The head of the working group formed to evaluate the federal judiciary's procedures for dealing with judicial misconduct faced a string of critical questions Wednesday from the Senate Judiciary Committee about the group's efforts to gauge the prevalence of sexual harassment in the third branch. Senate Judiciary chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told James Duff, the director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts and head of the working group formed in the aftermath of revelations about Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski's inappropriate conduct with law clerks, that his group's report issued earlier this month "kicks the can down the road" in terms of laying out viable, transparent processes court staff can use to report harassment. "The judicial branch has a problem," Grassley said at the beginning of Wednesday's hearing. "They have to deal with it or Congress will have to do it for the courts." Grassley noted that nearly every federal agency has a watchdog to whom employees can take harassment complaints. "It's time for the federal judiciary to catch up," he said. The report of the nine-member working group, formed at the behest of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., acknowledged that "power disparities" between judges and employees may deter workers from making complaints. The report, among other things, proposed the establishment of an internal Office of Judicial Integrity to provide employees with advice regarding workplace conduct. A group of former law clerks who have been vocal advocates for change have criticized the working group for not including current or former clerks as part of its process, not assessing the pervasiveness of harassment in the judiciary, and not setting a time frame to implement their proposed changes. The group also criticized the report for failing to apologize to harassment victims or acknowledging what went wrong in the Kozinski case, Grassley pointed out. Duff did take the opportunity Wednesday to apologize to victims. "I don't know anybody in our branch who doesn't feel the same way I do about it," Duff said. He stressed, however, that the judiciary has a process that "works when it's utilized, but it's not utilized often." Duff said that part of the reason instances might go unreported is that court employees either don't know about the current processes, find them too complicated or fear retaliation. Senators weren't the only ones casting a critical eye on the judiciary's report Wednesday. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, credited former law clerk Jaime Santos, who helped spearhead the group of clerks calling for reform in the complaint process, for being the driving force behind Wednesday's hearing. Santos, now counsel at Goodwin Procter in Washington, D.C., testified that federal judicial chambers are unlike other work environments since judges are "more demigods than they are employers." She said that in her own informal survey of former clerks, she'd heard from other women who were asked sexual questions during clerkship interviews, who overheard their judges and male colleagues objectifying litigants, and who'd been groped. "You can't solve a problem if you haven't studied its scope," said Santos in a critique of the working group's forward-looking focus. "The statement that this is not pervasive is just a guess." Santos also criticized law schools whom she said often heard of problems from former clerks but remained mum about them. "The silence from law schools over the past six months is troubling," she said. "They turned a blind eye toward this behavior and in many ways enabled it." Watch the video: