The topic of this episode is, “Who were the House Appropriations Committee Surveys and Investigations Staff and what did they do?”
More than a decade ago, a friend and longtime veteran of Capitol Hill informed me that he had received a contract to work for the House Appropriations Committee Surveys and Investigations staff. I had no idea who these folks were, despite all the years I had spent working for Congress. When I asked him for details, he explained to me that he really couldn’t share much about who they were and what he was doing. I thought that was odd, but I didn’t focus on it, and I let it go. I remember thinking it was something that I should look into, but I had more pressing research and life responsibilities, and I never conducted that research.
As fate would have it, a couple of years ago, I ran into Professor Matthew Dull at an academic conference. He is a tenured professor at the Center for Public Administration & Policy at Virginia Tech University.
To my wonder and delight, he informed me that he had written a lengthy paper (now article) on the history of the House Appropriations Committee Surveys and Investigations staff. We talked about what he learned about this mysterious corps of congressional staff, and I was riveted. I promised myself that I would not only read that paper but that I’d bring him on the Understanding Congress podcast, and finally, I’m making good on that.
So Professor Matthew Dull is with me today to tell me what he has learned.
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it. But Congress is essential to our republic. It is a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be.
And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I am your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.
Welcome to the podcast.
Matthew Dull:
Thank you, Kevin.
Kevin Kosar:
How did you first learn about the House Appropriations Committee Surveys and Investigations staff?
Matthew Dull:
Thanks, Kevin, for the opportunity to talk about the Surveys and Investigations staff, or S&I. This is a true story. I first learned about the House Appropriations S&I staff many years ago when a friend, a mutual friend actually of ours, Kevin, who is an analyst at the Congressional Research Service and is known for gestures like the one I’m about to describe.
He handed me a file, which contained a couple of documents. He’d actually told me he pulled it out of a discarded paper stack that was headed for recycling. That file included the only history that I’ve seen written of S&I by a former S&I investigator and FBI special agent named Richard Ash. I’m still trying to figure out where it was published, but it was written, I think, for the newsletter of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, which is a venerated institution of Hoover loyalists. And it also included this document that described the 2006 purge of Surveys and Investigations.
Now, this staff didn’t make headlines very often. It was known for being kind of under the radar. But in October 2006, the single-term chairman, Republican Jerry Lewis, fired the whole staff, and it created a couple of headlines. There were a bunch of former S&I investigators who were in the press talking about it. Here’s a quote, “It just amazes me that after some sixty years, that just with a swipe of a pencil the whole thing could go away.” And another investigator said it that the firing of the S&I staff in 2006 eviscerates the investigative function. He said, “There is little, if any, ability to do any oversight.” So, in a sense, this project started for me as a murder mystery. I was sort of trying to figure out what on earth the S&I staff did to get fired. But as I learned more, the mystery only deepened; it became richer.
Few people I encountered had heard of S&I. I liked to ask folks like you, Kevin, and I think I asked you a number of years ago, “What do you know about S&I?” And most people, even students of Congress and professional observers, had never heard of S&I. The people who had heard of S&I were disproportionately on the defense side or in the intelligence community, and they seemed to share a real sense that S&I was doing important oversight and that it was deliberately under the radar. I was told again and again, “You will never find any copies of S&I reports.” So, despite the fact that I could find lists of literally thousands of study titles in the House Appropriations Committee activity reports going back to the 1970s, I could find almost zero copies of those reports. And particularly again being told by folks that I would never find copies, I took as kind of a challenge, and I have now accumulated close to 200 work products—reports—from S&I over the course of its 80-year history. I’m now in the process of trying to create a public archive because, as I see it, those reports are important. They constitute the most important questions that the appropriators were asking at a time when the appropriators were known for being the smartest people in the room and having extraordinary power in the House.
