Congress Buckles Under E-mail Pressures

The good news is that people are using e-mail in an unprecedented number to contact their elected officials —now Capitol Hill needs to figure out a way to deal with the sheer volume of electronic correspondence.

by Roy Mark of dc.internet.com [March 21, 2001]

The bad news is that congressional offices are drowning in the digital flood of e-mail correspondence. The even worse news—Congress is doing little to change its condition as thousands upon thousands of e-mails go unanswered and voter frustration with the representatives mounts.

The handling or, more likely, mishandling of e-mail by congressional offices is the focus of a new study, Email Overload in Congress, by the Congress Online Project.

The report doles out blame for the current situation equally among:

• grassroots organizers who mount massive e-mail campaigns
• individual constituents who expect instant responses
• overworked, undermanned and poorly trained congressional office staffs
• disuse of the software available to offices to help alleviate the problem
• Congress itself for not allocating enough resources

The problem begins with the sheer volume of e-mail. The number of e-mail messages reaching the House of Representatives, for example, rose from 20 million in 1998 to 48 million last year, and it continues to grow by an average of one million messages a month. When controversial issues arise, the volume of e-mails spike even higher, usually driven by grassroots organizers urging their members to e-mail Congress. Because it is so easy to e-mail all members of the House and the Senate, these groups are, in effect, spamming Congress.

For example, The heavy e-mail traffic generated by the recent nomination of John Ashcroft as U.S. Attorney General slowed Senate servers to a crawl, causing delays in e-mail delivery that lasted hours and, in some cases, days. In the last year, Congress has also been inundated with e-mail about prescription drugs and the 2000 presidential election.

According to the report, the e-mail explosion began in December of 1998 with the beginning of the impeachment process. Prior to that, House offices were easily dealing with the few dozen e-mail messages each week while Senate offices received several hundred messages.

But when the impeachment process began, both the House and Senate received a deluge of e-mail from impassioned Americans wishing their views to be heard—and acknowledged.

In January 1999, during the peak week of the impeachment proceedings, House offices received up to 1,000 e-mail messages each day and Senate offices received up to 10,000 e-mails—most from people outside their districts or states who were e-mailing multiple members of Congress, according to the report.

The report adds that while the daily volume of e-mail diminished after impeachment proceedings ended, it never returned to the pre-impeachment lows. And since then, the volume of daily e-mail has been steadily climbing. For example, in August 2000—historically a quiet month for congressional offices—the House of Representatives received about 4 million e-mail messages, which pales in comparison with the 7 million messages the House received in December 2000 during the presidential election recount.

On the receiving end of these e-mails are the individual congressional offices. Unlike large organizations in the private sector, there is no central e-mail server for filtering and processing the correspondence. Each office handles its own e-mail in its own fashion.

While many congressional offices realize that they must change their ways, to do so would require rethinking not only their communications practices, but also retooling their budgeting and hiring practices to support these new e-mail activities.

Additionally, some offices are not even taking advantage of technology currently available to help handle the onslaught of e-mail. For example, researchers found that almost half of all congressional offices own software that could automate e-mail message sorting and set-up auto-responders, but that fewer than 10 percent of all offices on Capitol Hill actually use it.

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