and the civil exchange of ideas 
and opinions.
    So, now a really formal part. In accordance with clause 2
    (j) of House rule XI, we will allow up to 30 minutes of 
extended questioning per witness and, without objection, time 
will not be strictly segregated between the witnesses, which 
will allow for extended back-and-forth exchanges between 
members and witnesses.
    Vice Chair Timmons and I will manage the time to ensure 
that every member has equal opportunity to participate. Any 
member who wishes to speak should just signal their request to 
me or Vice Chair Timmons. Additionally, members who wish to 
claim their individual 5 minutes to question each witness 
pursuant to clause 2(j)(2) of rule XI will be permitted to do 
so following the period of extended questioning.
    Okay. That was really formal.
    I would like to now invite Vice Chair Timmons to share our 
opening remarks, and then we will get to our terrific 
witnesses.
    Mr. Timmons. Sure. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    And I want to thank both of our witnesses for taking the 
time to come. We know how busy you all are. So we really 
appreciate it.
    I just want to point out that we have 6 of the 12 members 
here and, as you can imagine, they all want to be here but they 
are in another committee or a subcommittee and that is how this 
place works. I was--I am on the Financial Services Committee. I 
spoke earlier, and I looked around as I was using my 5 minutes, 
and there must be 60 people on the committee, something like 
that, and I think there were four in the room when I was 
speaking. I had a great back-and-forth with Secretary Fudge 
but, you know, that is just not productive.
    And so I am very excited to hear how you all were able to 
accomplish such a great feat in a bipartisan and collaborative 
manner and get it across the finish line. A lot of people are 
working on a lot of different, important bills and you all have 
a framework that you are about to share with us on how to 
accomplish the task of legislating. We don't do a lot of that. 
Generally speaking, the loudest voices in the room are the ones 
that are heard, and I can promise you that the people on the 
edges of this Congress are not going to solve our problems, and 
I can promise you Twitter is not going to solve our problems.
    So I am just really excited about hearing the story of your 
success, and appreciate you all taking the time. I do hope that 
I can learn from your success, because I don't want to spend 20 
or 30 years in Congress until I am able to succeed in the 
manner that you all did. So, again, I just really appreciate 
it.
    And, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
    The Chairman. Thank you.
    We are thrilled to have two of our colleagues joining us 
today, Representative DeGette and Representative Upton. Thank 
you for taking time out of your schedule to talk with our 
committee regarding the 21st Century Cures Act.
    I will say, Congressman Upton, I would have said a bunch of 
nice things about you even if your family weren't here, but we 
are glad you are all here.
    Mr. Upton. I will just note that I like the color blue, but 
Mr. Joyce, being from Ohio, he probably has scarlet and gray 
and there is scarlet and gray. That is----
    The Chairman. They definitely----
    Mr. Upton. They had a banner of Keith Lloyd in the old 
days. It is--but anyway.
    The Chairman. Well, listen. The consensus-based approach 
that you took in drafting the Cures Act, along with your shared 
commitment to a bipartisan process, I think is a great model 
for how committees and members can work to successfully produce 
important policy, not just suspension bills, but something that 
really is substantive and that matters to a lot of Americans. I 
think Congress can learn from your experience, and that is why 
we are looking forward to hearing more about it.
    So in the spirit of collaboration, I invite you to take 15 
minutes together to present your testimony and respond to one 
another if someone says something that you want to respond to. 
And so we will take it away.
    Ms. DeGette. I would defer to Fred to start for the reason 
to talk about how we developed our partnership. Fred was the 
chairman of Energy and Commerce at the time this all started. 
So I think it would be instructive to talk about how he decided 
to do this, then we can sort of talk about how we proceeded 
from there.
    The Chairman. Great.

STATEMENT OF THE HON. FRED UPTON, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS 
                   FROM THE STATE OF MICHIGAN

    Mr. Upton. Well, let me just say a couple of things. I am 
not going to use the prepared text or anything like that, but I 
just--you know, this was something that we both really wanted 
to do, and we knew everybody wanted to do it. I mean, what 
family doesn't have cancer or Parkinson's or something like 
that? What can we do to solve the problem? And we also knew 
that the legislative process, this is not something [inaudible] 
suspension. It is not something we can do, you know [inaudible] 
it was going to take a 3-year effort because, if we wanted a 
smaller bill, we could have done it but it wouldn't have 
achieved the results that we all wanted.
    So we knew--and we were a team from the get-go, but we knew 
it was going to take 3 years. And so Henry Waxman was my 
counterpart, as much as Henry wanted to be part of it, we named 
it the Upton-Waxman bill [inaudible] going to be there. And I 
reached out to a really good partner, Diana DeGette, and she 
and I worked on this. We went to each other's districts. We 
enlisted every member of our committee, Republican and 
Democrat. We passed H.R. 6, which was the bill that we 
introduced 53 to nothing in committee.
    But I will tell you, the--oh, I am sorry. I didn't have it 
on. Could you not here me, Mr. Joyce? I am sorry. All right. 
Start over again. Start the clock.
    But we passed the bill 53 to nothing. And, you know, one 
point I actually--this was stunning to the staff, but we 
actually adjourned for a couple of days because that we had a 
glitch, and there was one faction that we didn't want off the 
reservation. And we also knew that we had a time crunch, that 
the work that we were doing, we reached out to the Senate. They 
wouldn't have time to do this. They have got different rules 
than we did. No way were we going to get through the cloture 
and everything else. So we knew that we had to have a very big 
vote in the House so that they would be on board, and we 
reached out to Mitch McConnell and Lamar Alexander and others 
in the Senate, and they had confidence in what we were doing. 
We knew what they wanted. So we had some provisions that were 
there.
    But I got to tell you, then-Vice President Biden was 
terrific. This is where we did the Cancer Moonshot. And we met 
with him for, I don't know, and hour or two, with Lamar 
Alexander, Diana and I, down at the White House, and he knew 
what he wanted and he wanted $1 billion. Then $1 billion was a 
lot much money, unlike the infrastructure package. A billion 
was a lot of money, and we said it is done. It is in there.
    But the bottom line was this: We worked with every member. 
We listened. We were able to reach out to the interest groups, 
the disease groups, the universities, pharma. We had a lot of 
roundtables. We--you know, I--when I became chairman of the 
committee, I ended op---we had opening statements for every 
member of the committee for every hearing. Oh, my. And when I 
ended that, oh, there were some members that were so angry. 
What do you mean I can't speak? I said, well, you know, I have 
the chairman of GM come in and, you know, 2 hours later, she 
finally gets to give her opening statement because you have got 
50-some members, you know, on an important--so I said we are 
ending that. We are going to have just brief opening statements 
by the chair and ranker and that is it.
    We are going to change the procedure in committee--this was 
an important one--and it has been held by my predecessors 
Walden and Pallone, that amendments that are bipartisan, when 
you get to a markup, subcommittee or full committee, go ahead 
of the queue so you don't have to wait for the section reading. 
You don't have to worry about getting foreclosed out. So that 
encourages people on both sides then to work together, because 
if you have got an amendment that is offered by Dingell and 
McKinley, bingo, it is going to happen. It is going to happen.
    So let's have those individual members meet and be able to 
finesse things together, because they will have, you know, as 
we--this job is networking, and there is a lot of respect for 
every member of our committee, and you can put two people 
together, it is going to happen as part of that markup.
    So that is--I don't know if other committees do that. That 
was my idea, and it has--again, it has held true. But, you 
know, as you look at what we did, we needed every day. I mean, 
we were--Diana and I were working as we were doing our 
Thanksgiving walks in Michigan and Colorado, you know, with 
just----
    Ms. DeGette. He was walking. I was actually cooking, yeah.
    Mr. Upton[continuing]. With just--well, you know, I make a 
pretty mean whiskey sour till we do those as well, but that 
probably--anyway, but we needed every day. We had probably six 
or seven legislative days after Thanksgiving to really get the 
thing done, but, you know, we passed it 392 to 26. And we got 
through it a Senate filibuster. And, you know, it is all part 
of the record, but both Bernie and Elizabeth, you know, led the 
fight on a filibuster. And Biden was in the chair and, you 
know, as president of the Senate and, you know, we walked it 
through. We got 75 votes, I think, on cloture, and Schumer was 
against us on that. That is pretty hard to do. But because we 
built the record, we were able to get it done, and it was 
literally the highlight of that Congress, the last bill that 
Obama signed into law, and we made a difference.
    And, you know, looking back, and Diana now is chair of the 
Oversight Subcommittee, I can't tell you how many hearings we 
have had in the last year or two. We wouldn't--we wouldn't have 
had a vaccine for COVID, might have been 8, 10, maybe even a 
year afterwards, but because of the work that we did, allowed 
for Operation Warp Speed, allowed for the money, the research 
to go forward, allowed for the pharmaceutical companies to 
literally produce the vaccine before it was approved.
    So Pfizer is my district. They actually do it in my 
district, as it happens. They did an incredible job getting 
ready, but they knew it was going to get approved and they 
could begin the manufacture process and get ready and hit. When 
the FDA approval came on that Friday, they could send the 
trucks out on Sunday afternoon to get it done. And the same 
thing happened with J&J and Moderna too.
    So bottom line is this: I had a great partner, and that is 
what you have got to do on a bill like this. And we are looking 
to do Cures 2.0 now. We have spent a lot of time the last year. 
COVID slowed us down, but we are looking to introduce that bill 
soon to update what we did on Cures. But we are going go to do 
it the same way. We are going to get the input. We are getting 
groups to contact all of you to be co-sponsors of the bill to 
move it forward, and hopefully we can build on what we did back 
in 2016.

