Ai Slop Is Swamping A House Office That Drafts Us Laws

Congressional lawyers are struggling to manage a flood of legislative proposals generated using artificial intelligence tools, many of them riddled with errors and shoddy language.

The strain on the House Office of Legislative Counsel is increasing as more congressional offices and outside groups rely on generative AI to draft legislation, according to interviews with eight current and former officials who work or have worked with the office.

They said AI’s ability to quickly generate mountains of text is forcing the OLC’s lawyers to spend significantly more time reviewing and rewriting the proposals. And in many cases, the drafts are plagued by mistakes that could ripple well beyond Washington — tying up the passage of legislation and risking lawsuits over erroneously cited statutes or incorrect legal definitions.

AI’s arrival on Capitol Hill means that the rapidly advancing technology — already threatening to disrupt software, warfare, Hollywood and myriad other industries — could soon shape laws that affect millions of Americans, in unpredictable ways.

“AI is good for a lot of stuff,” said Daniel Schuman, executive director of the nonprofit American Governance Institute, which helps modernize government technology. “But it’s not capable of drafting legislation that you would want to enact into law.”

Staffers and outside groups are “going to Claude or ChatGPT to draft the legislative language itself,” said one person who has advised office staff on the technology, who like several other people quoted in this story were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.

Given the errors AI tools generate, the OLC spends “more time trying to fix AI-drafted legislation than it would take for them to draft it from scratch,” the person said.

“AI cannot replace the skilled and dedicated professionals in the Office of Legislative Counsel who help the House do its most critical job,” Rep. Joe Morelle, the top Democrat on the Committee on House Administration, said in a statement.

“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,” said Rep. Norma Torres, another Democrat on the committee. The OLC enjoys technical expertise essential to drafting effective legislation, adding that ultimate responsibility for introduced legislation falls on members of Congress and their staff. “That responsibility cannot be outsourced to a chatbot,” she said.

But 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.

“It’s absolutely terrifying,” a House staffer said, “and no one is thinking about it yet.”

Why AI is so terrible at writing bills

People familiar with AI tools and the office’s work said the task of writing legislation is filled with crucial details that can trip up artificial intelligent agents — for instance, whether a particular pot of money should be a “tax credit, tax deduction, tax exclusion or a grant,” said Wade Ballou, who headed the legislative counsel’s office from 2016 to 2024. “AI is going to miss those nuances,” he said.

In other cases, 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, a person who works with the OLC said.

AI-generated drafts can also incorrectly cite previous statutes, said Ari Hershowitz, a lawyer and technologist who has worked with the office to integrate tech tools into its processes — “a guaranteed way of introducing thousands of bugs into our legal system.”

The American Governance Institute’s Schuman said that commercially available AI tools do not have the attention to detail and nuanced legal understanding needed to write bills.

The importance of the Office of Legislative Counsel

Heading off those pitfalls is the job of the OLC, whose dozens of civil servants are one of Congress’ most important quality-control checks.

The OLC “is the institutional capacity that makes Congress’s primary constitutional power, lawmaking actually work,” said Marci Harris, executive director of the government modernization nonprofit POPVOX Foundation. “When we talk about Congress’s ability to legislate, we are talking about this office.”

Those staffers are preparing for AI to expand their already heavy workload, OLC leader Warren Burke testified in a March hearing — even without any errors. He declined to comment for this article.

The office has seen a steady increase in the number of 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.

With artificial intelligence expected to continue driving that increase, overworked OLC staff may be slower to respond to members’ requests for review.

“Text produced by outside entities, whether a human or a computer, often takes significantly longer to review and revise as necessary to ensure the text accomplishes the sponsor’s intended policy goals,” Burke testified in March.

The delay may drive lawmakers to simply introduce AI-generated bills rather than work with the OLC to draft them, said a person who works with the office. No bills that have been voted on by either chamber have been shown to be entirely crafted by AI.

But AI-generated bill text is often riddled with mistakes, such as using the wrong terms, said Ballou and Schuman. Ballou, Schuman and Hershowitz added that incorrectly referencing portions of the U.S. Code is a common error found in such text.

Unless the office’s lawyers can keep those mistakes from ending up in statutes, agencies and courts might struggle to understand what the vague or erroneous laws are instructing them to do. And Congress might need to spend more time fixing past errors.

AI tools are already being integrated across the federal government, Ballou said. But applying an error-prone technology to the statutory language underpinning U.S. law creates “the highest risk at the apex of failure.”

‘A complete incongruency’

Compounding the problem: People who use AI to write legislation may not be publicizing it. “Staffers who use AI don’t tend to talk about it,” said one staffer, who told POLITICO that using AI still feels taboo. “Fully AI-generated bills are a disservice to the entire legislative process.”

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. “Not a shocker. Most staff use it,” she said in a social media post. She has since told her staff “to make sure they are double checking and more thorough.”

In addition to errors, the drafts OLC is reviewing are already becoming wordier, a hallmark of AI’s hand in drafting, according to a person who works with the OLC.

And as AI use increases, more congressional staffers are unable to articulate what they want their bill to accomplish, the person said. Without drafting the text themselves, they are not forced to “learn the issue as deeply,” leaving AI agents to make consequential choices about definitions and wording.

Taken together, those trends make it even more crucial for staff at the OLC to comb through each draft they receive.

Yet speed remains a challenge: AI can draft text so quickly that, without proper support, it is certain to overwhelm the office, the American Governance Institute’s Schuman said.

“Members and interest groups get to write things with AI, but then leg counsel themselves can’t use [commercially available] AI," said Charlotte Lee, director of strategic growth at Granicus, a software company that provides public sector organizations including the OLC with tech tools.

“There’s a complete incongruency,” she said.

How the OLC is using tech

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.

Already, the office has integrated various tech tools into its systems to assist its staff.

One tool, a software program called 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 that Hershowitz described as “the first AI tool in the House.”

Hershowitz, who developed the tool alongside OLC staff and other contributors, see the software as 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.

And 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.

The Senate’s adoption has not been as extensive, with only a limited number of staffers having access to the tool, Schuman said.

As a member of the Appropriations Committee, Morelle said that 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.”

For now, Ballou sees AI’s clearest role in his former office 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.”

Even without mistakes, 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.”