Kevin Kosar:
For listeners out there, I’ll remind you that the appropriators are the ones who appropriate your tax dollars and all the other federal funds towards discretionary activities. So the fact that these S&I staff were helping appropriators perhaps follow the money is, no doubt, of interest. I’ll just mention, as an aside, that about a year and a half ago, I had a podcast episode with a young scholar named Beau Bauman, and we were talking about the lost history of Congress’s Office of Legislative Counsel. The offices themselves were known, but a lot of their history was not known. What you’re bringing forward is a cohort of people who worked on Capitol Hill. The memories of those folks are rare, and there’re fewer and fewer people who have any idea that they ever existed. And so 20 years from now, if you are not doing the work that you’re doing, their history could be just completely lost. So let’s just go way back. You’d mentioned they’d been around for 80 years.
When exactly was this cohort created by Congress, and as far as you can figure, why?
Matthew Dull:
What you just said about the voices of these people who represent neutral competence. I’m interested in varieties of neutral competence, people who identify themselves as speaking truth to power, and the many legislative branch institutions that are known for having cultivated varieties of neutral competence (e.g., CBO, GAO, etc.). We’re hopefully going to talk a little bit about the FBI. Those, those folks had a sense of identity that was rooted in “just the facts.”
Now, of course, there are a lot of values wrapped in there. And I think one of the reasons why I’m motivated to do this and to reconstruct this history is exactly the reason that you’re describing. Part of their self-identity is that they didn’t talk about what they did, and that facelessness was quite functional for many years. Richard Fenno, in his book, The Power of the Purse, which was published in 1966 and is still sort of the quintessential portrait of the appropriators and the Appropriations Committee Cardinals during this period of extraordinary authority, describes the clerks alongside this S&I staff, who are sort of lurking in the background. But all of them are known for their proximity to power. They do not have power themselves. They’re there. They have a passion for anonymity, as Louis Brownlow put it. And Brownlow was, again, another voice that spoke to this idea that these institutions rely on a lot of highly professional people who don’t talk about what they do.
Part of the problem with that is if you don’t talk about what you do, you don’t build a reputation, and you don’t build a kind of power. For example, the S&I staff is often compared to the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, PSI, on the Senate side. I recently listened to a podcast episode you did with Elise Bean, who had a really important role, frankly, in encouraging my work on this project. You couldn’t do away with PSI, in a way, because it has such a strong reputation. It would be a lot harder to do away with. S&I didn’t build that reputation, and that was by design. Getting back to your question, the S&I staff was created in 1943 by Appropriations Committee Chairman Clarence Cannon. Cannon was a towering figure during the 20th century. He was the chairman of the Appropriations Committee from 1941 to 1964, with two brief breaks during periods of Republican control in the 80th and the 83rd Congress.
His reputation was built not just on power, but on knowledge. He was an expert parliamentarian. He wrote a book, still a text that is used, on parliamentary procedure. So his power was rooted in a sort of combination of his reputation for knowing more and his relationships with the committee Cardinals. So the subcommittee chairmen were known as Cardinals because, as you described, they held the power of the purse; they held so much authority. The S&I staff became a mechanism by which Cannon managed the Cardinals. In The Power of the Purse, Fenno describes House appropriators who are “confident that he knows a great deal more about the agencies for which he appropriates than the other members of the House, indeed more than the entire Congress.”
So to me, S&I and the S&I’s history is really about how the appropriators maintained a reputation for knowing more, and that was with the assistance of a whole staff of investigators, auditors, and analysts who were on detail from the agencies and basically worked at the dispatch of the appropriators watchdogging committee turf.
Here is how Chairman Cannon explained the creation of S&I on the House floor in 1943. He said:
Mr. Speaker, sound legislation is based on sound information. Too often faulty legislation is the result of inaccurate or inadequate information. From the beginning of the Congress, committees have been handicapped by lack of essential data and have sought practical methods of supplying the deficiency… The Committee on Appropriations has especially felt the need of an agency for research and investigation which could be relied upon to supply data to supplement that submitted by the departments in their annual hearings on the general appropriations bills. It is an old problem and one to which a great amount of thought has been given.
