Congressional lawyers wrestle with error-prone AI-drafted legislation

A growing number of congressional offices are using publicly available AI platforms to write draft bills, prompting the House Office of Legislative Counsel to confront a surge of flawed proposals. Lawyers there note that the drafts often contain incorrect legal terms, misplaced citations and misinterpretations of funding mechanisms, forcing staff to redo much of the work that would have been done from scratch. Former head Wade Ballou explained that AI cannot reliably decide whether a monetary provision should be a tax credit, deduction, exclusion or grant, and it sometimes omits jurisdictions like the District of Columbia and tribal nations.

The practice also appears to distance staffers from the substantive issues their bills address. In response, the office has created an internal AI tool called Comparative Print Suite, which highlights where a proposal cannot be mapped onto existing law, thereby preventing hallucinated language from entering drafts.