Unprecedented Obstruction?: Evaluating Presidential Responsiveness to Oversight in the Obama and Trump Administrations. Under review [email for draft]
President Trump has consistently disdained Congressional oversight and obstructed high-profile investigations of his administration. But how deeply has this president’s bucking of norms affected Congress’ ability to conduct routine oversight of the executive branch? Using an original data set, this paper proposes and presents new metrics for executive responsiveness to Congressional oversight requests, and compares the Trump administration’s provision of agency witness testimony to Congress with the Obama administration’s. I find that Trump provided far fewer federal witnesses of all types than Obama, under both united and divided government. However, one important measure of responsiveness shows that Congress was no less able to procure desired high-level witnesses under Trump than under his predecessor. My findings suggest that the steep and quick decline in routine oversight activity in Congress transcends Trump’s intransigence, and may be due to both chambers’—and both parties’—failure to make oversight a priority.

“I’ll Be the Oversight”: Lessons from the Trump Era. Under review. [email for draft]
In this paper, I contribute to the growing corpus of literature on former President Donald J. Trump’s effects on American democratic institutions. I focus on the particular institutionalized process of oversight and investigations in Congress and extract four primary lessons from the Trump era, showing that, while Trump did not change Congress’ basic investigative toolkit, he did expose the legislature’s institutional weaknesses through his defiance of Congressional subpoenas and his simultaneous decision to comply with federal court mandates. By pitting the legislature and the judiciary against one another, Trump demonstrated the extent to which effective democratic accountability through oversight depends upon the cooperation and commitment of all three branches of government.