   STATEMENT OF THE HON. DIANA DEGETTE, A REPRESENTATIVE IN 
              CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF COLORADO

    Ms. DeGette. Okay. So you can tell Fred and I have done 
this before, and I will just add a few things.
    Fred--as I said, Fred was the chairman of the committee. I 
wasn't--you know, I was just a--I wasn't a junior member, but I 
was----
    Mr. Upton. You were pretty senior.
    Ms. DeGette. I was pretty senior.
    Mr. Upton. You were the deputy whip. You were----
    Ms. DeGette. Okay. Yeah, but--but I had--I had worked on 
biomedical research issues in the past, and I think that is one 
reason why Fred contacted me. And also, I really try to do all 
of my legislation on a bipartisan basis, if I can.
    And so when Fred called me, of course, I was quite honored. 
And, as he said, what we did was immediately form this 
partnership, and we had an agreement that--that since it was 
around biomedical research, which impacts every family in 
America, Democrat, Republican, unaffiliated, doesn't matter, 
and so we agreed that we would--that we would try--that we 
would do a broad, sweeping bill.
    You know, so often in Congress people do bills like call--
like 21st Century Cures, and then it puts--like, it says, we 
are going have a study to study what to do, and then we pass it 
maybe on suspension, and then--and then the sponsors of the 
bill say, great news. We have cured all diseases by passing 
this bill.
    We did not want to do that. We didn't want to have just a 
fig-leaf bill that did nothing. We really actually wanted to 
restructure the way we do biomedical research at the NIH, drug 
and device approval at the FDA, and then get it--and then get 
it forward.
    And also, as Fred mentioned, the money that we had for the 
Cancer Moonshot, but also we had money for research on brain 
diseases and on other diseases, it totaled about $6 billion 
more for the NIH.
    And so we agreed early on that--and so what we did, we met 
with Francis Collins, the head of the NIH; we met with the head 
of the FDA, all of the agencies, and we said to them, what is 
that it that you need to have to make this happen? And then, as 
Fred said, we met with all of the different stakeholders. We 
met with the research universities. We met with angel 
investors. We met with patient advocacy groups, everybody we 
could think of. We had more roundtables than we could count.
    Mr. Upton. MD Anderson.
    Ms. DeGette. Right.
    Mr. Upton. Penn State.
    Ms. DeGette. Traveling all around the country. And this did 
take us 3 years to put it together.
    We had an agreement that we wouldn't move a bill forward 
that had provisions that we couldn't agree on. And there were 
provisions that we didn't agree on which we had to take out or 
not put in, but that was--that was our deal.
    And as Fred said, we did have--and we also--this is really 
important. We engaged our colleagues on the Energy and Commerce 
Committee and in the House leadership in every step of the way. 
Remember, back then, 2015, 2016, the Republicans controlled the 
House and the Senate, but the Democrats controlled the White 
House. And that is one reason why we felt like it was important 
to do this on a bipartisan, bicameral basis, because we knew, 
if it was a Republican bill that passed Congress, then it would 
get vetoed by the President. And so we thought it was so 
important that we had to have that collaboration.

  I.will posit to this committee that you are going to see this going 
forward. Because of the nature of American politics, no longer are you 
 going to have a situation where you are going to be able to pass very 
large pieces of policy legislation in a way that only one party agrees 
 with it. And we are--and we can talk about what is going on right now 
   with some of the budget reconciliation and so on, but if you are 
talking about a piece of policy and you can--we can think about all of 
the pieces of policy that even have passed the House that are stuck in 
   the Senate, but if we can actually try to put together bipartisan 
collaboration on policy, that makes it much easier for us to then pass 
                     it and get it signed into law.

