The House office that vets every bill for legal soundness is buried in AI-generated drafts.
Congressional staffers and outside groups are turning to Claude and ChatGPT to draft legislation before it reaches the House Office of Legislative Counsel. That office is staffed with lawyers whose job is to check the legal language line by line before a bill can move forward. According to interviews with eight current and former officials who have worked with the office, the volume of AI-assisted drafts has outpaced what the small legal staff can review. The result is a bottleneck at exactly the stage meant to catch errors before they become law.
Legislative counsel exists because bill language is unusually unforgiving: a misplaced clause can change who a law covers or whether it survives a court challenge. If AI tools speed up drafting but the review step stays a fixed, human bottleneck, you don't get faster lawmaking - you get more drafts waiting in a queue, with no guarantee the ones that move fastest were checked most carefully.
It's the same pattern that showed up when AI hit contract review and coding: the tools make the first draft cheap, and the expensive part - the reading - stays exactly as slow as before.