The central problem is a product of the constitutional separation of powers. The appropriations committees are not, like in a parliamentary system, connected to the Spending Power. They’re hopelessly outside of the Spending Power. They write the law, but when it comes to figuring out whether or not the agencies are spending the money that they want or asking for things that are consistent with congressional intent, they are hopelessly outside. In fact, there was a whole big debate in 1943 when Cannon created the S&I staff. The Republicans wanted to create a staff that would report to each of the independent subcommittees. For them, this analytical staff was really intended to be a counterweight to the Bureau of the Budget, which they basically viewed as a propaganda agency for the New Deal. So Cannon and the Democrats were trying to thread a needle: create capacity without creating capacity that could be deployed against their friends. And that is a kind of sub-theme throughout the development of S&I over the subsequent couple of decades. In fact, there are these all-out fights between Cannon and Ben Jensen, who was a Republican minority member for many years on the Appropriations Committee. The two of them actually got in a physical altercation once; they did not like each other.
There’s a kind of longer story there, basically about partisanship, even in the context of these committees, which were quite non-partisan. And I think part of what Cannon tried to do to make this a powerful resource for Congress was to define it as a non-partisan investigative agency. If you wanted to initiate an S&I study, you had to get signatures on what’s called a tasking directive, a letter that had to have four signatures—from the chair and the ranking member of the committee and the subcommittee. From Cannon’s perspective, that ensured non-partisan oversight. Over time, that became a real problem as polarization took hold.
Kevin Kosar:
Yes. It’s interesting that this was created during FDR’s presidency and the New Deal, when federal finances were a little gusher of dollars, and one could see where an appropriator would see a greater and greater interest in having greater capacity to be able to see what’s going on.
The S&I folks existed for 80 years, so I’m sure their numbers went up and down somewhat significantly. Just to help listeners better picture this group of folks, how many of them were there? Are we talking about 10 people? Are we talking 100 people?
Matthew Dull:
As you said, it changed over time. But this was a large part of the appropriations enterprise.
If you look at the staff budgets for the Appropriations Committee from the 1960s to the 1980s, the Surveys and Investigation staff alone typically accounted for at least 40% of the overall salary budget. And these are people who are expert economizers. They don’t spend money without getting something out of it. I have a notion that they were spending that money to get something. I think it was the power of these investigators. That money went basically to purchase the services of a hundred or more investigators each calendar year, from the 1960s through the 1990s. Looking at some documents that I recently collected in the Center for Legislative Archives here in DC, during 1965, 117 people I’ve identified went through S&I. In 1966, 118. In 1967, 235 people. So those are people who served for part of a year. It really amplified the impact that these folks were on detail. They were all over the place.
I think another factor that you have to consider when you think about how big they were is their footprint. Up through the 2000s, the S&I staff, which was headquartered in the Ford Office Building, had locations all around the DC area, four or five SCIFs, a set of offices at the Pentagon that I’ve heard multiple people say were large. One person described the Pentagon offices of the S&I as palatial. They had offices at Langley. I have a number of documents asking for an office to be set up in McLean. So that footprint, I think, again, amplified the impact of these investigators. Even though they were under the radar, if you were in the know, you knew. And certainly, if they showed up, if you learned that they were doing a study, it caught your attention.
Kevin Kosar:
And because they worked for the Appropriations Committee and all government runs on funding provided by that committee, I take it that, from what you’ve gleaned, they were researching and investigating all sorts of topics. It’s not like they were just tasked with one single narrow area. They’ve got their fingers in everything. Is that right?
Matthew Dull:
Yes, and their bread and butter was always defense and intelligence. I have from the Center for Legislative Archives, from calendar years 1969 to 1972, full copies of all of the reports that were issued by S&I. About 60% of those are military or military construction. It’s a lot of sort of nuts and bolts: the government is going to spend a lot of money developing a piece of land; let’s kick the tires.
Over time, the type of study changed. It changed really because, in part, the S&I workforce changed, and maybe that even works the other way: the S&I workforce changed because the questions that the appropriators were asking changed. At the beginning, they were almost all FBI agents. And in fact, there’s a story—probably apocryphal, but a little bit of truth to it—about the creation of S&I that doesn’t really center on Cannon’s grand design for a neutral competence, but really centers the relationship between Cannon and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Agent Richard Ash, I mentioned, who had written this one history, describes the creation of S&I this way.
