Congressional offices do more federal casework as their members gain seniority

Most voters see Congress through floor debates ^[17]. A congressional office's letters to the IRS or the Department of Veterans Affairs are much harder to see. To collect them, Devin Judge-Lord's team filed more than 400 Freedom of Information Act requests and spent nearly a decade building a database of more than 611,000 communications with the executive branch ^[9]. The records run from 2007 to 2020 ^[8], an average of more than 43,000 contacts a year ^[18]. The paper calls the result a census of legislator requests to federal agencies ^[16].

A record that large lets two opposing forces show up in the same data. Seniority and institutional power push members toward policy work: crafting legislation, commenting on proposed agency rules, addressing systemic problems ^[10]. By itself, that would predict less casework as a career goes on, close to the assumption that long-serving lawmakers grow less responsive ^[1]. The same members, though, build higher-capacity offices that handle more constituent service, such as a tax problem with the IRS or a benefits claim at the VA ^[11]. Both effects turned up, and "the capacity boost had a bigger effect than the shift toward policy work," Judge-Lord said ^[12].

The published summary does not give the size of that net effect, and it does not describe how the authors separated experience from electoral survival. Survival matters for a pattern like this one. If an office that is good at casework helps its member win reelection, long tenure and heavy casework would go together even if experience added nothing. Judge-Lord's explanation is a ramp-up: new members take over understaffed offices in the middle of a major transition ^[4]. "As anyone who has started a new job knows, it takes time to get up to speed. Members of Congress are no different," he said ^[2].

The thing this doesn't tell you is whether constituents end up better served. A count of communications measures effort directed at agencies. A veteran waiting on a claim cares whether it was paid, and a tally of letters cannot distinguish an office that resolves cases from one that writes more often about the same ones.

In my view the evidence supports a narrower conclusion than a full case against term limits. Forced turnover has a cost in agency casework, and the constituents of the newest offices pay it ^[6][4]. Judge-Lord allows that new members may bring fresh perspectives; his argument is that the term-limits debate should also count the startup costs of taking over an office ^[3]. The research also suggests that better-staffed offices can do more oversight, more policy work and more casework at the same time ^[15]. That brings staffing into the argument alongside tenure. "Hearing about Congress in the news, what you miss is the 16,000 staffers who do most of the work," he said ^[13].