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When disaster strikes, your local congressional office can help
Interview transcript:
Terry Gerton For the last few years, our team has been doing research into the role of congressional casework kind of within individual members, offices, and then writ large. As we’re talking to caseworkers, we keep hearing that there are some particular, really intense periods of casework that really demonstrate why casework is so important and effective. And a big part of that is disasters. So disasters are where congressional offices can be most helpful in supporting their constituents at the greatest moment of crisis, their greatest hour of need. But there are also some structural challenges that prevent offices from being really effective in being able to support their constituents. So that was something we really wanted to look into. We talked to caseworkers on both sides of the aisle who had handled a variety of disasters and just said, hey, how did this work for you? What were you able to do? What would you want to do more of? What needs to change for you to be more effective in that role?
Terry Gerton So these caseworkers, just to be clear, work with constituents on a variety of issues, and this is a focus on what happens in disasters specifically.
Anne Meeker Yes, exactly. So every member has a casework team that are usually broken up by portfolio. They handle the biggest federal agencies. You’ll have agencies like the VA, Social Security, IRS, and then every now and then, just about every office is going to handle some kind of crisis at some point. All of a sudden they need to develop this competence with FEMA and other disaster agencies as well.
Terry Gerton So when you talk to these folks, what were the biggest challenges that you discovered?
Anne Meeker One of the biggest challenges is just getting information from federal agencies. So obviously Congress has its Article I authority to do oversight over federal agencies, but the mechanisms for that specific contact are a little bit brittle. So congressional offices work with agency liaisons who are assigned to be the liaison to Congress. These liaisons sometimes…don’t have access to the information that caseworkers need. It’s hard to reach them. If you have a new liaison, they may not know everything that’s happening in their district, their area. So we really see some challenges there with just Congress not telling agencies how it should resource and how it could prioritize that responsiveness.
Terry Gerton Well, I can imagine in the midst of a disaster, if you have a liaison officer who’s not very experienced or even just super busy that getting connected is going to be even more difficult than it would be in a routine timeframe.
Anne Meeker Yeah, absolutely. And there’s a back-end issue to that too, which is within the agency, how does the liaison have information, have access to information on where individual cases might be? So are those individual points of contact between the liaison and the business units for the agencies also well-established, so that liaison can be providing and relaying accurate and timely information?
Terry Gerton Were there other particular challenges that the caseworkers mentioned for you?
Anne Meeker Some of these really come back to kind of the structure of Congress itself, especially new offices in districts that hadn’t traditionally seen this kind of big disaster said, “hey, when this hit us, we didn’t know what resources were available. We found out much later that we could have had a disaster box from [Congressional Affairs] and no one told us that in advance.” So really again, looking at kind of access to information — access to information on what resources are available to let offices do a good job of disaster planning was also something really important.
Terry Gerton The worst time to be trading business cards is in the middle of a disaster. So hoping that folks get to get connected in advance, but with all of the differing proposals out there about restructuring or disestablishing FEMA itself, what does that portend for these already challenging relationships?
Anne Meeker It’s a challenge for caseworkers just in this uncertainty. So as we’re telling offices, hey, no matter where you are, you need to have a disaster plan. You need to be ready. You need to have your agency relationship set up. The uncertainty of multiple competing proposals about what happens to FEMA and whether FEMA becomes an independent agency — there’s a discussion draft in the House arguing for that right now — or whether FEMA goes away and its responsibilities are shifted to other agencies, state and local agencies, which has been the White House and the executive branch’s proposal, that really makes it difficult for caseworkers to do that long-term planning. So we’re advising folks to continue to disaster plan the way that you have been. Work with your local liaisons, work with your FEMA liaisons, work with your state and your local counterparts just to make sure that no matter what happens, where we are in that process with FEMA, you are as ready as it’s possible to be.
Terry Gerton Well, that sounds like good advice. I’m speaking with Anne Meeker. She’s the Deputy Director of PopVox Foundation. One of the other recommendations in the report is about building multi-sector partnerships. Can you elaborate a little bit on that and how that would play out?