    And I will just say one last thing, and then Fred and I are 
delighted to answer questions. A lot of people talk--like to 
talk about process. How did you do this? I think that is the 
wrong question, because if you just say we are going to have 
bipartisanship, what does that mean? And to me, that means that 
you are going immediately start disagreeing in a partisan way 
about what--a lot of people say bipartisanship means I think 
something and you should go along with it, and that is not 
bipartisanship.
    And so the way I look at bipartisanship is find a tough 
issue like the issue of how do we do biomedical research and 
drug and device approval in this country, put together a team 
of people, and then talk and--and both recognizing the same 
issue, but then work collaboratively on how to fix it.
    And I could mention any number of the 40 issues that face 
us right now in this country, from immigration reform to 
climate change and all of the other issues. We all recognize as 
Democrats and Republicans that these are issues we need to 
resolve. So rather than retreating to our respective corners 
and having the Republican plan and the Democratic plan, put 
together that collaboration and then work with our leaders to 
try to make it happen. Nobody will get 100 percent of what they 
want, but at least we will work to fix the thorny problem.
    So that is what I would--that would be my initial remarks.
    The Chairman. Do you want to respond to anything she said?
    Mr. Upton. No. Our 15 minutes has expired, sir.
    The Chairman. All right. All right. Well, let's--let's open 
it up for questioning.
    I would love to just get a sense out of the gate, though. 
If we all acknowledge this is something that should happen more 
in this place, one, why do you think it doesn't happen more in 
this place? And are there things that the institution could do 
to incent it happening more?
    Mr. Upton. You know, as Diana was talking--and so this is 
just an idea. You know, I worked for President Reagan before I 
ran for office, and so he was a great President with a 
Democratic Congress and he got a lot of things done. And at the 
end of the day when he ran for reelection, he won 49 States, 
only losing Minnesota. But that is because of Mondale; a good 
man, by the way, Dean.
    When I came, I said--you know, again, I was part of that 
team. I said, I am here. Want to make a difference. There is 
not a bill that I am going to work on that isn't bipartisan. So 
every bill that I have ever introduced has always had a 
Democratic sponsor. Kweisi Mfume, wonderful guy, he represented 
my mother-in-law when she was alive in Baltimore. And I had a 
bill early on, on creating a tax credit for small businesses 
that had to make structural changes to comply with the 
Americans with Disabilities Act. Believe me, I got it down in 
that one sentence to describe what it was, and Kweisi was my 
co-sponsor. It was Upton and Mfume. I was probably the only 
Republican who could actually spell his name, let alone say it. 
And I am glad that he is back. He really is a good friend.
    And I can remember Kweisi coming up to me on the well of 
the House and he grabbed my lapel like I do to him and he sort 
of shook me and he goes: Upton, what have you done to my 
reputation? That bill is now law, and now the chamber of 
commerce supports me. It was hailed as the best bill for small 
business, and you have now ruined my reputation.
    But it was--you know, whether it is that bill or oil spills 
or certainly what Diana and I did, I mean, there is not a bill 
that I haven't worked on. And so when I was chairman of Energy 
and Commerce, we had--Obama was President. Over 200 bills he 
signed into law that came out of our committee, every one was 
bipartisan. We had another 200 that, you know, didn't get out 
of the Senate, but they--even though they were bipartisan.
    So somehow you have to instill to reach across the aisle, 
whether it is bill introductions or--I mean, you have to have 
some incentive, I think, to--you know, we are going to have a 
divided government for some time, you know, House or Senate, 
whatever. It is close. You got to really push for that to get 
people's attention and get away from some of the backstabbing 
that otherwise you might see.
    I guess this wasn't on.
    Ms. DeGette. Just to add, you really do have to incentivize 
bipartisanship, and maybe that is at the leadership level with 
the Speaker and the minority leader to--to--if people come and 
they want to work on a bill together, from a leadership level, 
to support that. When Fred was chairman, as he said, he would 
prioritize bipartisan amendments, which is a tradition that has 
continued under Frank Pallone's leadership of Energy and 
Commerce.
    But I think--I think at the leadership level--and I--again, 
I don't know how you bake this into any kind of rules, but if 
it was--if it was supported--now, 21st Century Cures, it was 
supported at the leadership level by--on both sides of the 
aisle and both sides of the Capitol. But so often what happens 
is, even if Members try to work together on a tough issue, then 
the political ramifications at the top levels become so great 
that these Members get sort of beaten back.
    The Chairman. Mr. Timmons.
    And if anyone has questions for our witnesses----
    Mr. Timmons. If anybody has to----
    The Chairman[continuing]. Just----
    Mr. Timmons[continuing]. Leave----
    The Chairman[continuing]. Gesture.
    Mr. Timmons. Okay.
    The Chairman. Go ahead. And then I got you.
    Mr. Timmons. Perfect.
    Three years, that is a pretty long time. I imagine things 
changed over the course of that time. So you all had an 
agreement in principle at the outset. How different was it when 
it actually was signed into law?
    Mr. Upton. Well, we needed that time to, frankly, put it 
together. I mean--I mean, we had probably, I don't know, 30 or 
40 roundtables, and all over the country, I mean, and we--you 
know, we asked. You know, I can remember Diana, in my hideaway, 
telling Francis Collins, you know, if it only does this and 
this, then we are going consider this to be a failure. We--you 
know, he was complaining about not having--not able to have his 
researchers actually go to events around the country because 
there was a prohibition on funds for travel, and I said, well, 
if that is all we do, that is--you know, what a waste of time 
that will be.
    So, you know, we learned from the venture capitalists that 
50 percent of the money that they were investing in drugs and 
devices was going overseas from where it had been a few years 
before because our approval process took so long. And we wanted 
to make sure that the standards were still going to be safe, 
you know, and as we saw with the Pfizer trial and Moderna, 
there are still 30,000 people that were in those. We wanted to 
make sure that that wasn't diminished at all. But it just, as 
you explored this--and, you know, it was a pretty darn 
comprehensive bill. I mean, it was hundreds of pages long.
    Ms. DeGette. 350.
    Mr. Upton. 350, Diana reminds me.
    You know, and we took all these good ideas. You know, 
people, you know, these researchers and others, you know, we 
met with, you know, Nobel Prize winners, some of the 
frustrations they had. And, well, what is it that we need to 
do? And they would tell us, and then we would sit down. We had 
a really talented staff and they helped us get this thing 
through, but, I mean, it took that long.
    Ms. DeGette. Well, we didn't have the bill written when we 
started, as you can tell. We just started with the idea that we 
needed to have more--we needed to restructure the NIH to the 
way biomedical research had changed, but the institution 
hadn't. And we needed to change drug and device approval at the 
FDA, as Fred says, to make sure we still had efficacy and 
safety but to make sure that it just didn't take decades and 
decades to approve new--new drugs and devices.
    So we didn't have an idea particularly of the way to do 
that. So--so that is why it took 3 years to consult with all of 
the experts, and things did change. And what is interesting, 
Fred says now we are working. So it is 4 years--5 years later. 
We are now working on Cures 2.0, because even more things have 
changed--technology, the way you can do data aggregation, and, 
of course, now the Biden administration has proposed this ARPA-
H, a mean--lean, mean problem-solution machine that would be 
based on DARPA but for healthcare. So we are putting that in it 
too.
    So, you know, a lot of these things change all the time. 
That is true with all of the policy that Congress does.
    Mr. Upton. And the other thing was, you know, Paul Ryan, to 
his credit, he said, you know, we added $45 billion over 10 
years for health research, something that I have always 
supported. Actually, that was one of my first bills I worked on 
back in the nineties, to double the money for the NIH, and we 
were successful but then sort of stopped.
    So Paul Ryan said you got to pay for it. You know, Mike 
Enzi, chairman of the Budget Committee over there in the 
Senate, said you got to pay for it, and we came up with the 
pay-for-its that were real. Maybe that is why Portman is 
calling me.
    Ms. DeGette. That might have been the hardest----
    Mr. Upton. That was hard.
    Ms. DeGette. That might have been the hardest part of it--
--
    Mr. Upton. And then Schumer stole them. Schumer found out 
what they were and then he stole them for a good cause, 9/11, 
and then we had to come up with them again. And that time, you 
know, we kept them secret. So----
    Mr. Timmons. One--one follow-up question. So we spent a lot 
of time last Congress on this committee talking about time, 
calendar, and the schedule. Do you think that--well, let's 
just--2019, we had 65 full working days and 66 travel days. So 
do you think that being here more would be more productive and 
would help facilitate? I would say that we pinball around when 
we are here. You are just going all over the place and you are 
never actually able to do any----
    Mr. Upton. Of course, now we have Zoom that we didn't have 
before, but it is frustrating. You know, again, we are both on 
Energy and Commerce. It is hard on a Zoom hearing or a markup. 
You know, you got different time zones. You know, you don't get 
a long notice about them. You know, this last week, we had a 
Health Subcommittee markup that took, I don't know, 5 hours, 
something like that, and we, Republicans, had about a 4-day 
notice that it was coming and speeches lined up. You know, I am 
traveling in the district and, you know, I have got to take my 
iPad and put it in my passenger's seat of my car, and my staff 
reminds me to turn off the camera because they will see that 
you are on the phone, talking to someone else while you are 
driving. I mean, it is just--it is a lot more difficult to do 
it that way.
    And you also, you miss the chance. You know, if Diana or 
Debbie Dingell have an amendment and they want to talk to me 
about it, it is a lot easier for me to go from my seat on the 
dais to theirs and, you know, talk about PFAS or whatever it 
might be. So you miss that. So I think it is important that we 
are here, but we ought to also take advantage of the technology 
stuff.
    Ms. DeGette. And I will say I completely agree. Some of the 
problems we have had the last 18 months have been because 
everything was remote. But as somebody who has been in 
Congress, I am in my 13th term, I have seen it--I know. Well, 
you have been here longer than I have. So--so--so I have seen 
it every which way, and it is a tough balance. If we were here 
5 days a week, 4 weeks a month, probably many more of us would 
be divorced by now, but more than that, the activities would 
expand to fill the time.
    So I don't think--I do think--I agree with Fred. It is 
important to be here and that is how you get a lot done, but I 
think you have to balance that against people's need to be with 
their families in their districts.
    I.don't know about everybody here, but in the last 18 
months, what Fred's describing, all of us, it is--a problem 
that existed before has only gotten worse, because now you can 
be on two hearings or three hearings at one time and it is----
    Mr. Perlmutter. You are supposed to be under the rule.
    Ms. DeGette. Okay. But, sorry. But in any event, it does 
diminish the time you can actually work on substantive 
legislation.
    Mr. Timmons. I yield back, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.
    The Chairman. Go ahead, Mr. Perlmutter.
    And if others want to weigh in on this, just gesture to me 
and I will add you to the list.
    Mr. Perlmutter. Yes. So, you know, I think you two had a 
history bef---you didn't just do recompete out of whole cloth. 
I mean, you had a history, both of you having served on the 
same committee and having worked in a bipartisan fashion on 
prior things. One of the very first things when I came in, 
there was a narrower piece of legislation that the two of you 
were working on, but it was on scientific research with respect 
to stem cells. And the opportunity, what I remember, was a real 
effort by both of you to engage other Members in a bipartisan 
way. I mean, that was like my first experience here, which was 
of--like, I thought, okay, this is going to work great. Look at 
how they are doing this. You know, and you had a lot of 
hurdles. You had vetoes. You had all sorts of stuff, but you 
kept grinding away.
    So, you know, part of what I think your success is here is 
an openness to doing things in a bipartisan way, with a lot of 
give and take, and both of you having trusted one another in 
prior kinds of matters where you could--you knew each other was 
going to work, you were generally on the same page. And that 
does require time, you know. So I would say--I mean, I don't 
know how you react to that, but the fact is you had a history 
before you did the recompete bill.
    Mr. Upton. Yeah, it was really a trust. We had a trust in 
each other. And, you know, there is a story--I am not going to 
tell the whole thing--but it is, you know, there is--you slam 
doors, but they worked, not between the two of us, but, you 
know----
    Ms. DeGette. No, just by me.
    Mr. Upton. [continuing]. Good cop and bad cop.
    Ms. DeGette. The doors were slammed by me usually.
    Mr. Upton. Yeah. I wasn't gonna----
    Ms. DeGette. But it worked. But--but--but--but, Ed, you are 
exactly right about that is--is having that personal 
relationship. And one thing that I think that we could--
actually, the chairman and I talked about this, is trying to 
find ways to encourage Members to get to know each other on a 
personal basis. A lot of people, and I am one of them, feel 
that traveling someplace on a bipartisan basis really helps 
Members get to know each other and each other's family. But 
even just on the committee, having social events or working 
together, getting to know somebody personally that you can 
trust them, then helps you be--and, you know, over time, on the 
committees you get to know who you can trust and who you can't.
    Mr. Perlmutter. My last question is, did have you fun doing 
this?
    Mr. Upton. Yeah. Yeah, we did.
    Ms. DeGette. We can't talk about all those times but, no, 
we--we--not only did we have fun doing it, but we got to know 
each other's spouses and families. And we--I think both of us 
would say that, at this point, we are personal friends and our 
spouses are personal friends too, having gone through this 
whole process. And there is nothing more satisfying than, 
believe you me, than standing next to the President while he 
signs your bill that is going to help fix biomedical research 
that will help millions of patients. Right? And so it is that 
satisfaction in your job that really makes it work.
    Mr. Perlmutter. Thank you.
    The Chairman. Mr. Joyce.
    Mr. Joyce. Thank you.
    And I appreciate the work that you both have done.
    I just wanted to get back to something that you brought up 
starting out in building a bipartisan consensus and those type 
of things. Did you start with, say, you know, Alzheimer's, and 
this is an issue, and then start writing down the things you 
agreed upon, and then, you know, in that discussion, there 
would be some parts that maybe you disagree about a funding 
mechanism or these types of things, and then put that off but 
sort of built a list of things you work on and then worked on 
the things you disagreed upon? Or how was that initial 
evolution, if you will, of how you got to a consensus?
    Mr. Upton. Well, it was an open process the whole way. So 
we really, I would say, we included all of the disease groups, 
cystic fibrosis. I remember we brought in a young 16-year-old 
and he told us how he lived. They were all there--diabetes, 
Alzheimer's. I mean, we got to know them all. We would have a 
roundtable and they would all share their frustration. They 
would all talk. You know, we had, you know, how much money--I 
remember the meeting that we had with Diana and Frank, and it 
was more than just Diana and I, we included other people. Bob 
Latta was a good part of that as well. But we--you know, how 
much money more do we need for NIH research? And we swatted 
around a couple of figures, and I said, well, I will take this 
to the Speaker and he is going to tell me I got to find the 
money for it, and we did. But, you know, we were----
    Ms. DeGette. Here is what we did. We asked everybody that 
we met with to submit their ideas. And then what we did with 
our intrepid staffs, one sitting right back there, is--is--is 
all of our staff went through all of the suggestions and then 
they saw what they could agree on and that would seem like a 
good idea. They threw out the ones they both disagreed on, bad 
idea. And then they took the ones where there--that seemed like 
there was a kernel of a problem that needed to be addressed but 
maybe we didn't agree on that. And so then that is when we 
talked and that is when we tried to work it out.
    And then there were some very, very difficult issues that 
probably did need resolution, but we couldn't--and there wasn't 
very many like this, but there were some we just couldn't come 
to an agreement about what the right approach was, and these 
were things that were really partisan issues. And so we just 
agreed not to put those in this bill.
    But--but because of the topic, most of the issues we had in 
there, we could agree on and we thought they were important. 
There were also a lot of things that we thought were important 
but we couldn't afford to address them with the budget 
parameters that we had, because we did--we paid for the whole 
thing, as Fred said. So----
    Mr. Upton. So now we are--that we working on the Cures 2.0, 
we have done a couple of four or five different discussion 
drafts over the last 6 or 7 months. They are all public. We 
have asked for comments. We have gotten hundreds of comments. 
Our last deadline was Friday. Right, Mark? I think it was 
Friday. So we are going through there, those now, and I am 
hoping that in the next, you know, week or so, probably 2 
weeks, we will be able to actually go to legislative counsel 
and we will put together what I hope will be H.R. 6 again.
    Ms. DeGette. We want to try to pass this bill this year----
    Mr. Upton. Yeah.
    Ms. DeGette [continuing]. Because then you get into silly 
season.
    Mr. Upton. Yeah. Not only that, but also, the President, to 
his credit, is doing this plug for ARPA-H and I think it is 
going to be in the approps bill. So we want to make sure that 
it is defined the right way so that it works. So there is 
pressure on us to get it done so that we authorize that $6 
billion or $7 billion dollars the right way so that we can even 
expedite further the case for diseases and devices.
    Mr. Joyce. So I just want to follow up a little further 
than--I got the initiation of it processed. Did you put time 
limits on it then? I mean, did you say we are going to work on 
this for the next 4 weeks, 6 weeks, 3 months or----
    Ms. DeGette. Well--well, yes, we did Fred.
    Mr. Upton. Well----
    Ms. DeGette. Because--because we had to--we said--I mean, 
for the first few years, you know, we wanted to get as much 
input as we could. We got all that input. But then we did have 
time limits on submission of when people could submit comments 
and when they had to be in, and then--then the drafting. And 
then--and then some of the--some of the--unfortunately, some of 
the time limits slipped a little bit, particularly after it 
went over to the other body. And in the end--and in the end, we 
were in this dicey situation that Fred just described where it 
was after the election and we were--the 2016 election, and we 
were home for the Thanksgiving recess and they were going to 
have a special session, and we had to get it passed through the 
Senate in the special session.
    So--so up until then, we did set deadlines all along for 
drafting, for comments, all of that. And you really have to do 
that; otherwise--and that is what we are doing with Cures 2.0. 
If you don't do it, then it will just drift along indefinitely.
    Mr. Upton. And we, in essence, had to preconference it with 
Lamar Alexander, because they had to--we knew that they didn't 
have time to do the hearings. So we had to see what insistence 
they wanted on certain provisions, and we had to deliver for it 
to happen.
    Mr. Joyce. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    The Chairman. All right. Mr. Phillips.
    Mr. Phillips. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

 I.say this--I make a point of saying this in every meeting because I 
think it is so true, but you can't work with people you don't trust and 
you can't trust people you do not know. And right now, our institution 
relies on the hope that people, as wonderful as the two of you, get to 
 know each other and set aside partisanship in a shared mission to get 
                            good work done.

