Congress, the President, and executive branch agencies use federal advisory committees to gain expertise and policy advice from individuals within and outside the federal government. Federal advisory committees are created to bring together various experts—often with divergent opinions and political backgrounds—to examine an issue and recommend statutory, regulatory, grantmaking, or other policy actions. Federal advisory committees are one of only a few formalized mechanisms for private-sector citizens to participate in the federal policymaking process. Federal advisory committees, however, are prohibited from creating policy or issuing regulations. Their role is to remain strictly advisory. Federal advisory committees can be called task forces, panels, commissions, working groups, boards, councils, conferences, or other titles. As noted above, federal advisory committees can be established either by Congress, the President, or an agency head. Congress has the power to establish a committee in two ways. First, Congress can specifically mandate that the committee be established by law. Second, Congress can authorize the establishment of a committee, but leaves the decision on whether to actually create the entity to a designated agency. Congress may decide to establish a federal advisory committee for a variety of reasons, among them to allow the federal government to collect the experts on a particularly technical or scientific topic in one location to debate the potential policy outcomes; to ensure that appropriate stakeholders of a particular policy arena have the opportunity to voice their opinions to policymakers; to attempt to remove a controversial policy option or funding decision from a highly charged political arena; or to reduce congressional or executive branch workloads. When Congress chooses to establish an advisory committee, it may also determine whether the committee should be governed by or be exempted from the transparency, access, and reporting requirements of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). For example, FACA requires all applicable advisory committees to file a charter prior to operation. The charter is required to include the committee's objectives, the committee's affiliated agency, the committee's duties, the estimated operating costs, the estimated number of committee meetings, and the anticipated termination date, among other information. Additionally, all advisory committee meetings that are subject to FACA are presumed to be open to the public, with certain specified exceptions. Adequate notice of advisory committee meetings must therefore be published in advance in the Federal Register . Subject to certain records protections provided in the Freedom of Information Act, all papers, records, and minutes of meetings must be made available for public inspection. Membership must be "fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented and the functions to be performed," and the committee should "not be inappropriately influenced by the appointing authority or by any special interest." This report assists Members and staff when they are deciding whether a federal advisory committee is the appropriate mechanism to assist policymaking, grantmaking, or other questions. This report provides analysis of some primary components of federal advisory committee design, including examples of federal advisory committee structure and operations. The report examines some reasons Congress may choose to establish an advisory committee, and provides context to understand when applying the provisions of FACA to a committee could assist or hinder a committee's operations. This report uses the provisions of FACA and information within the FACA Database to shape its analysis of federal advisory committee creation. As part of FACA's statutory and regulatory requirements, agency officials report operating practices and committee costs into the FACA Database, an online data collection tool the General Services Administration (GSA) created and manages. The database is the only publicly available source that includes aggregated and historical information on FACA committee membership, operations, and costs. The collection of data on federal advisory committees and their operations provides around 1,000 examples of operating advisory committees in any year, more than half of which were created by statute. Federal advisory committees can be established for a variety of reasons. According to a 1972 Senate Government Operations Committee report, advisory committees were intended to provide an "opportunity for the public to learn either about [advisory committee] deliberations and recommendations or about the information on which [advisory committees] base those recommendations." Federal advisory committees, therefore, can be especially helpful in policy arenas where public access to and participation in debates and discussions are as important as (or, possibly more important than) the policy recommendations that emerge from those discussions. In an examination of advisory commissions established by presidential directive, one scholar stated that these advisory commissions have traditionally allowed a President to deflect blame, buy time, and give the appearance of action on issues that are too politically charged, too difficult, to solve. The same study noted that commissions are used by presidents to garner greater public support for a policy to which the president is already committed; show symbolic concern over a situation at the highest level of government; establish a fact base for others to use; respond to crises; deflect political heat from the president and allow passions to cool when issues become explosive; overcome the "stovepipes" and parochial thinking of the permanent bureaucracy; gather more information about a problem and its policy alternatives; forge consensus