Working at CRS was the worst professional experience of my 20 year career, and I would recommend avoiding the agency unless you are in a desperate financial situation. The agency's dysfunctions are tragic, as it is falling far short of its ability to provide the Congress with the expertise and policy analysis it needs.
Working at CRS felt like joining a 600 person dysfunctional university faculty. Your colleagues will be brilliant, but so much of your time will be spent navigating: 1) the egos of longtime analysts, and 2) an overly complicated and sclerotic bureaucracy -- both of which will make it much more difficult for you to deliver useful and timely analysis to Congress.
Internal to CRS, relationships between managers and employees are often strained, in large part because of the agency's Kafkaesque promotion process and because senior managers adopt a shoot-the-messenger approach to constructive feedback. The leadership of CRS is also vehemently opposed to telework, and is doing everything it can to limit employees from working from home, which has also been a drag on morale throughout the agency.
Finally, the agency's technology is *comically* bad, despite the fact that Congress has provided the agency with multimillion dollar appropriations to deal with the issue. Throughout COVID, the entire agency would be knocked offline frequently for hours due to problems with the agency's VPN and network drives, and it took over a year for solutions to be developed.
