Unprecedented Obstruction?: Evaluating Presidential Responsiveness to Oversight in the Obama and Trump Administrations. Under review [email for draft]
President Trump has consistently disdained Congressional oversight and obstructed high-profile investigations of his administration. But how deeply has this president’s bucking of norms affected Congress’ ability to conduct routine oversight of the executive branch? Using an original data set, this paper proposes and presents new metrics for executive responsiveness to Congressional oversight requests, and compares the Trump administration’s provision of agency witness testimony to Congress with the Obama administration’s. I find that Trump provided far fewer federal witnesses of all types than Obama, under both united and divided government. However, one important measure of responsiveness shows that Congress was no less able to procure desired high-level witnesses under Trump than under his predecessor. My findings suggest that the steep and quick decline in routine oversight activity in Congress transcends Trump’s intransigence, and may be due to both chambers’—and both parties’—failure to make oversight a priority.

“The Purpose-Driven Congress: Measuring and Explaining Legislative Outcomes of House Investigations.” Revise and resubmit at Legislative Studies Quarterly. [email for draft]
What inspires and propels investigative work in Congress? Both the Supreme Court and members themselves cite legislation as one of the goals of the investigative process, but what makes certain investigations more legislatively productive than others? In this paper, I assess the structure of House committee investigations and the role of each component part in predicting both individual and collective legislative outcomes. I show that public-facing activities most reliably contribute to the introduction and the passage of legislative provisions, while bipartisan sup port for an investigation does not appear to translate into its legislative success. Examining investigations as complex, multi-partite processes and explicitly linking this work with policymaking moves us closer to a comprehensive understanding of why members conduct oversight and offers lessons for how members might structure investigations to facilitate their legislative goals.