Congressional lawyers are drowning in a flood of legislative proposals generated with artificial intelligence tools, and the House Office of Legislative Counsel is paying the price. The office’s lawyers are spending far more time reviewing and rewriting bill text as more congressional offices and outside groups lean on generative AI to draft legislation, according to interviews with eight current and former officials who work or have worked with the office. The result is a pileup of shoddy language, wrong citations and legal mistakes that could slow legislation and trigger lawsuits over erroneous statutes or bad definitions.
Who Does the Fixing
The burden lands on a small corps of civil servants. The OLC, which Marci Harris called “the institutional capacity that makes Congress’s primary constitutional power, lawmaking actually work,” has become the quality-control checkpoint for a system that now expects machines to spit out law. Harris, executive director of the government modernization nonprofit POPVOX Foundation, said, “When we talk about Congress’s ability to legislate, we are talking about this office.” That’s the choke point. Not the members. Not the outside groups feeding the machine. The office.
Warren Burke, the OLC leader, testified in March that staffers are preparing for AI to expand an already heavy workload, even without errors. He declined to comment for the article. The office has seen a steady increase in requests and introduced bills over the last decade. In the last Congress, Burke’s office of 61 attorneys and 19 support staff prepared over 30,000 bills, nearly three times as many as were actually introduced. In early 2025, during the first 60 days of the current Congress, the office received 5,623 requests for legislation, Burke told the House Subcommittee on Legislative Branch Appropriations in testimony last year, up 72 percent from two years earlier.
That’s the hierarchy in plain sight. A tiny staff absorbs the mess while the broader machine keeps accelerating.
What AI Is Doing to the Process
Daniel Schuman, executive director of the nonprofit American Governance Institute, which helps modernize government technology, said, “AI is good for a lot of stuff. But it’s not capable of drafting legislation that you would want to enact into law.” A person who has advised office staff on the technology said staffers and outside groups are “going to Claude or ChatGPT to draft the legislative language itself,” and that the OLC spends “more time trying to fix AI-drafted legislation than it would take for them to draft it from scratch.”
Four congressional staffers involved in drafting bills told POLITICO that AI use is becoming more commonplace in the House, with staffers and advocacy groups relying on it for their daily work, including reviewing and drafting legislation. One House staffer said, “It’s absolutely terrifying, and no one is thinking about it yet.”
The details matter, and AI keeps missing them. Wade Ballou, who headed the legislative counsel’s office from 2016 to 2024, pointed to the difference between a “tax credit, tax deduction, tax exclusion or a grant.” He said, “AI is going to miss those nuances.” A person who works with the OLC said D.C. and tribal nations may wind up excluded from federal programs if a bill defines a state as referring only to the 50 states.
Ari Hershowitz, a lawyer and technologist who has worked with the office to integrate tech tools into its processes, said AI-generated drafts can also incorrectly cite previous statutes, calling that “a guaranteed way of introducing thousands of bugs into our legal system.” Schuman said commercially available AI tools do not have the attention to detail and nuanced legal understanding needed to write bills.
The People at the Bottom Pay First
The consequences don’t stay inside the Capitol walls. Mistakes can ripple beyond Washington, tying up the passage of legislation and risking lawsuits over erroneously cited statutes or incorrect legal definitions. If the office’s lawyers can’t catch the errors, agencies and courts might struggle to understand what the vague or erroneous laws are instructing them to do. Congress might then have to spend more time fixing past errors.
Ballou said AI tools are already being integrated across the federal government, but applying an error-prone technology to the statutory language underpinning U.S. law creates “the highest risk at the apex of failure.” A staffer said staffers who use AI don’t tend to talk about it because using AI still feels taboo. “Fully AI-generated bills are a disservice to the entire legislative process,” the staffer said.
Rep. Joe Morelle, the top Democrat on the Committee on House Administration, said in a statement, “AI cannot replace the skilled and dedicated professionals in the Office of Legislative Counsel who help the House do its most critical job.” Rep. Norma Torres, another Democrat on the committee, said, “Relying too heavily on AI-generated bill text could introduce errors, create unintended legal consequences, or result in language that does not accurately reflect a member’s policy intent.” She said the OLC enjoys technical expertise essential to drafting effective legislation and that ultimate responsibility for introduced legislation falls on members of Congress and their staff. “That responsibility cannot be outsourced to a chatbot,” she said.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Florida, came under fire in June for submitting a summary of an amendment that was generated using Claude, but she said the amendment itself was not written by AI. In a social media post, she said, “Not a shocker. Most staff use it.” She has since told her staff “to make sure they are double checking and more thorough.”
The House Wants Speed. The Office Gets the Mess
Speed remains the obsession. Schuman said AI can draft text so quickly that, without proper support, it is certain to overwhelm the office. Charlotte Lee, director of strategic growth at Granicus, a software company that provides public sector organizations including the OLC with tech tools, said, “Members and interest groups get to write things with AI, but then leg counsel themselves can’t use [commercially available] AI.” She said, “There’s a complete incongruency.”
The OLC has convened a working group to explore how AI may be used to “improve efficiencies, such as by improving legal research,” Burke said in his March testimony. The office has also integrated various tech tools into its systems to assist its staff. One tool, the Comparative Print Suite, allows congressional staffers to visualize how a certain bill will change the U.S. Code. Many bills include instructions on how to amend current law, striking through certain phrases and inserting others. The Comparative Print Suite uses natural language processing, a form of artificial intelligence, to show exactly how the U.S. Code would be amended, a feat Hershowitz described as “the first AI tool in the House.”
Hershowitz, who developed the tool alongside OLC staff and other contributors, said the software is far superior to what commercially available products can do because it is designed to return error messages when it cannot be confident where changes should be made. “There’s no hallucinations,” Hershowitz said, contrasting it with typical generative AI tools that, when faced with uncertainty, will make assumptions in order to complete the task. It was designed specifically with Congress in mind.
Lee, one of the lead designers on the Comparative Print Suite, tailored the tool to the office’s needs through interviews with those who would use the technology and weekly meetings with OLC staff. Lee said the personalized process will lead to fewer mistakes and allow the Comparative Print Suite to gain widespread adoption across the legislative branch. Schuman said the Senate’s adoption has not been as extensive, with only a limited number of staffers having access to the tool.
Morelle said he was committed to equipping the House OLC “with the resources to continue its exemplary service and ensure that all legislation remains a thoughtful, high-quality product.” Ballou said AI’s clearest role in his former office is as an aid to legislative drafters, not a substitute for them. AI can help lawmakers process information, he said, but it cannot replace the “art of drafting.” Hershowitz said he expects the office’s workload to worsen as AI speeds up the generation of bill text. “You had a problem that was already at 10,” he said. “Now you multiply it by 100.”