    How can we better bake that into this culture here, 
onboarding, orientation, throughout the course of the year?
    You know, lacking leadership that makes that a priority, a 
shared priority, you know, we can't do it ourselves without 
sometime of a system--some type a systematic, I think, effort. 
Do you have any thoughts on how we can do better?
    Ms. DeGette. Well, I do, which is, I think during the 
orientation, there should be many more--I don't--I don't know 
if some of--maybe some of the newer Members could say, but when 
I went through orientation in 1997, many of the orientation 
events were bipartisan events. They had--and some of the think 
tanks had bipartisan orientations too, the Kennedy School and 
others. I don't know if they are still doing those, but over 
the years, I have heard many of them are, yeah.
    The Chairman. Sure. Go on. What--there we go.
    Ms. Williams. There we go.
    So no shade to Mr. Davis, who helped us in our new Member 
orientation, but because of COVID, we--I am lobbying for a new 
Member orientation do-over for some of the things, because I 
feel like there are--there should have been opportunities----
    Ms. DeGette. Right.
    Ms. Williams [continuing]. More so for us to get to know 
each other. I know we are working right now on a bipartisan 
institute with the Library of Congress to be able to get both a 
bipartisan group together of freshmen Members, but we missed 
out on a lot.
    Ms. DeGette. Uh-huh.
    Ms. Williams. So I am--I will be lobbying you for some more 
do-overs of time for us to get together and get to know each 
other, because it makes a huge difference in our ability to 
work together.
    Ms. DeGette. And I also--and that is what I had heard too, 
about your orientation, but I also think that--that--that doing 
more--I mean, really from a bipartisan perspective, all we have 
are events at the White House, right? And we didn't have those 
last year, but the summer picnic----
    Mr. Upton. You weren't invited.
    Ms. DeGette. Really? They--they----
    Mr. Upton. I am kidding. I am kidding.
    Ms. DeGette. Well, maybe they did do it last year, but I 
was--I was following the appropriate CDC protocols last year, 
so--anyway, anyway, I am just saying, rather than rely on that, 
maybe we should do more all-Member events. These Library of 
Congress lectures that they started having, of course, they 
didn't have during COVID, that really has helped a lot, and 
they didn't have those when I first came.
    Mr. Phillips. Let me ask about committees. Have either of 
you served on a committee in which the chair or ranking member 
prioritized, you know, some type of an effort to get their 
members to know each other, in any committee on which you have 
served over your respective careers, at the committee level?
    Mr. Upton. Yeah. Probably--I don't know that there is a 
overt effort. I mean, I try to do it. You know, Energy and 
Commerce, we want you on the committee, Dean. You know, we are 
going to work----
    Mr. Phillips. I would be happy to.
    Mr. Upton. Yeah. But, I mean, you know, we have a history 
of having really good, thoughtful Members on both sides of the 
aisle. And, you know, I think there has always been some 
collegiality that has been positive that we have had, but I 
think it just sort of goes with, you know, once you are there, 
of course, you are not looking to move again.
    Mr. Phillips. Sure.
    Ms. DeGette. I do think Members do socialize, but it is not 
on a formal basis. And that--that----
    Mr. Phillips. Maybe it is an opportunity.
    Ms. DeGette. I think it is an opportunity. That is a good 
suggestion.
    Mr. Phillips. Kicking off a new Congress and--okay.
    Ms. DeGette. Yeah.
    Mr. Phillips. With that, I yield back.
    The Chairman. Go ahead, Mr. Davis.
    Mr. Davis. Thank you.
    Great to see both of you.
    Fred, you are kind of like a unicorn around here, a former 
chair that decided to stick around.
    And I think, you know, both of you can continue to send a 
message of what worked when Congress worked. And I think there 
is some bipartisan scorn to go around as to why this process 
seems so broken.
    Now, I am glad to be the House Administration rep on this 
committee, because a lot of suggestions we get, not just from 
the witnesses but my fellow members, we can act on, and we take 
this back and do what we can do try and foster more 
bipartisanship.
    But I told my colleague, Ms. Williams, in her class at 
freshman orientation, you will never have another orientation 
like this again, I hope. I don't want to see another pandemic. 
But it was the most awkward orientation process that we could 
have ever experienced, and more awkward, Ed, than just hanging 
out with me. I mean, you know----
    Ms. Williams. Wow.
    Mr. Davis. But we want to fix that, but we also have to fix 
the institution itself. What you all did with the 21st Century 
Cures Act, I mean, that is the epitome of bipartisanship. I was 
a 16-year staffer. I remember passing transportation bills, 
highway bills. These types of issues were always done on a 
bipartisan basis. But the entire political lectern seems to be 
moving toward the polar ends of the political spectrum. You 
know, outrage is what raises profiles and it is what raises 
money. And it is unfortunate, because I think the majority of 
us here want to figure out a way to get back to some sense of 
governing, some sense of normalcy.
    And I think Nikema is right. It starts with your first 
introduction to your fellow colleagues at orientation. We need 
to do a better job of making it bipartisan. And if I am ever 
given the chance to run that, we will make that happen. We will 
let you guys go through some remediation classes too because we 
need that. We really do.
    But my question to both of you--and I wasn't here for your 
testimony, and Fred knows I didn't read it beforehand either.
    Ms. DeGette. Well, we didn't submit it.
    Mr. Davis. Well, that is good. I admit it----
    Ms. DeGette. You are fine.
    Mr. Davis. I admit it, I wouldn't have read it either. 
However----
    The Chairman. For our next panel, we have read all of your 
testimony. We have you covered.
    Mr. Davis. That--depends on the definition of ``we.''
    But what is the one thing that you guys may not have said 
in your opening statements, you know, based upon the questions 
and comments of everyone here--what is the one thing you both 
are doing to try and change this place now, and what kind of 
results are you getting?
    Mr. Upton. Well, I am--I don't think that there is 
something new that I am doing. I am keeping with the same 
formula that I had when I came, and that is to work with all of 
my colleagues on you name the issue. And I would like to think 
I have that reputation based on people that are looking to me 
to be a co-sponsor or a sponsor on different bills, work 
together.
    You know, and, I mean--you know, I will say one thing. It 
goes back to the orientation. You know, one of the things that 
our class did, there were 50 in our class, is we decided that 
we would meet, at least on the Republican side, every 
Wednesday. And we did that for 28 years----
    Ms. DeGette. Wow.
    Mr. Upton [continuing]. For an hour every week. And if you 
were a former Member because you left to go do something else 
or maybe you lost, you still were entitled to come. And it was 
a really good experience of building relationships, finding out 
what other people were doing on other committees. It was no 
staff, was all off the record, but it was really a terrific 
hour every Wednesday from 4 to 5. And that, I think, helped 
build the--you know, where we were and issues that we cared 
about and really got things done.
    Ms. DeGette. Okay. So I am now, as Fred said, and as Mr. 
Joyce knows, because he was just with me, I am now the chair of 
the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of Energy and----
    Mr. Upton. Powerful.
    Ms. DeGette [continuing]. The powerful, all-powerful 
Oversight Committee of Energy and Commerce. And as you can 
imagine with doing investigations in those areas, this could be 
a very partisan subcommittee. But I am--I am working very 
closely with my ranking member, Morgan Griffith, and we have 
decided that we are going to try to work together as much as we 
can for bipartisanship on our subcommittee hearings. What that 
means is we communicate with each other, not just during the 
hearings, but before the hearings.
    We had a situation come up recently, not--not in today's 
hearing, but in a recent hearing where an issue came up in the 
middle of the hearing that could have really sparked a huge 
partisan fight in our committee. This--we were actually doing 
the hearing remotely, and we were texting each other about how 
to smooth this over and resolve it, and we were able to do it. 
Some people still raised their partisan disagreements, but we 
were able to do that.
    And I carry that same real effort towards bipartisanship 
and fairness when I preside on the floor. I really try hard to 
make sure that I am being respectful to Members on both sides 
of the aisle and that I am--even though I may personally 
vehemently disagree with what they are saying, that I give them 
the opportunity to be heard and to be fair. So that is what I 
am doing myself.
    Mr. Davis. Well, I appreciate the fact that both of you are 
willing to be here and step up and help us learn from the 
successes you have had in the past. It is a very difficult 
time. I mean, we don't know what triggers Members. I am being 
triggered right now by a Broncos phone, being a Raiders fan; it 
is very----
    Ms. DeGette. Go Broncos.
    Mr. Davis continuing]. It is very difficult. Probably being 
triggered by a Cub hat too. But you know what? I am going to 
get beyond this.
    Mr. Upton. My family.
    The Chairman. Yeah.
    Mr. Davis. I am going--I am going to make sure that we do 
what we can here to take your advice. And thank you both for 
your time.
    And I yield back.
    The Chairman. I need to apologize to Mr. Latta, because we 
have got to go on to the next.
    Mr. Latta. Can I just make one comment?
    The Chairman. Yeah, go ahead.
    Mr. Latta. Real quick. I didn't push it there. Yeah, 
thanks.
    Well, first of all, I have been on E&C for over 11 years 
and was there with Cures. And just to tell you real briefly. I 
will never forget. You might remember Fred Barton--I am sorry. 
Fred, you might remember what Joe Barton said at the end, our 
former chair emeritus, that he had not served on that committee 
in all those years--and that was a long time that he had been 
on the committee--that a bill of this magnitude and could have 
been so divisive, went out with a unanimous vote.
    So, you know, when I think back to E&C through the years, 
you know, about 93 percent of our bills have come out through 
the years bipartisan out of committee. It shows the work that 
is done in committee. That is the point I always think we need 
to be thinking about as we go forward here, is that legislative 
work starts in committee, and I am a firm believer of that. 
This is the way it gets done. Because if it starts the other 
direction, it is going to be a tough--a tough road to hoe.
    So, you know, again, from all that your, both of your work 
on the committee through the years, it is that bipartisanship, 
but it is also showing that you work in committee. So thank you 
very much.
    Ms. DeGette. Mr. Chairman, can I just say one thing?
    The Chairman. Sure.
    Ms. DeGette. Because I want to bust a myth on the record. I 
feel really strongly about this. I frequent--nobody has said 
this today, but I frequently hear people say, oh, we need to go 
back to having Members here 5 days a week so they can be here 
over the weekend and so the families can get to know each other 
and the spouses can get to know each other.
    And, you know, I have now been in Congress 25 years. My 
kids were 2 and 6 when I came here, and now they are 27 and 31. 
And what I will say is that is a charming vision that has long 
passed in this society. We now have 25 percent of the Congress, 
soon I hope it will be at least 50 percent, are women. Most of 
the men in Congress have working spouses. And in those--in 
those bygone days, all those social events were planned by 
stay-at-home wives, and we don't have that anymore in Congress, 
either for the male members or the female members.
    And so to say that we are going to have people here all the 
time so they can socialize, when I came to Congress, I had a 
wonderful colleague, Jim Davis. Some of you might remember Jim. 
He was from Florida. His kids were exactly the same age as 
mine. We lived very close to each other in Bethesda in those 
days, and we never saw each other socially, because Jim's wife 
Peggy and my wife, Lino, both had jobs.
    Mr. Upton. Her husband.
    Ms. DeGette. And so--my wife--my husband--thank you, Fred--
my husband Lino.
    And so I think when we think about ways for Members to get 
to know each other, we can't--we can't go back to that trope. 
We have to find new ways for us to all get to know each other 
on a personal basis.
    Thank you.
    The Chairman. I am going to make that the last word for 
this panel, with gratitude to you both. Thank you for sharing 
your perspectives with us.
    And, with that, let me invite up our second panel. We are 
joined by three experts who are going to share their 
experiences and ideas for making committees work better, making 
them more productive and collaborative.
    Witnesses are reminded that your written statements will be 
made part of the record.
    Our first witness is Jenness Simler. Ms. Simler served as 
professional staff on the House Armed Services Committee from 
2005 to 2017. Most recently, she served as staff director of 
the committee, as well as deputy staff director, for 4 years. 
In these roles, Ms. Simler was the senior advisor to the 
committee chairman, responsible for strategic planning and 
operations for the committee, leading the staff, and delivering 
the annual defense policy bill.
    Previously, she served as the policy director for the 
committee, conducted oversight of Navy and Marine Corps 
procurement and R&D programs, managed defense acquisition 
policy and industrial base portfolio, and had responsibility 
for defense science and technology programs.
    Prior to her work in Congress, Ms. Simler served as the 
deputy to the chairman, Combating Terrorism Technology Task 
Force within the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
    Welcome. You are now recognized for 5 minutes.

