The political control of the bureaucracy remains a classical topic in political science. However, little is known about the reverse of this relationship: bureaucracies influencing politicians. I conceptualise bureaucratic influence on legislators as the extent to which legislators use the information produced by agencies in the legislative process. Building on cheap talk models of strategic communication, I argue that legislators will make greater use of bureaucratic information when ideologically close to agencies. Agency independence, operating as a credibility-enhancing mechanism, can nonetheless mitigate the effect of ideological distance. I introduce a new measurement strategy to estimate legislators’ use of bureaucratic information which employs natural language processing techniques and syntactic parsing. I apply this method to a corpus of 6.8 million speeches given by US congresspersons in forty years of floor and committee speeches. A series of two-way fixed effects specifications reveal that, on average, the use of bureaucratic information decreases with legislator-agency ideological distance, but the effect is weaker for more independent agencies.