Health Agency Forms Permanent Commission to Have Celebrities Explain Things to Congress
The new panel has no budget, no research staff, and one recurring agenda item: scheduling.
Officials confirmed the creation of the National Commission on Explaining Things to Congress, a body formed after several members of the legislature admitted they had not personally reviewed the material an actor had just described to a subcommittee in plain language.
The commission's mandate is narrow. It does not fund clinics, train birth workers, or collect outcomes data. Its single responsibility is identifying which working actor is available on a given week to sit before lawmakers and restate what midwives, doulas and public health researchers have already said, slowly, with hand gestures.
"We came together as one commission, unfunded," said a spokesperson for the panel, before excusing themselves to attend a subcommittee meeting about which subcommittee should handle scheduling. The remark was not followed by any policy proposal, because none was on the agenda.
Internally, the commission has already split into three working groups: one to book the actors, one to draft the introductory remarks thanking the actors for coming, and one to determine, at the end of each session, whether the material should be sent to Congress a second time in case it did not take the first time.
No lawmaker has yet proposed reading the underlying material directly. A commission aide said this option had been discussed but tabled, pending the results of a future meeting about whether meetings are the correct venue for that discussion.