STATEMENT OF MS. JENNESS SIMLER, VICE PRESIDENT, BOEING GLOBAL 
            SERVICES AND FEDERAL ACQUISITION POLICY

    Ms. Simler. Good afternoon, Chairman Kilmer, Vice Chair 
Timmons, members of the committee. Thank you for inviting me to 
speak with you today regarding committee best practices, 
promoting bipartisanship, and strengthening policymaking. I am 
truly grateful for the opportunity.
    As the chair said, my name is Jenness Simler. I am 
currently employed by the Boeing Company, but I am testifying 
before you today as the former staff director and deputy staff 
director of the House Armed Services Committee, and the views 
expressed here today are my own.
    By way of brief background, I joined the HASC as a member 
of the professional staff in 2005. I served in both the 
majority and the minority. And after more than a dozen years on 
the committee and working tirelessly with members to craft the 
National Defense Authorization Act, which--I have to just brag 
on them--has been enacted, as you know, annually for over 60 
years, I hope my experience may offer some unique perspectives 
regarding committee work and cooperation.
    First, let me ask you to consider the following. What do 
these individuals have in common--a former Army explosive 
ordnance disposal officer, a prosecutor of 9/11 co-
conspirators, the second ever female fighter pilot, a nurse, an 
author, a former CEO? These are just a sampling of the careers 
that HASC staff had prior to working for Congress.
    What they also have in common is that they were never asked 
their party affiliation. They are patriots, hired for their 
policy expertise and commitment to service.
    This is just one aspect of how the HASC gets a bill enacted 
every year with large bipartisan majorities. I firmly believe 
bipartisanship is at the heart of consensus building, which 
leads to transparency, sound policymaking, and productive 
legislating.
    Bipartisanship does not mean, as we have heard here just in 
the first panel, that the Members agree on all issues. Far from 
it. However, with deliberate intent, bipartisanship can be 
built in order to allow policy differences to be debated 
constructively and to create resiliency in the face of 
electoral change.
    Bipartisanship at the HASC starts with its membership. My 
written testimony further addresses how staffing practices also 
enable bipartisanship, but focusing on the Members for now, I 
will start by observing that Members who request seats on the 
Armed Services Committee tend to represent districts with a 
strong military footprint. This is a key difference compared to 
other committees where members may have fewer shared district 
equities. Nevertheless, there is an opportunity for other 
committees to consider ways to help members feel more aligned 
by building upon common constituent priorities.
    For example, committees have authority to use task forces 
and panels to create small member teams to conduct oversight on 
specific issues and build camaraderie. Alternatively, much like 
Chairman Upton's example, field hearings and codels can be very 
effective in bonding members and hearing from like-minded 
constituents from across the country.
    Second, bipartisanship at the HASC also stems from issues 
within the committee's jurisdiction. Not only do members have a 
profound sense of the importance of national security, but they 
also take pride in fulfilling specifically enumerated 
constitutional responsibility. Moreover, many of the issues the 
committee considers do not lend themselves to partisanship. For 
example, a member doesn't feel one way about the importance of 
naval power just because they are a Democrat or a Republican. 
They may care where the next ship is built, but all members 
support domestic shipbuilding.
    However, the military is a microcosm of issues facing 
America. There are plenty of issues, particularly social issues 
or foreign policy, where members may divide along party lines. 
That is where deliberate cultivation of bipartisanship and 
transparency makes a difference.
    The chairman and the ranking member do a great deal to set 
the tone and expectations for members in this regard. Likewise, 
policy offsites early in a new Congress or at the start of a 
legislative cycle also serve as useful education and sobering 
reminders of the natures of the threats we face.
    Committees without national security responsibility could 
still replicate this practice by regularly level-setting 
members regarding the shared problems that need to be solved 
and the responsibilities of the committee to offer solutions, 
much as Representative DeGette suggested.
    Third, on the HASC, trust is strengthened through 
technology and practices used to conduct hearings and to build 
the NDAA. While the majority is responsible for the calendar 
and for operations, hearings are designed collaboratively. 
There is a single joint hearing memo. Many events are scheduled 
as roundtables or briefings to turn off the camera and to 
facilitate a free exchange of information.
    As you know, the NDAA is voluminous, to say the least. Some 
of the bill is template, but most of the bill and report comes 
from ideas submitted by members and staff.
    The committees use a web-based portal to collect members' 
legislative requests, and all requests can be viewed by both 
majority and minority staff. They have a shared goal to include 
as much as practicable from the members' top priorities.
    The committee also uses a separate database to draft both 
the bill and report language from start to finish. The database 
is open to the entire staff. There is no surprising the 
minority, and minority staff have the opportunity to make edits 
in real time.
    For markup, members submit amendments electronically in 
advance of the actual markup. All submitted amendments are 
reviewed by the entire staff together in one room, in one 
lengthy meeting. The goal of the amendment review is to 
identify where consensus is possible, where drafting flaws may 
inadvertently limit consideration, and where the debates will 
be.
    Following this review, members have the option to revise 
amendments, in order to build bipartisan support or to correct 
parliamentary deficiencies prior to markup. This practice 
minimizes disruptions and disappointments the day of markup.
    Still, every member of the committee can offer as many 
amendments as he or she would like, and they will all be 
considered. There are multiple opportunities to legislate as 
the subcommittees each have legislative jurisdiction, as well 
as the full committee.
    Every year, well over 350 amendments are considered before 
the NDAA ever leaves committee. Technology aids in this process 
as amendments are now distributed electronically and can easily 
be found in the committee repository for member review.
    During floor consideration of the NDAA, where hundreds more 
amendments are filed, a similar bipartisan process is used to 
review the amendments with similar goals--where can consensus 
be found and where are the important debates that need to 
occur.
    A comparable theme extends to conference negotiations with 
the Senate. Both the majority and minority staff member are 
assigned to each provision and participate in all negotiations.
    When I was new to the staff, I was actually really 
surprised to learn that the biggest conference disagreements 
are between the House and the Senate, not between Republicans 
and Democrats.
    The key takeaway from these practices is that while no 
member will support every provision in the bill, they are 
incentivized to support it because they have had such a direct 
hand in shaping the content, every member was included in the 
process, and the confidence that conference negotiations are a 
consensus process that reflects the will of both the majority 
and the minority.
    I hope these observations form a useful starting point for 
this committee's work. I look forward to your questions. And 
once again, thanks to the committee for your time today, your 
valuable work, and your efforts to modernize an institution I 
care so deeply for. Thank you.
    [The statement of Ms. Simler follows:]
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    The Chairman. Thank you.
    Our next witness is Warren Payne. Mr. Payne worked for the 
committee on Ways and Means, where he held a number of staff 
leadership roles from 2007 to 2015, including serving as policy 
director. He also serves as a fellow for the Bipartisan Policy 
Center, and as part of the BPC Advisory Group, made up of 
former senior staff to members' committees in leadership.
    As policy director at Ways and Means, Mr. Payne was 
responsible for developing policy in all areas within the 
committee's jurisdiction. Major legislation that he worked to 
enact includes the Tax Increase Prevention Act, the ABLE Act, 
the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act, two highway 
and infrastructure funding bills, and free trade agreements 
with Colombia, Peru, Panama, and South Korea.
    Mr. Payne also served as a senior staffer to both the 
National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and the Joint 
Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.
    Mr. Payne, you are now recognized.