He says:
It is said that on one occasion in the early 1940’s the Honorable Clarence Cannon (D) of Missouri, then Chairman of the Appropriations Committee was seated next to Director J. Edgar Hoover at some function at the Mayflower Hotel [in Washington, DC]. Representative Cannon, after complimenting Mr. Hoover for the successes of the FBI and its complement of Special Agents, said he wished he had a similar group to help him with the committee’s oversight responsibilities. Mr. Hoover is said to have replied, “How many do you want?”
And I think that says it all. There’s a historian, Aaron Stockham, who’s written about the early history of S&I, and particularly the relationship between the Appropriations Committee and the FBI.
That was an alliance that greatly empowered the FBI. For 25 or 30 years, most of the SNI staff were FBI agents on detail. At the beginning, they had actually worked out an arrangement where the early members of the FBI who went to serve on the S&I staff would meet with J. Edgar Hoover and resign their commission. They’d basically resign from the FBI and go to work on the Hill in a way to sort of obscure the fact that the Hill had this extra staff. But the bottom line was, as a consequence, those folks really belonged to J. Edgar Hoover when they were working for the committee. They were working for the committee, but they needed the approval of J. Edgar Hoover to have their career back when they went back to the FBI.
The first 25 directors of SNI between 1943 and 1977 were all FBI agents on detail. And I’ve said that between 40-50% of the salary budget for the Appropriations Committee went to S&I; one-third of the Appropriations Committee budget went directly to the FBI just for detailed agents from the 1960s to the 1970s, up until frankly Hoover’s death and a number of things, as you are well aware, that happened that sort of complicated the FBI’s reputation for neutral competence in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Then S&I shifted its model. They self-consciously moved to a GAO model. After 1977, the S&I director position rotated between a GAO person and an S&I person. By the early 1980s, 50 or 60 GAO staffers were each year detailed to SNI. That was the single largest place that GAO was sending detailees during that period. It was a giant investment. And I think part of what they wanted to do when they brought in GAO staff was to address a problem that they had, which was their investigative model. It was a methodology. I heard one person tell me that with the FBI guys, somebody would tell them something and they’d write it in a report, whereas GAO had a methodology for fact-checking, tracing, and verifying. They had a certain kind of rigor. Their skills and methods, their model of neutral competence fit the era better, and I think that during their peak activity in the 1970s and 1980s, S&I was really a GAO-fueled oversight juggernaut.
Kevin Kosar:
When I was thinking about Surveys and Investigations, they kind of stick out amongst legislative branch neutral competence-based agencies insofar as the other agencies’ stuff is public. GAO reports are public, CBO is public, and CRS reports were widely circulated on Capitol Hill and then became officially public six to eight years ago. That was something Daniel Schuman and I worked on. But Surveys and Investigation reports were not, and I remember thinking, “Gosh, why is this?”
The answer is obviously that information is power. And the Appropriations Committee knows what they know. It’s the people at the top there who are going to have this information, and then they can use that information to make their decisions or not; all the better to have the information all to you. So that in itself is fascinating.
Matthew Dull:
Could I read you a quote, actually, to that point?
There are different explanations, but one former investigator said to me about the secrecy that they didn’t want a lot of visibility into a particular investigation they were conducting because people are generally likely to be more forthcoming if something is not on the front page of the newspaper. It made a difference. People were more forthcoming when you kept it under the radar, is what they said.
And I think that’s exactly what they had in mind. In fact, going back just very briefly to Cannon’s explanation, he said in 1943:
The system cannot be used for the publicizing or aggrandizement of the chairman or any member of the committee. Requests submitted by the subcommittees are for facts. Opinions are not admitted. The investigators receive written assignments and make written reports, and from those facts reported the members of the committee deduce their own opinions. Results of the investigations are not released to the newspapers. The Department which has been investigated does not itself know what the investigator has reported and as a result must be on its toes ready for any development when its representatives appear before the committee in the hearings on the Budget estimates.
That is something I heard again and again. These agencies did not like the fact that there was a report out there that they had not seen, and that maybe the appropriators whom they were appearing before knew something that they didn’t know.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah, it’s a different model of accountability.
