No, that’s not my word. That’s the word Paul Glastris and Haley Sweetland Edwards use to title the lead article in the summer issue of Washington Monthly.

What they mean is that the moment the Republicans took over the House in 1994 (Gingrich and his crowd), they took a meat ax to Congress’s permanent workforce. They

cut the “professional staff” (the lawyers, economists, and investigators who work for committees rather than individual members) by a third. They reduced the “legislative support staff” (the auditors, analysts, and subject-matter experts at the Government Accountability Office [GAO], the Congressional Research Service [CRS], and so on) by a third, too, and killed off the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) entirely. And they fundamentally dismantled the old committee structure, centralizing power in the House speaker’s office and discouraging members and their staff from performing their own policy research.

[snip]

Today, the GAO and the CRS, which serve both House and Senate, are each operating at about 80 percent of their 1979 capacity. While Senate committee staffs have rebounded somewhat under Democratic control, every single House standing committee had fewer staffers in 2009 than in 1994. Since 2011, with a Tea Party-radicalized GOP back in control of the House, Congress has cut its budget by a whopping 20 percent, a far higher ratio than any other federal agency, leading, predictably, to staff layoffs, hiring and salary freezes, and drooping morale.

As you might imagine, this has had many deleterious effects. One is the outsourcing of policy development to lobbyists and think tanks. Since those outfits are by their nature close to corporations and business, policies and legislation have been favorable to those entities. Second is Congress’s inability to do oversight of the government. Its resources are so limited that it can’t seem to do more than one investigation at a time, which means other areas needing oversight (NSA surveillance?) fall by the wayside.

I daresay most of us haven’t noticed all these cuts. They need to be corrected, but as long as the Republican party’s goal is to reduce the size of government that probably isn’t going to happen.

It’s a fascinating article, well worth the read.