'A different way of doing law': For four decades, he drafted bills in the House

WASHINGTON — Wade Ballou pointed at a scarred wooden table in his office.

“Let me give you a warning about this table. Supposedly, the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 was written on this. I’ve had the legs raised a bit, but it continues to be a bit low. Watch your knees and all of that.”

His tenure doesn’t stretch back quite so far, but for over 40 years, Ballou worked for the House Office of the Legislative Counsel, which helps draft bills for members of Congress.

“It’s all legal work. We maintain the attorney-client privilege, and we’re nonpartisan, so we work for everybody,” he said.

Handling bills both big and small, he saw the drafting process change across the decades. He rose from trainee to tax expert to leader of the office, a role he took in 2016.

Now he’s headed into retirement, and Ballou sat down with Roll Call in October, after making the announcement. He said he’s ready to spend some more time with his grandkids, and he has some thoughts about the future, including the promise and perils of AI.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Q: Can you describe what the office does?

A: We receive requests from members for bills, resolutions, amendments, and in a back-and-forth with them, we seek to understand what it is they really want to do. What’s the problem they’re trying to solve, and what’s their policy solution?

And then we advise on how their solution will tie into law, what we find in our research, raise additional questions, provide a draft, and essentially come to agreement with them on whether or not the draft reflects their policy.

Q: How did you get your first job here?

A: I went to UVA law, and I was engaged, and my now wife was up here in northern Virginia. So I was just signing up for interviews with everybody, and one day I got a note in my mailbox saying, “You have an interview with Legislative Counsel.” And I said, “Who?”

I basically walked into the interview blind and got intrigued. It’s a different way of doing law. I was signing up for firms, but my heart was not in firms. I was a forest firefighter in college, and my father was a judge and had been in the Navy, so we were a public service-oriented family. And I was intrigued by the opportunity to mix both law and public service in a way I had not imagined before.

Q: What are some topics you’ve worked on over the years?

A: I had a chance to be involved in pretty much all the tax bills from 1996 through roughly 2017 or so, and then a number of the large health care bills even before that.

One of the things we say in the tax [realm] as something finally comes together and we send it out, we look at each other and say, “Hope it works.” It doesn’t have to become law. That’s not our responsibility. So it might not pass, it might get vetoed, but the fact that we pulled together what the members wanted, and it works as well as we can get it to work in the time allowed, that for me is a real sense of accomplishment.

Q: How have you seen the office change over time?

A: Probably the biggest one would be relating to computers. When I arrived, there was a mainframe, and there were terminals our clerks had. I would be writing out long-hand what I wanted, or I would go and dictate, and the process was slower, more reflective. The high cost of making changes meant that changes were more deliberate.

Q: Now there’s talk about AI changing how Congress writes legislation. What do you think?

A: I’m the wet blanket at the party. How do you use something like that in a responsible way? Because as attorneys, we have the ethical obligation to actually know what we’re working on and to advise our clients, the members, accordingly.

Having said that, AI is a tool, and like any other tool, we can use it responsibly, and in fact, we already have in the House with the Comparative Print Suite.

Backing up a little bit, there’s a requirement in the rules that anytime a committee reports a bill, they have to have a statement in their committee report that shows how the bill changes current law. That requirement is known as a Ramseyer in the House, after Congressman Ramseyer, who got it adopted into the rules in 1929.

Fast forward to [several years ago], and there was a change in the House rules that began to expand on that requirement. We had already developed a tool that allowed us to prepare Ramseyers electronically, and it was actually fairly good at the time, getting roughly 70 to 80% accuracy, but then required an expert to actually go through and add in what it missed. So we turned that tool around and had to completely redo it [using natural language processing].

Now the tool is in the high 90s in terms of accuracy. It shows how a bill would modify current law, how an amendment would modify a bill, and a bill-to-bill comparison that’s more robust than what you would get just using Microsoft Word. And it’s a kind of AI that’s not out there hallucinating.

Q: So it sounds like you’re comfortable using AI to help compare legislation. But what about actually drafting it?

A: We had a conference a couple weeks ago with the Organization of American States. It was all about AI in legislation, and [in one exercise we] just kind of put in a few prompts and said, “Hey, give me a bill that does this.” And I immediately went to the end of it, and it provided for regulations, and it was kind of OK, except for the fact it did not address the recent Supreme Court cases. So it’s interesting, but from a legal point of view, that is really inadequate, right? It’s got a long way to go.