Avoids politics

It is worth noting that OLRC inhabits an odd place on this spectrum. OLRC is required to prepare the U.S. Code for publication; that aspect of its work is mandatory. But it is up to OLRC to decide when a new title should be created and what it should contain, and Congress is not required to take any action on codification bills prepared by the office. OLRC can organize and reclassify enacted statutes into coherent legal titles, but it is up to Congress whether to formally enact those titles as so-called “positive law.” As *1631 noted, half of the titles of the U.S. Code (including important titles like Title 42, which contains the civil rights laws) have been organized by OLRC (or prior codifiers) but never formally enacted by Congress as positive law titles.

OLRC staff told us several times there is a “total lack of political will” to enact codification bills:

Members don't care about positive law codification bills. Members care about, at best, policy and constituents, but making law easier to read and understand and navigate or correcting technical errors? They don't care about that .... What member ever went back to a town hall meeting and said, you know, “I got a U.S. Code title codified!”?503

We were surprised to learn from our interviews of partisan staff that most staffers do not even know what OLRC does, or where it is! Due to this lack of political salience, OLRC is not sought out by members. As they put it: “No members know we are here.”504

Why have an office no one cares about enough to use? The need to organize the U.S. Code in ways that make statutes and their amendments accessible to the public is uncontroverted. But why give that responsibility to a nonpartisan agency? Why not the Speaker's Office?

One reason, we believe, is precisely because no one is watching. As one interviewee put it: “Someone needs to do this. You need someone to run this stuff down. You have to have someone who isn't going to slip something by. Congress isn't going to be tracking it down.”505 In other words, the nonpartisan and politically dull stance of OLRC, ex ante, gives it the credibility to do work that is needed, but that Congress does not care about enough to supervise.

As with other studies of bureaucracies, OLRC's institutional design enables it to take on projects with long-term, diffuse benefits (but correspondingly low political salience). Its staff are incentivized not by the electoral connection, but by their own commitment to professionalism far beyond the next election cycle.506