   STATEMENT OF MR. WARREN PAYNE, SENIOR ADVISOR, MAYER BROWN

    Mr. Payne. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, Vice 
Chairman, and members of the committee. Thank you for the 
opportunity to be here today.
    Again, for the record, my name is Warren Payne. I am 
currently a senior adviser at the firm of Mayer Brown. The 
views I will express today are my own.
    As the chairman said, I spent a number of years at the Ways 
and Means Committee, including as the committee's policy 
director. In addition to supervising policy development for the 
committee, I was also the lead staff liaison to the Senate and 
the administration.
    While I was on the committee, for the vast bulk of the time 
I was on committee, the Senate had a Democratic majority and 
the administration was governed by the Obama-Biden 
administration. So from my perspective, the development of 
bipartisan consensus was a necessity. It was required.
    I found in my role that I would spend as much time talking 
and engaging with my Democratic counterparts in the Senate and 
the administration as I did with my own staff and committee 
members. I found that this engagement across the aisle was 
vital to my ability to do my job successfully.
    We are Democrats and Republicans for a reason. We have 
different views, we have different perspectives, and we have 
different backgrounds. Sometimes it means we don't really 
understand what drives our individual views and perspectives. 
That lack of understanding, I found, often led to incorrect 
assumptions about why a position was being held or what a 
member's or staff's motivation could be. And that incorrect 
assumption led to miscommunication, and that made bipartisan 
consensus much more difficult to reach.
    It was only through frequent and informal communication 
with my Democratic counterparts that I was able to learn and 
understand their background and motivations.
    As the chairman said, 2 years ago, I participated in a 
project of the Bipartisan Policy Center to help draft 
recommendations to improve and modernize Congress. I brought my 
experiences from the committee to that effort.
    I have submitted for the record two detailed memos from 
BPC. I am going to highlight just a few things in my oral 
testimony, in particular, a couple observations on improving 
staff development and creating more opportunities for private 
and informal engagement among members and staff.
    With regard to staffing, I would argue Congress does need 
to invest more in its staff. Certainly, this investment can 
take the form of higher salaries, but I think just as important 
are increased opportunities for professional development, 
particularly for committee staff, which are expected to have 
very high knowledge and expertise in the areas of the 
committee's jurisdiction.
    I would like to emphasize opportunities for what I call 
real-world professional development and education. As an 
example, the Senate has a convention called the staffdel, where 
staff will travel on a bipartisan basis. I would recommend the 
House adopt and broaden this convention to include domestic 
travel and activities as well.
    In particular, this will provide not only an opportunity 
for more professional development and experience for the 
committee staff, it also will provide a very important 
mechanism to improve engagement and interaction between the 
members and potentially staff.
    As an example of the benefits of this type of activity, I 
look to my time in the executive branch. Before I came to Ways 
and Means, I served as a senior adviser to one of the 
chairpersons at the U.S. International Trade Commission. It is 
an agency that has three Republican and three Democrat 
Commissioners.
    During that time, I have traveled frequently with my 
Democrat counterparts, staff of Democrat Commissioners. This 
was important, not only that I got to see how the policymaking 
the Commission would do, would impact the stakeholders where 
they work and live, but also gave me tremendous opportunity to 
learn and be with and engage with my Democratic counterparts 
and learn to understand their background and motivations.
    The regular committee structure, I don't think, lends 
itself to these types of engagements. Hearings and markups are 
good and necessary, but I would emphasize the need for more 
private, informal settings for engagement at the committee 
level.

 In particular, the committee should ensure numerous opportunities for 
    closed-door, private, member-level discussions. Transparency is 
 important. It is necessary for Congress to operate, but in order for 
  members to have the kind of frank and free exchange of ideas that I 
   think is critical, it is an activity that does not lend itself to 
 television and C-SPAN. So more closed-door, member-level discussions.

    Secondly, I would emphasize having those kinds of 
engagements at something below the full committee level. Ways 
and Means is one of the smallest committees in Congress, and we 
found even doing full committee, closed-door activities with 
the relatively few members we had to be challenging. Other 
committees like T&I or Financial Services, where the committee 
membership is much larger, would face an even harder time 
logistically pursuing a significant closed-door member 
activity.
    So whether at the subcommittee level or in ad hoc format, 
those create potentially even more opportunities for bipartisan 
member and staff engagement.
    I would share with the committee one example of this 
activity from my time at Ways and Means. We formed 11 working 
groups, each led by one Republican and one Democratic member. 
Each working group was assigned one area of tax policy. Members 
self-selected into which working group they wanted to 
participate in. The committee, the roundtables, the working 
groups had almost complete flexibility to how they operated.
    The benefit of this approach was, because members self-
selected into a working group they were interested in, there 
was a commonality of interest for the members participating. No 
matter how diverse their own individual backgrounds, they were 
there because they had an interest in this issue, and so there 
was a nexus of commonality off of which they could have good 
productive conversations.
    I think these working groups produce tangible benefit of 
bipartisan success, because the education working group, which 
was co-led by former Congresswoman Diane Black and Congressman 
Danny Davis, produced legislation with respect to education tax 
credits that the committee subsequently marked up and moved out 
of committee and to the floor.
    So I would leave you with those examples. And the most 
important message is, the more opportunities members and staff 
can have for informal, closed-door opportunity to engage and 
exchange of views, the more successful I think committees will 
become.
    Thank you very much. I look forward to answering any of 
your questions.
    [The statement of Mr. Payne follows:]
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    The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Payne.
    And our final witness is Scott Adler. Dr. Adler is vice 
provost and dean of the graduate school and professor of 
political science at the University of Colorado Boulder.
    Voice. Go Buffs.
    The Chairman. He is also a former founding director of the 
American Politics Research Lab. Dr. Adler has spent most of his 
25-year career at CU Boulder, studying the organization and 
performance of the U.S. Congress, and his current research 
examines congressional agenda setting and committee power.
    Among his many publications, he is the author of ``Why 
Congressional Reforms Fail: Reelection and the House Committee 
System,'' and co-author of ``Congress and the Politics of 
Problem Solving.''
    This committee has been great for Amazon.com book sales for 
political science books.
    Dr. Adler received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, and 
was a member of the American Political Science Association's 
Presidential Task Force on Congressional Reforms.
    Dr. Adler, we just got notice that they may be moving up 
votes, so I may ask you to maybe abridge your comments a little 
bit, if possible, just to make sure we have plenty of time for 
Q&A.

  STATEMENT OF DR. SCOTT ADLER, VICE PROVOST AND DEAN OF THE 
        GRADUATE SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER

    Mr. Adler. Sure.
    Chair Kilmer, Vice Chair Timmons, members of the Select 
Committee, thank you for inviting me today. As Chair Kilmer 
said, I am a professor of political science, and spent most of 
my career studying the structure reform and performance of 
congressional committees, and the views expressed here are my 
own.
    The points I would like to emphasize today are, first, the 
central role that legislative committees play in Congress' 
governing responsibilities. Second, how that role has 
significantly diminished in recent years. Third, that 
strengthening the position of committees will improve Congress' 
legislative capacity and lawmakers' engagement in policymaking. 
And finally, I will offer some suggestions on how the House can 
bolster the committee system.
    Now, the example given of the 21st Century Cures Act and 
the dynamic that developed between Representatives DeGette and 
Upton in many ways highlights exactly what is important about 
the place of legislative committees as a venue for lawmakers to 
develop expertise, build personal relationships within their 
caucus and across the aisle, incorporate the input of 
stakeholders, and retain skilled and knowledgeable staff.
    Historically, these aspects of committees both promote 
lawmaking activities by members and place committees at the 
forefront of policy innovation. But lawmaking perhaps should be 
thought of as a muscle that committees must continually 
exercise for it to remain strong. For many years and for a 
variety of reasons, that muscle had atrophied. The data are 
clear. Committees are reporting a smaller proportion of the 
bills enacted into law. Federal agencies increasingly exist 
under expired authorizations, and the House and Senate 
authorizing committees are far less utilized in negotiating 
inter-Chamber differences.
    Many congressional observers, including many lawmakers, 
recognize that some committees and the committee system as a 
whole does not retain the position that it once held as the 
center of policymaking and oversight. When committee power 
diminishes, the body becomes more reliant on centralized 
leadership and outside stakeholders, which reinforces that 
atrophy.
    Certainly, there is plenty about the old days of the 
congressional committee dominance that was undesirable, but if 
we seek a structure that engages and incentivizes Members of 
Congress to collaboratively invest in policymaking, it almost 
by necessity involves a reinvigorated committee system.
    Now, at the macro level, a vigorous committee system does a 
number of things. It incentivizes specialization so that 
Congress has the technical knowledge to skillfully debate and 
resolve differences. It makes it easier for Congress to 
reliably address policy problems, and ultimately improves and 
rebalances the position of Congress with respect to the 
executive branch.
    For lawmakers, strong legislative committees provide all 
members the opportunity to continually engage in productive and 
collaborative policymaking, facilitate regular interaction with 
stakeholders, and offer productive ways to demonstrate to 
constituents their legislative abilities. However, without a 
clear and predictable process for members to regularly 
legislate, they will turn their energies elsewhere.
    So how should we reinvigorate the committee system? This 
panel itself has already considered and made a number of 
meaningful recommendations, and we have heard other very good 
suggestions from the witnesses here today. Let me offer a few 
additional thoughts.
    Lawmakers need to see that the pay-off of their investment 
in knowledge, skill, time, and resources will happen.
    First, a return to routine reauthorizations provides a much 
needed rhythm to oversight and governance of the executive 
branch. Our work shows that it offers a better structure and 
schedule to the operations of committees and can lower the 
legislative stakes through regular opportunities to revisit 
existing policies.
    Additionally, we also know that lawmakers respond to 
actions taken by the Chamber and the leadership that assure 
committees will have fair consideration--the committee work 
will have fair consideration by the entire body, even better if 
the Chamber can provide a degree of protection so that their 
efforts won't easily unravel once reported out of committee.
    To be sure, I don't believe that the entire committee 
system is broken. In fact, over the next several months, we 
will see bills from several committees that still retain that 
ongoing policy leadership role. In particular, the annual work 
of Armed Services and Appropriations are good examples of 
committees who regularly exercise their policymaking and 
oversight responsibilities.
    A more regular reauthorization process, even annual 
reauthorizations, like the NDAA, may help other committees 
achieve this rhythm.
    Ultimately, of course, there are many alternatives for 
strengthening the committee system and lawmaker engagement. And 
I appreciate this panel's thoughtful consideration on this 
important topic.
    Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.
    [The statement of Mr. Adler follows:]
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    The Chairman. Great. We have got a bit of time for 
questions before they call votes.
    It seems like there is three themes that kind of came out 
in your testimony. One is, some of this is around sort of the 
norms of the committee, right? So, in Armed Services, it 
functions in a bipartisan way because it has always functioned 
in a bipartisan way, and there are some sort of norms in that 
regard.
    One theme is around committee capacity, and, you know, you 
have seen some diminishment of committee capacity over time, 
the budgets for committees and those sorts of things.
    And then three is, you know, some of your tips that you 
provided around how to empower individual rank-and-file 
members, particularly in an environment where, more often than 
not, particularly on the big stuff, you have seen more and more 
centralization of power.
    So if time permits, I hope we get a chance to pull on all 
three of those threads.
    Let me ask, you know, because, Ms. Simler, you mentioned 
how in Armed Services some of the staffing is not necessarily--
the committee is not necessarily staffed where you ask what 
party are you affiliated with.
    I came out of a State legislature that we had nonpartisan 
committee staff, that, you know, their job was to help identify 
big problems and write the legislation. And then we had 
partisan committee staff that would also give their input but 
more from the angle of politics.
    We have this on Armed Services kind of, and this committee 
has it, but that is a choice. I don't know if you have thoughts 
about how to incent that, whether that is a good idea, whether 
committees should have some funding that could be solely used 
for nonpartisan staff.
    I.would be curious, maybe to Ms. Simler or Dr. Adler, or 
both briefly. I want to make sure we can get to as many people 
as time, so if you can keep remarks short.
    Ms. Simler. I don't think it has to be a binary choice, and 
I don't want to leave the impression that the committee staff 
on the Armed Services Committee are on some sort of ivory tower 
of only pure policy thought. This is a political institution, 
and to be successful as a member of the staff, particularly in 
terms of committee staff, you need to have that substantive 
subject matter expertise but also the political antenna, if you 
will, in order to make sure that you are advising members of, 
first, what the right policy outcome is, but what does the 
political landscape look like, and can that landscape be shaped 
to achieve that policy objective, or does the policy objective 
perhaps need to be fine-tuned so you can at least make 
incremental progress.
    So I would say I don't think it has to be binary. Although, 
I do believe that the approach that is--to committee staff that 
is taken in terms of looking at subject matter expertise first, 
is an appropriate one, because there has also a role for 
personal staff and then, of course, leadership staff to build 
that political advice for members.
    The Chairman. Go ahead.
    Mr. Adler. I would very much agree that there is a utility 
in having nonpartisan staff. As you mentioned, right here on 
this committee, you have a mix of partisan staff and 
nonpartisan staff. And I think, in a lot of ways, having staff 
that isn't necessarily attached to the majority or attached to 
the chair specifically but continues the institutional 
knowledge over time as well, have a mission of not necessarily 
carrying out the agenda of one party or the other but of 
fulfilling the responsibilities, the legislative 
responsibilities of the committee is very important.
    And I think it also helps to build those bridges across the 
aisle where there may be difficult questions, that those staff 
that are nonpartisan are meant to adjudicate where the best 
place for policy is and work out some of those differences.
    The Chairman. Go ahead.
    Mr. Timmons. Just do one quick question. I think in order 
to facilitate these policy conversations, we need to both 
incentivize collaboration, because at the end of the day, we 
are going to need 60, 70 percent of the middle to come to terms 
with whatever we are pushing.
    And then the other thing is disincentivizing conflict 
entrepreneurs. So if we are going to incentivize collaboration 
for the purpose of policymaking and also disincentivize 
conflict entrepreneurs, what are your thoughts on just one or 
two ideas in each of those areas?
    Mr. Payne. So off the top of my head, because I haven't 
really contemplated that, I think one thing you heard, 
particularly from former Chairman Upton, is committee 
leadership makes a difference. Right? I was fortunate to work 
for two Republicans who had a view that felt like we should be 
trying to do as much as possible on a bipartisan basis.
    And mind you, it is not like Ways and Means is known--Ways 
and Means doesn't have the reputation HASC does for, like, 
being all bipartisan, right? There is lots of shirts-and-skins 
stuff that happens at Ways and Means.
    But a few of you have been around long enough to remember, 
perhaps, Republican Ways and Means chairmen who didn't have 
that view and who were extremely partisan. And so you just 
couldn't do this type of thing without having that leadership 
at the committee level. So that is one.
    But, two, that same leadership can help frame a landscape 
or structure of engagement to minimize the benefits of that 
kind of entrepreneurialism, Mr. Timmons, you talk about, if 
those members aren't given the opportunity to participate in 
the roundtable or the subcommittee or the working group.
    So a lot of this, I think, really does stem from what 
structure the chairman is going to impose, and then, you know, 
to the extent that the chairman and ranking member can reach 
agreement on some of those structures so they have the same 
incentives on both sides of the dais, that is a big task to 
ask, particularly when you are in the minority, right? You have 
a certain mind-set when you are in the majority about what it 
is you are supposed to do on committee.
    So it is probably more incumbent on the chairman and the 
ranking member from that perspective, but it really makes a 
difference as to who is leading the committee, in my 
experience, as to how viable any of those things are.
    The Chairman. I think what is tricky about all of this--and 
now I have got Mr. Latta and Mr. Cleaver--committees can do a 
lot of the things that you have raised now. Right? They can 
have informal dialogues. They can have--as Chairman Upton said, 
you know, if an amendment was bipartisan, we took that up 
first. They can do committee travel.
    The question is, is there something that our committee 
could recommend to incent some of that good behavior. Right? I 
don't know if you have thoughts on that, but I would value your 
two bits if you do.
    Mr. Adler. Well, one of the things that I was going to say, 
which I think touches on both of these questions--and I am 
getting back to one of the bigger points in my written 
testimony--there is no magic bullet to lower the heat.
    We saw that when committees were doing regular legislative 
activities, like a reauthorization--and I will talk about 
Appropriations or Armed Services, the ones that are doing it on 
an annual basis--I know that that is a hard thing for a lot of 
committees to do, and it is hard for us to imagine certain 
committees ever being able to do reauthorizations on an annual 
basis.
    And I am talking about folding together a lot of what they 
normally do stretching over many years but renewing it every 
year, similar to how the Armed Services Committee does the 
NDAA. It can lower the heat. Knowing that issues can come back 
up for consideration each year, it can lower the stakes over 
what is being decided at any given moment.
    Now, of course, it does scare a lot of folks who think 
that, well, what if we don't get this done, do all these 
programs go away? And then, of course, there are other members 
who would love to see programs go away.
    But getting the committees in the rhythm of thinking that 
every year they are going to revisit this large 
reauthorization, I think, will build up those relationships, 
those important relationships that have to exist in order for 
them to legislate but also give them some confidence that what 
decisions are made today, if they truly don't work out, if the 
policies require some updating and some revisiting, that will 
be--that opportunity is there again next year and the year 
after.
    So I think it is worth considering the possibility that 
some of the committees might work better, might work in a more 
collaborative fashion--the members get to know each other 
better--by having that kind of rhythm to their schedule.
    The Chairman. Mr. Latta, and then I got you, Mr. Cleaver.
    Mr. Latta. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And 
thanks to the panel today.
    First, let me just say this: I think that, you know, I 
pointed out in the past that when we look at our committee's 
again, they are so important. That is where we get our work 
done.
    And I think two things. I think that, number one, our 
committees are too large, there are too many members. I am just 
kind of--just out of consensus, do you all--because, you know, 
when I look back at this chart right here--this is Energy and 
Commerce--in 1947, Energy and Commerce 27 members. This year we 
have 58, and it has just gone up. So that is one of the issues.
    The other issue I have is that we have--Members serve on 
too many committees. And I think to your point, you said, you 
know, you get to know your constituencies and the Members are 
very similar. Well, you don't have that when you serve on too 
many different committees.
    So to tie that together, when you talk about, like, block 