among the interests represented on the commission itself; and change the hearts and minds of men. The study attempted to group commissions into three categories: agenda commissions, which aim to attract support and attention to presidential policy initiatives; information commissions, which are designed to give "new ideas, new facts, and new analysis to policymakers"; and political constellation commissions, which seek to "foster consensus, compromise, and cooperation in a policy domain." Another researcher who examined the impetus for committee creation found that some committees are created to acquire new ideas from outside experts. He added, however, that committees may be created to allow politicians to avoid blame for issues that are too cumbersome or too politically charged. Moreover, he stated that Members of Congress may create committees because of the immense workload of legislators. Creating an advisory committee can "pare down Congress's workload to more manageable dimensions or to handle and manage a problem in a timely manner." Scholars and practitioners of government have debated whether advisory bodies, in fact, increase public interaction with the federal government. Other debates continue over whether advisory committees have a positive effect on the federal government, or if they are a symptom of a federal government that is not performing properly. In 2011, two scholars found evidence that advisory committees can be useful to federal agencies, especially those that have a technical or scientific focus. Agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) consult "advisory committees when in-house information processing is relatively costly and the political stakes of its decisions are high." The highly valued information and expertise from advisory committees can be influential when agencies decide whether to approve a drug, device, or other committee recommendation. Also in 2011, another scholar examining the utility of advisory committees in a national security context found that "national security commissions are much more likely to influence policy when they are formed in response to a crisis, established by the executive branch, or given a narrow mandate." According to the author, Congress's fragmented decisionmaking makes it relatively hard for Congress to act with alacrity. ... The president or an agency head can form a commission and appoint its members quite quickly—often within weeks. But when members of Congress seek to establish a commission, the slow pace of the legislative process frequently allows the passage of many months, or even years, before its authorizing statute is enacted, and additional months typically go by before its members are appointed. In 2012, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report that noted four practices that may influence the utility of an advisory body. The four practices are 1. securing clear agency commitment; 2. finding a balance between responsiveness to the agency and independence; 3. leveraging resources through collaboration with similar groups; and 4. evaluating the group's usefulness to identify future directions or improvements. Building on this examination of the FDA drug approval process, another scholar found that the FDA is less likely to require warning labels on pharmaceutical drugs and is less likely to withdraw a drug from the market if the drug was reviewed and recommended for approval by an advisory committee. This finding may demonstrate that decisions that rely on the recommendations or advice of an advisory committee are more reliable or scientifically sound than those that are not. A Congressional Research Service (CRS) review of FY2014 committee-reported information in the FACA Database found that statutorily established FACA committees tended to report lower percentages of their recommendations being fully implemented by their affiliated agencies when compared to the recommendation implementation rates reported by committees established by the agencies. In the analysis, 123 advisory committees established by agency authority reported an average of 65.6% of their recommendations were fully implemented by their affiliated agencies. The median reported percentage of full recommendation implementation was 76%. By contrast, the 250 advisory committees required to be established by statute that reported implementation data had an average of 45.9% of their recommendations fully implemented, and a median of 50% full recommendation implementation. The finding suggests that agencies' officials may be more likely to implement recommendations from advisory bodies that they established, rather than the advisory bodies that Congress established within the agency. CRS's analysis also found that scientific technical program advisory board committees and national policy issue advisory board committees reported higher rates of full implementation of their recommendations than committees that were non-scientific program advisory board committees or were committees involved in grantmaking. For example, the 136 scientific technical program advisory boards that provided data on the implementation of their recommendations found, on average, that 60.2% of their recommendations were fully implemented. The median percentage of full implementation of recommendations was 77%. The 66 national policy issue advisory board committees that reported on their full recommendation implementation had, on average, 52.0% of their recommendations fully implemented. The median percentage of full implementation was 58%. In contrast, the 75 grant review committees reported, on average 41.9%, of their recommendations were fully implemented, but the median reported full implementation of recommendations was 0%. Overall, the literature on federal advisory committees has shown that they can have influence on an agency's decisionmaking process.