Beyond Checks and Balances: Congress’ Oversight of Non-government Institutions

• In Event: Legislative Committees

Abstract

Thanks in large part to the Trump administration and the House’s January 6th Committee, Congressional oversight is enjoying its much-deserved moment in the limelight, both in terms of scholarship and public attention. While executive branch-focused oversight is undoubtedly an important and still under-studied area of research, conceiving of the legislature’s oversight responsibilities only in terms of constitutional checks and balances obscures Congress’ often extensive investigative work aimed at non-government institutions--both non-profit organizations and private for-profit companies. Some of the most famous investigations in Congress’ history focused on the private sector--for instance, the investigations into Big Tobacco in the 1980s and 1990s, and the 2007-2008 probe into steroids use in professional baseball--and yet political scientists do not yet have a complete framework for understanding this oversight work. In this paper, I pose four major questions that oversight scholars should answer: 1) To what extent does Congress devote its scarce resources toward non-government institutions, across committees and across time?; 2) why might Congress opt to investigate non-government institutions in lieu of public agencies?; 3) how effective are these investigations at achieving Congress’ policy goals?; and 4) what is the public response to non-government investigations? I answer the first question via a detailed descriptive analysis of non-government investigations since 1975 and, from this data, I chart the paths by which oversight scholars might answer the other three questions.

Author

• Claire Catherine Leavitt, Smith College