I think frequently, at least in this modern, post-1970s congressional reforms era, the idea is that oversight means putting sunlight in there and getting as many eyeballs on the outside looking in and looking for wrongdoing. The earlier form of oversight was to say, “Look, you do that, have a lot of other people looking in, people are going to get embarrassed, they’re going to get defensive, they’re going to lawyer up, they’re gonna hide information, they’re gonna drag their feet in responding. If we keep this behind closed doors, maybe we can get to the truth, and we can get this corrected.”
We are getting close to being out of time, but I have a couple of questions I just can’t leave without asking.
Surveys and Investigations, it’s 2026, they’re not here anymore. I think you said they were abolished in 2024. Do we know why? Was it ever explained publicly, or are we guessing what happened?
Matthew Dull:
This is the first time that I’ve had an opportunity to speak on this topic in a public setting; this is a question that I would like Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole to answer. He has not; his staff has not. I’ve gotten a firm, “We will not talk to you.” They have not responded to my queries.
They reorganized. You can see it in the staffing reports. There was nothing written. This was an institution that played a very important role for many years, and it’s pretty striking that it’s gone now and nobody noticed.
There are lots of reasons for the demise of S&I. As I mentioned in the paper, which is the first article written about the history of S&I, a lot of it had to do with polarization and the fact that these tasking directives required signatures from both parties.
But there are other factors. I think the politics around visible oversight changed a ton, and I think in some ways S&I no longer fit the ecosystem. It wasn’t what the members wanted anymore. And in fact, actually, there was a real sense of disappointment among the folks that I’ve spoken with, that what they call the “front office”—these are the folks who are running the committee—that they just didn’t care. One staffer said, “When the two parties no longer sign a directive, that’s the end of your investigation. It doesn’t start. There is no investigation.” This is a disappointment that is directed not just at Tom Cole and the Republicans. It is actually the chairman Rosa DeLauro. A couple of members who were S&I staff say that it was when DeLauro became chair that she basically made it clear she wasn’t having any tasking directive signed. Her experience was in the HELP subcommittee, which was so polarized that it had not initiated an S&I study for 20 years. She had no prior experience with S&I oversight, and I think it’s an example that the members who are elevated to the chairmanship now have a different set of oversight priorities that are not served by S&I and its nonpartisan, under-the-radar model.
Kevin Kosar:
All right. I have got to slip in this closing question: if you had to pick—and I know it’s hard—what’s the most interesting or surprising thing you learned about the S&I staff so far?
Matthew Dull:
The one I’d really like for your listeners to remember is the story of what’s called the Lee List. The third director of Surveys and Investigations was a character named Robert E. Lee. He is the only director of S&I in the 80-year history of S&I to have leveraged that powerful position for publicity and to advance his career. He leveraged his S&I position into an FCC commissioner position. He became the longest-serving FCC commissioner.
Now, how did he leverage that position? His staff in 1947 did a study of the State Department that produced an appendix with 108 names, drawn from State Department personnel files, basically derogatory information that the investigators had pulled from the files. That Lee list was repurposed in February 1950 by Joe McCarthy and became McCarthy’s list. And not only that, Lee and McCarthy became good friends and partisan allies. That is an extraordinary story that I hope I’ll have an opportunity sometime to tell more fully because it really needs to be told.
Kevin Kosar:
Thank you very much, Professor Matthew Dull, for telling us a little bit about the mysterious and mostly forgotten House Appropriations Surveys and Investigations staff. Listeners are reminded that you can learn a whole lot more by reading Matt’s fabulous paper. And you will also find links in the program notes to additional materials.
Thank you, Matt.
Matthew Dull:
Thank you.
Kevin Kosar:
Thank you for listening to Understanding Congress, a podcast of the American Enterprise Institute. This program was produced by Jaehun Lee and hosted by Kevin Kosar. You can subscribe to Understanding Congress via Stitcher, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn. We hope you will share this podcast with others and tell us what you think about it by posting your thoughts and questions on X and tagging @AEI. Once again, thank you for listening, and have a great day.
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