scheduling, I think that one of the things that has come out, 
and maybe, Mr. Payne, you would like to talk about this--we 
have a real problem around here just trying to get our 
committees to operate, and because we don't have the time set 
up where it is, like, you are on a certain time, this is when 
you have to be in committee where we get things done. Could you 
just comment maybe on block scheduling?
    Mr. Payne. Yes, sir. Having dedicated time where the 
committees know they can meet and you are not going to be 
interrupted by votes, it is vital to having the--you know, 
Chairman Upton talked about taking 3 years, right, to do Cures. 
That means they probably did that in 2-, 3-, 4-hour chunks at a 
time. Right? And so you need that kind of time in order to be 
able to have a really robust discussion and debate.
    And so having time blocked off for the committees to 
operate--and the committees can choose how to use them. Maybe 
that is when you have all your full committee hearings. Maybe 
that is when you have all your subcommittee hearings. Maybe 
that is when you do your roundtables, your markups.
    But having dedicated time the committees know will not be 
interrupted, that is an incredibly important resource, from 
just thinking of it from a staff's perspective, in being able 
to plan and know that we are going to have members there when 
we need them there.
    I mean, Ways and Means is a pretty small committee, so we 
didn't have some of the challenges that you are talking about, 
but that was just a function of the fact that we were a 
relatively small committee.
    Mr. Latta. Thank you.
    The Chairman. Mr. Cleaver.
    Mr. Cleaver. Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Latta, for those 
questions. I am right with you on that. I think it is 
ridiculous.
    I would suggest--and I think I may have said something to 
the chairman about this previously. I would suggest that we do 
need to restructure how we operate in terms of committees and 
all that. I think that is important. But I think far more 
important, at least as I see it, is the annual, almost now 
traditional, moments where we surrender greater and greater 
authority to the executive branch of the government. I don't 
think we are going to be able to have a full appreciation for 
what we do when we depreciate ourselves in favor of a coequal 
branch of the government.
    You know, there are a lot of examples. One of them, I mean, 
December 8, 1942, it is the last--just think about this--the 
last time the Congress of the United States declared war. So we 
shouldn't have had any fights after that. I mean, because that 
is the last time we declare--well, actually, we declared in 
1941, and in 1942, we amended it, amended to include Bulgaria, 
Romania, and Hungary, the allies of the Axis.
    But yesterday--2 days ago I heard on the news, they were 
interviewing a woman, an attorney here in D.C., who said, the 
President needs to go over to the Senate, call Pelosi over to 
the Senate, and tell them, you cannot go home in August unless 
you finish this agenda.
    You know, I don't know what people take--what courses 
people take in law school, Attorney Perlmutter, but, you know, 
we got a civics problem in the country. But we are victims 
ourselves, because we just surrender all of the authority of 
the House of Representatives to the President. I don't care who 
is in power. I don't care who is in power. You got it, Mr. 
President, tell us what to do.
    And it bothers me, particularly when I realize that, you 
know, we are surrendering, and then we don't get a chance to 
run our operation in a way in which--you know, we don't 
surrender to the chairs, the leadership, you know. We are going 
to vote on stuff, and I will bet you less than 80 percent of 
the people had anything to do with it.
    I am through.
    The Chairman. Anyone want to respond to that?
    Mr. Adler. So I might respond to both comments. First, I 
agree with you that Congress needs to be in a position to be a 
coequal partner in governing. I would say the places in which 
Congress has retained that--I will go back to the NDAA, Armed 
Services--it really has retained that because of the strength 
of those two committees on the House and Senate side.
    Mr. Cleaver. Yeah.
    Mr. Adler. They are very involved. And I think that--
personally, I believe that committees are the key to that, that 
expertise, building that expertise, and that specialization 
both on staff and with Members, the longevity that they serve 
and reexamining the policy in that area.
    So I think committees are critical for doing that, and, of 
course, critical for engaging lawmakers in this process.
    And back to Representative Latta's point about too many 
committees. Before you arrived, I think Vice Chair Timmons 
mentioned that there were overlapping committee hearings or 
meetings, and, of course, the reason for that is because you 
all serve on several committees at once.
    Now, the motivations for that are multilevel. Members want 
to be able to be involved in policymaking in several different 
areas, as well the leadership would like to be able to give you 
good committee positions. So by reducing those assignments, of 
course, you are taking that away both from the leadership and 
individual lawmakers.
    The only other--you can't invent more hours in a day. So 
the only other choice is to spread the meetings out which, of 
course, has other sorts of political costs.
    Ultimately, I agree with you, though. I think we probably 
should have Members specializing a little bit more, doing--
spreading themselves less thin across the entirety of Federal 
policy and focusing in on their work in a couple of areas 
rather than across four or five.
    The Chairman. Do you have any questions? Go ahead.
    Mr. Perlmutter. Yeah, a couple questions and just a 
comment.
    Mr. Payne, I think you were spot on when you were talking 
about the bipartisanship sort of comes from the leadership of 
that particular committee. And, you know, I think just in my 
current situation, I have got two very bipartisan-type chairs, 
and I have got two--the committee itself is a partisan 
committee, the Rules Committee. But another committee is pretty 
partisan, and it makes a big difference in how the rest of us 
manage our affairs.
    And so, you know, HASC has generally had a pretty 
bipartisan-type leadership. Everybody is engaged, and so I 
think that is important, and we are in a much more centralized 
setting, where we have ceded not just authority to the 
executive branch but to leadership.
    And I personally--you know, that is why I asked the 
question of DeGette and Upton, you know, in their putting that 
bill together, did they have fun. Because at the end of the 
day, you know, we want to be proud of our craft and what we do 
for the people. And I don't know if any of you want to comment 
about that.
    And the other thing I was going to talk about were the 
staffdels. We have taken advantage of the German Marshall Fund 
and had our staff participate in that, and I know it has been 
great for everybody. So just a couple comments and, you know, 
the development of trust is sort of key to all of this. And I 
will shut up.
    Mr. Payne. The one thing I might respond to, sir, is the 
importance of getting this into the DNA of the committee, 
because if you want to create a setting where you are more 
likely to have future leaders of the committee who endorse the 
bipartisan aspect--no chairman becomes chairman, and no member 
becomes ranking member airdropping into a committee. They have 
been on the committee for a number of years before that 
happens.
    So if it starts whenever you can start it, and it becomes 
part of the committee's DNA, it becomes self-reinforcing that 
future leaders will continue to endorse that type of approach.
    Ms. Simler. Just comment kind of addressing Mr. Cleaver and 
Mr. Perlmutter and the chairman's comments. I do think--I 
agree, I am concerned about the acquiescence, if you will, of 
power to the executive branch. I do think part of the solution 
to that does go back to committee work and building--just 
building that muscle of legislating makes it less, I think, 
worrisome for both leadership and individual members about 
having to take tough votes and to reclaim that constitutional 
authority. So I do think that there is something to that.
    And, Chairman Kilmer, to your question about incentives to 
the committees to do all these things that we have been talking 
about, because they do have a lot of the authorities they need, 
I will steal one of Dr. Adler's recommendations a little.
    I do think there is something to be considered regarding 
some kind of expedited floor consideration for legislation that 
meets certain criteria. And that could be something this 
committee works on in terms of what those criteria look like, 
but that might be an additional incentive, as well as 
disabusing Members of this notion that somehow bipartisanship 
and transparency and consensus-building means that you lose 
political leverage. That is not the case.
    Actually, transparency and bipartisanship and cooperation, 
if done correctly, allows each party to build a communications 
plan that lets them advocate for their positions and to build 
that case for the public and still get the political wins that 
they need. So that is my recommendation.
    The Chairman. That bell you heard was votes, so I may have 
us go into quick speed round. Go ahead, Vice Chair Timmons. I 
know you had one more issue.
    Mr. Timmons. We should leave the committee jurisdictions 
alone, and it doesn't really matter if we try to because they 
are not changing. But, you know, the other question is, 
cybersecurity is such a pressing issue. Any legislation which 
is comprehensive, which is long overdue, would have to go 
through like a dozen House committees and at least half a dozen 
Senate committees. It is just really hard, so I mean, what do 
we do about that?
    Mr. Adler. Yeah. So since 9/11 and the creation of Homeland 
Security jurisdictions--well, Homeland Security itself, its 
jurisdiction is spread out among, it must be a dozen other 
committees--it is a very large number--and then, of course, 
cybersecurity similarly so.
    And, unfortunately, there are those overlaps, which are--
over the years, we have seen efforts to shave, on the margin, 
the jurisdictions of certain committees. And that is easiest 
done at the beginning of the term--particularly if you have 
turnover in the majority, the new majority can do that.
    But I would say, as a whole, my recommendation as a whole, 
trying to reorganize all of the committee jurisdictions is a 
fool's errand. You will end up killing every other good 
recommendation you have because that will just be way too 
difficult to do, so I would recommend you stay away from it.
    Shaving on the margins might be one thing, but a wholesale 
restructuring is something that really just will be the end of 
all the other good recommendations you are going to have.
    Mr. Cleaver. Our lives. Our lives.
    The Chairman. Yeah, exactly. As someone who wants to not be 
murdered, it is--so--and I may have this end with this: You 
wrote the book on failed reform efforts. Having said that, 
there has been some past efforts at reform that have been 
successful. There was intent behind pulling power away from 
chairs.
    Now, I think the unintended consequence is that power has 
been vested in--has been centralized, so that rank-and-file 
members may not feel the sense of efficacy that, you know, that 
many, I think, Members want, and many committees may not have 
that sense of efficacy, particularly on the big stuff, where 
often it will happen through omnibus or something like that.
    And I don't know if you have thoughts about if there are 
recommendations that this committee could make. So I am on 
Appropriations, and last week we were sitting--members were 
having lunch together, and a senior appropriator, a Republican, 
said, you know, this place really vested more and more power in 
leadership.
    And so I asked him, I said, how do you change that? And he 
goes, well, it is just a choice by Members and it is a choice 
by committees. And I was, like, but is it?
    So I guess my question to you is--and maybe we can take it 
offline if you have more than 60 seconds' worth of thought 
about this, but--so are there recommendations this committee 
could make--and I say this without any disrespect to leadership 
on either side of the aisle, but with a view that members want 
to have a sense of efficacy, that committees, to meet Mr. 
Latta's point, if committees are going to be the place where 
policymaking happens, something needs to change. Any thoughts 
on that?
    Mr. Adler. Well, as you said, it is more than a 60-second 
conversation, but I think that, ultimately, the caucus can make 
these decisions about how they want to structure themselves.
    Now, that is not easy, as you said, and, of course, what we 
are talking about is shifting--we will call it shifting--some 
of that authority away from the centralized leadership, the 
party leadership, to committee chairs. And I will say that 
historically we went the other direction, but that is what was 
seen as necessary at the time.
    Now, there needs to be another reinvestment. And I think 
one of the ways to characterize this is that is what--that it 
is also what can be good for individual Members as well. It can 
help them to present themselves as effective and engaged 
lawmakers.
    I think right now the emphasis on grandstanding and 
position-taking has overtaken what used to be seen as, this is 
how you make your name as being an effective lawmaker. And I 
think that a lot of Members could--they want to be reelected, 
and they do a good job representing their constituencies, but 
representation needs to happen at the legislative level more so 
than at just simply position-taking.
    The Chairman. We are going to have to leave it there. And I 
apologize in advance, because I think all of us would like to 
come and talk with you a little bit more as we wrap up, but we 
have to run and vote. So let me thank all of our witnesses for 
their testimony.
    Let me thank our committee members for their participation 
and our staff for putting together yet another terrific hearing 
with wonderful experts. So thank you and thank you for being 
here.
    Without objection, all members will have 5 legislative days 
within which to submit additional written questions for the 
witnesses to the chair to be forwarded to the witnesses for 
their response. I ask our witnesses to please respond as 
promptly as you are able.
    Without objection, all members will have 5 legislative days 
within which to submit extraneous materials to the chair for 
inclusion in the record.
    And, with that, this hearing is adjourned. Thanks so much.
    [Whereupon, at 3:17 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]
    
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