Smith College Professor Sees Oversight as Key to Good Government

When Smith College Assistant Professor Claire Leavitt began looking into congressional oversight as part of her doctoral studies in 2016, the topic seldom registered on the public’s radar.

Fast forward to the current political moment, when oversight—the power of the legislative branch to ensure federal agencies and the president are following the law—is top of the news cycle.

Leavitt’s study comparing oversight activities during the Obama administration and the first Trump administration received this year’s Excellence in Research Award from the Carl Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy at Wayne State University Law School.

In Leavitt’s view, good government isn’t possible without good oversight. “The purpose of Congress is to problem solve, and you can’t solve problems if you are uninformed,” she says.

Drawing on data from congressional hearings, her paper “offers valuable context for understanding changes in the balance of power between Congress and the executive branch,” said Levin Center Director Jim Townsend in announcing the award.

An expert on American political institutions, Leavitt notes that the U.S. has a “long history of effective government oversight,” including, for example, an investigation led by then Senator Harry Truman into military war profiteering during World War II.

But “bipartisan oversight has become increasingly rare,” Leavitt adds, and President Trump’s refusal to cooperate with numerous congressional investigations during his first term “upended everything we thought we knew about how oversight is supposed to work.”

If a president defies a subpoena, Leavitt explains, “Congress doesn’t have enforcement power of its own. It has to turn to the courts.” The legislative branch could shut down the government or cut agency funding to force an executive to cooperate with investigations. “But that’s politically tricky,” she says. 

During the first Trump administration, “Republicans were doing oversight,” Leavitt notes. “They spent a lot of time investigating how agencies were functioning and calling out instances of waste and fraud.”

But after Democrats won back control of the House in 2018 and President Trump refused to cooperate with investigations, congressional power diminished.

Leavitt began her graduate studies thinking she would focus on the role of interest groups in politics. “But I realized the field of oversight offered an opportunity to make more of an impact—to answer a lot of big questions that needed to be answered,” Leavitt says.

Her award-winning paper addresses a number of those questions: How political polarization affects congressional oversight (it makes it harder); how the targets of government investigations have shifted over time (in the Republican-controlled 119th Congress, they include college campuses, trade with China, and Biden-Harris policies); and whether the courts have retained their enforcement authority (courts ruled more often against Trump in his first term, but it’s unclear what will happen in his second, given his appointment of political allies to the federal judiciary).

Next on Leavitt’s research agenda is measuring the effectiveness of oversight by identifying instances when congressional investigations have resulted in policy change. She is also interested in exploring whether oversight of the private sector leads to more desired policy change than oversight of government agencies.

Is she optimistic that the American democratic political system of checks and balances will survive?

“My students ask me that all the time,” Leavitt says. “If I were a betting person, I’d say it will continue.”

Her own experiences on Capitol Hill—including a stint as a fellow on the House Oversight Committee under the first year of divided government under Trump—are a source of that optimism. “It’s not as common in political science to experience the inner workings of the institution, versus just studying the data,” Leavitt notes.

 If there’s one idea she hopes her Smith students will take away from her classes, it’s this: “I want them to become Congress sympathizers,” Leavitt says, with a smile. “It’s extraordinarily tough to get things done even in the best of times. So I tell my students to go a little easier on the legislature.”