Committee Influence Compared: The Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee
Open AccessThe purpose of this thesis is to investigate the relationship between the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) and the State Department. The State Department's missions are expanding with the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and, soon, Afghanistan. In a sense, the SFRC and the State Department will be picking up where the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) and the Defense Department left off. Strong legislative oversight of this effort is critical to the strategy's success. This thesis uses a comparison of the SFRC and the SASC committees to analyze the feasibility of this strategy. I argue that the SFRC has less influence over the State Department than the SASC has over the Defense Department. This effect is caused partly by the fact that the SASC is more powerful than the SFRC on the floor of the Senate. An example of this power differential is found in the two committees' records of passage of annual authorization acts. While the SASC has passed an annual authorization act for 49 straight years, the SFRC has not passed an annual authorization act since 2003. This imbalance carries with it implications for national security. The U.S. strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan hinge upon the ability of the State Department to execute nation-building in the wake of troop withdrawal. To accomplish that, the State Department will need increased authority, increased budgets, and increased support from congressional committees and Congress. These important resources will not be available without a powerful committee conducting credible oversight of the State Department.
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