Modernizing Casework: Recommendations to CHA’s Modernization and Innovation Subcommittee
In August of 2026, the Committee on House Administration’s Subcommittee on Modernization and Innovation opened a public submission portal for Members, staff, academics, and civil society to share recommendations for the next phase of Congressional modernization.
The Constituent Service Institute shared five recommendations around strengthening and modernizing casework, and capitalizing on previous investments in casework support in the House championed by the Subcommittee. Many of the supports and resources now benefitting caseworkers are the direct result of this Subcommittee’s advocacy, and we are encouraged to see the Committee’s continued spirit of collaboration in this submission process.
We include the summaries of these requests here. For more information on these recommendations, including implementation and cost estimates, drop us a line at info@constituentserviceinstitute.org.
Establish a Casework Liaison Office
Casework is one of Congress's most direct constitutional functions: it is the infrastructure through which Congress upholds citizens’ First Amendment right to petition for redress from grievances, and a critical element of the Legislative branch’s oversight of the Executive. Across both chambers, hundreds of offices manage active caseloads spanning dozens of federal agencies, and year-end summaries routinely show casework efforts recovering millions of dollars in delayed and retroactive benefits for constituents.
Despite this scale and importance, caseworkers operate without dedicated institutional coordination, communication infrastructure, or visibility within either chamber. There is no central point of contact for caseworkers navigating institutional resources. Communication between federal agencies and the caseworkers who handle their portfolios is fragmented: agencies have no reliable way to reach all relevant caseworkers when they need to push urgent updates, and caseworkers have no institutional channel to surface systemic issues back to agencies. As a result, each office independently builds and maintains its own agency contact lists, develops its own processes, and trains its own new hires — duplicating effort across hundreds of offices.
This lack of central ownership also jeopardizes the long-term success of the House’s continued investment in the CaseCompass casework data aggregation program. The CaseCompass aggregator, while under development by the House Digital Service, will require a long-term product manager to own continued refinement on user feedback, maintenance of the casework taxonomy to accommodate new programs and reorganizations in federal agencies, and champion the tool’s use in both casework operations and as a rich source of oversight data for policy and oversight. This will require dedicated specialist work for the Committee to see the full benefit of its ongoing investment in this tool’s development.
This idea proposes a small, dedicated Casework Liaison Office (CLO) — housed within the CAO in the House and the Sergeant at Arms in the Senate — to serve as a central advocate, communication hub, knowledge manager, and data steward for the Congressional casework community. The CLO would perform six core functions: (1) serving as a two-way communication hub between federal agencies and caseworkers, maintaining a directory that lets agencies reach relevant caseworkers by portfolio without gaining direct access to internal Congressional directories; (2) stewarding CaseCompass, the House Digital Service's casework data aggregation tool, including its taxonomy and data quality; (3) supporting caseworker peer communities and preserving institutional knowledge through shared resources and searchable repositories; (4) serving as a wayfinding resource and Hill presence for a largely district- and state-based workforce, complementing the CAO Coach program's support services; (5) representing caseworker needs in CRM vendor discussions and procurement; and (6) providing nonpartisan casework trend data to committees conducting oversight, modeled on the Taxpayer Advocate's reports to Congress.
The expected benefit is a more coordinated, less duplicative casework infrastructure — one that reduces the burden on individual offices and volunteer caseworker communities, preserves institutional knowledge against staff turnover, and gives Congress better visibility into systemic problems with federal agency responsiveness.
Collaborate with the House Ethics Committee to amend the House Ethics Manual to authorize Member-to-Member staff details for casework surge support
Any Congressional office can expect to face at least one casework demand surge in a given Congress — a natural disaster, a policy crisis such as the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, or another event that generates a sudden spike in constituent need that overwhelms a specific office's capacity. The frequency of both natural disasters and policy-driven surges has increased in recent years, making this a recurring, foreseeable strain on offices rather than a rare exception.
Informally, some offices have already begun addressing this on their own: experienced caseworkers from one office providing direct, in-person or virtual support to a colleague office during a surge, using their own MRA funds to help process constituent intake and prepare agency inquiries. This practice tends to occur within delegations with strong existing relationships and frequent natural disasters, and offices have noted it is a good use of otherwise unspent MRA funds and lets caseworkers with extra capacity continue to use their skills productively. However, this practice is technically inconsistent with House Ethics rules specifying that MRA funds may only be used on behalf of the Member's own constituents.
This idea proposes that CHA work with the House Ethics Committee to formally authorize Member-to-Member staff details, at the discretion of the Members involved, specifically to provide surge casework support. Formalizing this practice would let offices with relevant subject-matter or agency-process knowledge assist a new or overwhelmed colleague office — support that may be reciprocal over time, since any office may eventually be the one needing help. Beyond its immediate value for disaster and crisis response, formalizing Member-to-Member details could also let offices tap into subject-matter expertise held by other offices' staff more generally, and may open up other use cases as the practice matures.
An additional secondary benefit is relational: knowing that they may eventually need to call on colleagues for help — and that colleagues may call on them — gives Members an added incentive to maintain cordial, cross-party working relationships. This idea is responsive to Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress recommendation 151, and builds on the Select Committee's and Subcommittee's research into surge capacity models; Member-to-Member details are well positioned among those models because they preserve Member control over how and when staff time is shared, rather than routing support through a centralized pool maintained by the CAO or other institutional entity.
