Experts debate how Congress can handle e-mail overflow

An avalanche of e-mails to Capitol Hill this week underscored the need for Congress to devote more money and resources to technologies, a communications expert warned Wednesday. The House's "Write Your Rep" application, which lets the public identify and contact their representatives in Washington, was so overwhelmed as members battled over the $700 billion financial rescue plan that administrators had to impose limits on the Web-based program.

Comment on this article in The Forum.A memo sent to House members from the Chief Administrative Officer stated that during hours of peak demand, "some constituents attempting to use the system may receive a message asking them to try back at a later time, when demand is not so extreme." The restrictions were necessary to ensure that congressional Web sites were not completely disabled by the millions of e-mails flowing into the system. CAO spokesman Jeff Ventura said new software and hardware were installed to mitigate the issue but warned it would take several days for the system to recover.

"Congressional offices are struggling to keep up, and this scenario highlights that fact," the Congressional Management Foundation's Tim Hysom said. "More planning for bandwidth and resources is required to help the House and Senate manage what will ultimately be communication volumes like this in the future." That advice will be a cornerstone of a report that the foundation, which has studied how citizens communicate with Congress, will release in December.

There have been peak moments of communication in the past, Hysom said, pointing to the controversy over President Bill Clinton's 1998 impeachment as the first time Capitol Hill offices grappled with e-mail overflow. More recent spikes have occurred during debates over the Iraq war, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and interrogation policy. "When there are these big spikes, communication volumes never really go back to the previous levels," he said.

A June report by the foundation found that twice as many citizens who contact Congress do so via the Internet rather than by postal mail or the telephone. According to the study, 73 percent of staffers said their offices spent more time on constituent communications than they did two years before, and about half said they had to reallocate resources to cope with the surge. "It's difficult for one office to engage in hundreds of thousands of conversations," Hysom said.

But David Almacy, who left his post as White House Internet director last year to join the public relations firm Waggener Edstrom, downplayed the problem. "To invest millions of dollars in infrastructure that would enable millions of e-mails to come in at any given time would be an overreaction," he said. System failures occur only when a particular issue reaches a heightened level of public interest. "99.9 percent of the time, services are up and running, but the system is not designed for situations like the one they faced this week," Almacy said.

Some members dealing with the constituent e-mail crisis took matters into their own hands. Rep. Sam Johnson, R-Texas, urged his constituents to either keep trying the Write Your Rep application or call one of his two office phone numbers to register their opinion. In a message posted on his Web site, Johnson thanked those who wanted to share their thoughts on the rescue package. In the past week, more than 2,300 constituents contacted Johnson about the bailout. He noted that the only time he recalled such constituent feedback was when the Senate debated immigration.