The topic of this episode is, “What is the Congressional Research Service, and what does it do?”The guest of this show is me, Kevin Kosar.  I spent a little over a decade at the Congressional Research Service (CRS) working as a non-partisan analyst and as an acting section research manager. Subsequent to my time at the agency, I was one of the individuals who advocated that Congress make CRS reports available to the public and not just legislators. I’ve also written about CRS and the other legislative branch support agencies, like CBO and GAO.But it would be weird for me to ask myself questions and then answer them, so I asked my AEI colleague, Jaehun Lee, to serve as my interlocutor.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’s 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’m your host Kevin Kosar and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.All right, Jaehun, take it away.Jaehun Lee:Let's start simple. What is the Congressional Research Service?Kevin Kosar:The Congressional Research Service is the rare government agency where its name actually accurately describes what it does. It is a research and reference service for Congress. Congress is its lone client. CRS is an agency in inside the Library of Congress. So it is a federal government agency—not some sort of private sector research outfit—and its job is to support Congress and to do so by providing nonpartisan research, analysis, legal opinions, and just about anything else that Congress may require.You think about Congress, it's comprised of regular Americans—anybody can run for Congress and anybody can become a congressional staffer. And when those people come to Washington DC, they're suddenly saddled with this immense responsibility of governing: they have to make laws, they have to oversee executive agencies, and they have to respond to lots of constituents. They have to receive interest groups who come through their doors, making demands of them related to policy and spending.Nobody who enters that position is fully equipped to handle it. We're all amateurs when it comes to governing, and CRS plays a critical role in helping those folks govern. So if you're a brand new legislator and you're trying to figure out, “How do I introduce my first bill? Where do I even get this thing drafted?” You can call up CRS and they'll say, “Okay, here are the steps. Here's how you should reach out to legislative counsel within the chamber who can actually put your ideas into a template and grind it through.” They can help you on these sort of things. They can teach you the basics of legislative procedure: what's a filibuster? How does a congressional budget process work?They also are a giant resource for facts and nonpartisan—and this is key, nonpartisan—analysis. Everybody in DC in the private sector to one degree or another has an angle, a perspective. Often, especially when you're talking about interest groups or lobbyists, they have specific policy goals and they are going to make arguments to persuade you to pick their policies or to support them. CRS...