Anne Meeker A really critical piece for, for caseworkers and being responsive to their constituents after disaster is knowing. They kind of play this concierge role for constituents: Hey, if someone comes to me and they say the storm hit this part of my property, maybe I’m on a private road, where do I start? What do I do? And so a huge thing that caseworkers do is kind of act as that concierge for figuring out…the state will handle this part of that disaster cleanup, the county will handle this part and then FEMA will handle this part. So building those relationships to really understand what’s available from whom and what the process is for applying for it is really a critical, critical connecting function that congressional offices don’t get a lot of credit for, but it’s where they can really be important and really can be effective. So we definitely say, again, no matter where you are in the country, what’s going on, have you had a hurricane? Have you had to tornado? Use your networks and make those relationships strong.
Terry Gerton And the power of those congressional offices is that they’re on the ground themselves, right? So they know the community, they know the players there and have relationships that they can call on.
Anne Meeker Yes, absolutely. They have that direct line to FEMA. They have the direct line to their state and local folks. And like you said, the emotional and the cultural part of being on the ground is really important, too. There’s one thing to tell someone, “hey, here’s where you can get money to repair your private road,” and another thing when they come to your office for a hug and to then tell them where to get that money to repair the private road. Again, overlooked but really important pieces of what district and state offices do for Congress.
Terry Gerton Well, another key part of the network in disaster response is local nonprofits. So how do you wrap them into your multi-sector relationship building?
Anne Meeker This is a key part of our recommendations. So Congress has strict ethics rules. We can all appreciate this is important, but one of the places where those strict ethics roles actually prevent offices from being helpful is that house offices are prohibited from making direct recommendations and making direct referrals to nonprofits. There are some exceptions; offices can co-host a constituent service event with a qualified nonprofit. But in a disaster situation, you may not have the time and the energy to set up an event. You want to just tell people when they call you, hey, this is part of your resource menu. You can go to federal for this, state for this and the Red Cross for this. So we have said that the Ethics Committee should work with the Committee on House Administration to think about is there a smart way to relax those rules, to allow offices to send people to their local resources, but again, still upholding those strong ethics practices?
Terry Gerton That’s a really important conversation to be having. What other recommendations do you have in the report?
Anne Meeker One that’s really come up in the past, too, is this is a huge capacity challenge for congressional offices. House offices are capped at 17 and a half staff, I think. And so in a disaster, your workload might double, triple, quadruple, but you don’t get any additional staff. And so we’ve worked to say, is there a way that the House can find a possible route to provide some surge capacity? In our report, we offered a few potential paths that the House could look at for doing that, including lifting that staff cap to allow offices to bring on any interns that they might have full time; relaxing some ethics rules to allow officers to do member-to-member details so a member in a district that’s not hit could send some of their staff to temporarily detail to a colleague’s office that might be harder-hit; or bringing on temporary fellows. I think there are a lot of different ways the House could go to think about, you know, this is not the fault of this office for mismanaging. This could happen to anyone and this office still needs additional staff to be able to support constituents. So again, how can we make that happen?
Terry Gerton The report also makes a really important point, I think, about the emotional toll of disaster casework on a staff. You recommend some support activities or structures to help mitigate that. Could you elaborate for us?
Anne Meeker So the employee assistance programs in both the House and the Senate are wonderful. They really do a great job of supporting all staff, but especially caseworkers in this really difficult and unique challenge. But I think there is more that can be done specifically for both of those EAP programs to develop disaster-specific support resources. This is a huge challenge for casework staff. You are probably affected yourself if you live in this district that’s been hit by a disaster. So you may be helping your own family, your own household recover at the same time you’re also helping other constituents. So I think we do need to look at options for disaster-specific counseling and then also kind of disaster-specific post-traumatic stress work to really help those staff be resilient to continue helping constituents for the long term.
Terry Gerton Well, Anne, we’re heading into hurricane season. Do you expect any of these reforms to be implemented in time to make a difference?
Anne Meeker I think we’re still waiting to see what happens with this agency. It’s obviously been the subject of quite a bit of political work recently. The one thing that we are hopeful for is that the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and other members and associated committees have really started to talk about, how do we work with our caseworkers? How do we solicit expertise? How do we solicit that really deep level of knowledge for what’s wrong and what needs to be better from our caseworkers? So I hope not only that these committees leverage that expertise going forward, but also that that nudges the committees to say, and also how do we fix the liaison problem? How do we strengthen liaisons? How do we help our caseworkers so that they can help us?The post When disaster strikes, your local congressional office can help first appeared on Federal News Network.
