[barry-cotter]

There’s no necessary contradiction between those two things. More importantly lobbyists are indispensable because Congressfolk have tiny, tiny staff budgets so it’s not like they have their own internal researchers or even their own legal team. People forming the United States have unpaid interns because they can’t afford better.

[jacobolus]

Congress has tiny staff budgets partly because one of the parties outsources all of its policy analysis and legislation writing to lobbyists, all of its public outreach/education to corrupt “think tanks” and corporate-owned media outlets, and intentionally eviscerated their own budget because in the past their own independent expert analysis often contradicted industry preferences, which was inconvenient for the corporations calling the shots.

[briandear]

One of the parties? You haven’t been around DC much I’m assuming.

[jacobolus]

Yes, one of the parties is largely responsible for budget cuts in the Congress’s own staff.

A web search turns up e.g. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/news/2015/06...

Or more recently and pointedly, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-congress-cbo-idUSKBN1...

Or you can find many other sources from the past 25 years discussing this.

The Congress should be robustly funding the Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Budget Office, committee staff, individual members’ staff, etc. But one party does not want the Congress to build up long-term institutional expertise or do careful independent analysis.

[markdown]

Then they should be paid whatever is necessary to make lobbyists unnecessary. I suspect though that that would change nothing, because these "expert" lobbyists you support don't really want lawmakers to have full knowledge of whatever is important to them; their goal is to feed lawmakers the information they need to entice them to support the lobbyists agenda.