A key House lawmaker is looking to secure funding for a new artificial intelligence agent to connect data sources throughout the House of Representatives, as a bipartisan group looks to modernize access to legislative data for both congressional employees and the public.

Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-Okla.), chairwoman of the House Administration Committee’s subcommittee on modernization and innovation, said today that she has requested funding to develop the “My Intelligence Assistant.”

Bice’s office described it as “a secure and customizable AI agent connected to data sources throughout the House.” Her office said that “funding has been secured” for a database application called “PRISM” that “modernizes the digital infrastructure critical to House Rules Committee operations, as well as the overall legislative process.”

“House staff are already building AI tools for managing schedules, summarizing bills, monitoring floor activity, and more,” Bice said in a statement. “Mia will accelerate the kind of ongoing innovation that’s needed to ensure that Congress remains current. PRISM will also help us work better for our constituents by ensuring that we can consistently and reliably represent their views in the legislative process.”

Funding for congressional technology developments are available through the Modernization Initiatives Account, which was established as part of the fiscal 2021 legislative branch appropriations bill.

In order to secure funding from the account, lawmakers must request approval from both the House Appropriations Legislative Branch Subcommittee and the full House Appropriations Committee.

AI, digital clutter challenge leg data access  

The funding request comes a week after Bice’s subcommittee held a hearing on modernizing access to legislative data.

Lawmakers acknowledged the strides that the House Clerk, the Congressional Research Service, the Government Publishing Office and the Library of Congress have made over the past decade in modernizing public access to congressional data.

But recent developments, including artificial intelligence advancements and an ever increasing growth in data, are straining access to congressional information

“The data and information that various House websites and Congress.gov maintain are essential to legislative branch functions, but the websites risk becoming obsolete,” Bice said during the hearing. “As more and more users seek platforms and tools that can perform searches, complex tasks, and analyze quicker and better, there’s a lot of opportunity here to reimagine how we make the house and the work that it does make more sense to the American people.”

The Library of Congress first unveiled Congress.gov in 2012. After years of improvements, LoC Deputy Chief Information Officer John Rutledge said the website now features a modern design and infrastructure, mobile-friendly access and new search capabilities, as well as integrated data streams from CRS and other sources.

“With this expansion work complete, now is the time to turn our focus to making Congress.gov as intuitive and user-centered as possible,” Rutledge testified last week.

The Library of Congress is also seeking funding to move Congress.gov to the cloud to help deal with the new challenge of AI data scraping.

In the month of April, Rutledge said Congess.gov received 16 million visitors driven by AI bot traffic. In mid-June, he said the website received 22 million visits in a single day.

The massive influx of traffic was impacting the performance of the website, so the Library put a human-verification check on Congress.gov last month. The website then blocked approximately 98% of incoming requests in a single day, according to Rutledge.

But Rutledge pointed out that the Library doesn’t want to reject AI access in the long term. He said AI “is also giving the American people access to more information than ever before.”

“But authenticity and objectivity matter, and people know they can depend on Congress.gov to meet those standards,” he added.

He said the Library needs $2.4 million to migrate the Congress.gov web application to the cloud.

Meanwhile, Kirsten Gullickson, the director of analysis, quality assurance, and product support, for the House Clerk’s Office, said House Digital Services is working to improve how data flows to other organizations like the Library of Congress, including through an updated House calendar.

“We are working on improving our data transfers to the library, and we have some ongoing projects to continually update and modernize everything,” Gullickson said. “I do think that we have good foundations to do this work, and we just need to continue to invest.”

But as subcommittee Ranking Member Norma Torres (D-Calif.) pointed out, it’s difficult for public users to find legislation and track changes to bills through what’s often a byzantine legislative process.

“Many Americans simply do not know where the right information lives online, and often end up in a frustrating rabbit hole of clicks,” Torres said.

Gullickson recommended Congress adapt a “data-first strategy, grounded in user research and designed around how people and the systems that they rely upon discover, access, verify, and use our information.”

With more than 600 publicly available websites under House.gov alone, Gullickson also recommended that the House create “a more consistent experience across all of our websites, using familiar navigation and design patterns that help people find what they need when they need it.”

She also said House.gov should evolve “into a clearer public front door, helping people find the authoritative information without needing to understand the internal organizations of the House or even of the legislative branch.”

“These recommendations are not intended to be implemented through a single large modernization effort,” Gullickson added. “They can begin with user research and discovery, continue through forward-looking information architecture and user experience design, and progress through a phased iterative roadmap that continuously delivers improvement and value over time.”

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