Develop Certification Programs for High-Sensitivity Casework Areas
Congressional caseworkers are formally limited to expressing a Member's opinion on a constituent's case and obtaining status updates from agencies. In practice, however, caseworkers regularly affect the outcome of a case through their advocacy — the way they frame an inquiry, the details they surface, and the persistence with which they follow up can meaningfully shape how an agency handles a constituent's matter. This influence carries real upside, but it also carries real risk when caseworkers lack the specialized knowledge a particular case type demands. A caseworker unfamiliar with a program's rules may inadvertently trigger an unnecessary review of a case that was close to resolution, or give a constituent mistaken information about their options by misunderstanding how a program actually works — outcomes that can cause direct, sometimes irreversible harm to the constituent involved.
Certain categories of casework carry disproportionate risk along these lines: cases involving especially sensitive constituent records and circumstances, cases requiring detailed knowledge of a specific federal program, and cases where an incomplete or erroneous inquiry is more likely to cause harm. Examples include military sexual trauma cases, deportation cases, and complex disability appeals before the SSA and VA. Casework in these areas often also involves constituents who are trauma survivors or otherwise in vulnerable circumstances, and effectively supporting them requires more than programmatic knowledge alone — it requires trauma-informed practice. POPVOX Foundation's research on Congressional casework during the Afghanistan withdrawal documented this dynamic directly: caseworkers with less expertise in immigration and military casework were disproportionately challenged by the surge in sensitive, high-stakes inquiries, and the caseworkers who handled this work experienced a significant, lasting mental health burden. That research also found that the burden of this kind of casework falls unevenly across offices, with new offices and less experienced caseworkers particularly exposed.
The House has precedent for investing in specialized support for staff handling a uniquely sensitive category of casework: the Office of the Whistleblower Ombuds was established in recognition that inconsistent or incomplete handling of whistleblower matters could cause direct harm. This idea proposes a similar, more systematic investment across casework broadly: directing the Congressional Staff Academy to partner with CRS, the CAO Coach program, and the proposed Casework Liaison Office to develop certification programs for casework areas identified as carrying especially high complexity, sensitivity, or risk of harm. The Coach program and the CLO would be well positioned to identify and periodically update the list of qualifying case areas as needs evolve.
Publish an Anonymized Version of the CaseCompass Dataset
CaseCompass, the House Digital Service's casework data aggregation tool, is building a standardized, structured picture of how constituents across the country experience federal agencies — which programs generate the most casework, where agencies are slow or unresponsive, and where systemic breakdowns are affecting constituents at scale. This is exactly the kind of data academics, journalists, and civic technologists are increasingly eager to work with, and interest in CaseCompass data among these communities is already growing.
This idea proposes that an anonymized version of the CaseCompass dataset be made public. Doing so would benefit several audiences at once. Researchers studying administrative burden, agency performance, and constituent service could use the data to produce rigorous, evidence-based analysis that Congress itself could draw on. Journalists could use it to identify and report on systemic agency failures affecting real communities. Civic technologists could build tools on top of it, in the same spirit as CaseCompass's own origins in the House Digital Service. And within Congress, publishing the data may paradoxically make it more discoverable to the audience it was originally built for: policy and oversight staff are more likely to find and incorporate a public, well-documented dataset into their workflows than to locate the same information buried in HouseNet, where institutional data can be difficult to discover even for staff who would benefit most from using it.
There is also a good-governance case independent of these use cases. CaseCompass reflects data generated through Congress's use of taxpayer-funded staff time to help constituents navigate taxpayer-funded federal programs. Aggregate, anonymized information about how well those programs are functioning is the kind of government performance data that has a legitimate claim to public transparency, in the same spirit as other public federal performance datasets.
Establish a pilot study on barriers to proactive casework outreach
Congressional casework today operates almost entirely on a reactive model: offices help constituents who know to ask, know how to ask, and trust that asking is worth it. While many Congressional offices work diligently to mitigate this lack of information with mobile casework outreach programs, that model still leaves out constituents who don't recognize that their representative's office can help, don't know how to reach it, or have been discouraged by past experience with government from trying. The result is that casework volume reflects who is equipped to ask for help, not the full scope of need in a district.
An emerging body of research — most notably Dr. Megan Rickman Blackwood's 2026 dissertation formalizing "Proactive Casework Theory" through two pilot programs in state legislative offices — suggests that when offices proactively reach out to constituents rather than waiting to be contacted, the volume and composition of casework shifts substantially. In piloted programs, offices that shifted from a reactive posture to direct outreach saw large increases in validated casework requests, with a notably higher share of that new casework coming from constituents facing housing insecurity, benefits disruptions, and other circumstances that make them less likely to self-initiate contact.
Beyond serving more constituents, proactive outreach has real potential value for Congress's oversight function. Casework is a direct feedback channel on how federal programs are actually working, but a reactive-only model produces a distorted picture: offices hear disproportionately from constituents with the resources and confidence to reach out, while others facing the same or worse problems remain invisible. A broader base of proactively surfaced casework would improve the quality of the data flowing into tools like CaseCompass, giving Congress a more accurate picture of where federal agencies are falling short — not just where the most vocal or resourced constituents happen to notice first.
At the same time, offices face real, unresolved barriers to conducting this kind of outreach: limited staff capacity to take on proactive contact on top of existing reactive caseloads, resourcing constraints, and House Ethics and franking rules that may restrict how offices can contact constituents who have not first initiated contact themselves. Before Congress considers whether or how to encourage proactive casework more broadly, it's worth understanding precisely what is and isn't currently permissible, and what would need to change to make this approach viable for offices that want to pursue it.