Congressional Staff - the Forgotten Federal Employees
The Essentials Newsletter, Thirty-sixth Edition
If you dig into my LinkedIn profile, you’ll realize that I worked in Congress (insert throat-clearing sound), starting 32 years ago, for about seven years. My tenure there spanned both chambers, working for two Members of Congress from Pennsylvania (one succeeded the other), a Senator from Arizona and a Senator from Nebraska. My husband also worked in Congress for 10 years, for the House Energy and Commerce Committee and a Member of Congress from Florida, and, of course, we have many friends who’ve worked as congressional staffers, and a few who are Members of Congress themselves. What may not be obvious, unless you’re a current or former congressional staffer, is that a year working in Congress is like a dog year, at least in terms of intensity, stress, hours worked, and lessons learned.
While the nation is focused on the thousands of federal department and agency workforce now, too few people in this country know or care about what happens behind the scenes in Congress, but everyone should understand it. I say that unequivocally having been on the other side for the past 24 years, advocating primarily for the electric sector in front of Congress and several federal agencies. Members of Congress are, by design, more responsive to the needs of their constituents, whether individuals, groups, or companies/businesses. The federal agencies, regardless of who’s in charge, are removed from that pressure, being only indirectly impacted by it via the oversight and funding roles of Congress. The Judicial branch is the most removed, having limited interaction with Congress beyond judicial nominations flowing through the Senate, some oversight, and funding provided by Congress for its operations.
Despite wavering support for Congress at times, it is, truly, the place where average Americans have the greatest inroads into the workings of government, even if those inroads are for a personal need, such as help securing paperwork from the Department of Defense or expediting a passport. Even securing help in a more dire situation. For example, just after the recent, devastating Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina, my good friend here in town could not reach her elderly parents and had no luck contacting local authorities. She reached out to her parents’ Congressman from North Carolina for help. His team, in turn, immediately reached out to a County Commissioner who contacted the sheriff’s department. The County Commissioner called my friend and reported what they knew about the situation, helping my friend to determine how to further help her parents, who ended up being shaken but fine, holed up on the top floor of their house while flooding devastated their town.
Members of Congress from all parts of the political spectrum provide this type of help on a daily basis, often under the radar. But they also write our national laws, fund the activities stemming from those laws and from foundational, constitutionally envisioned activities -- and they oversee the executive branch’s execution of those laws and activities. Congress sets the strategic direction and funding, similar to a corporate board, and the executive branch agencies execute them under the leadership of the President and his designated executive team, who are the cabinet heads. Similar to corporate boards, there are supposed to be check-ins, justifications back to the “Board/Congress” when adjustments need to be made, and overall communications flow.
Sometimes, however, the executive branch agencies under either party ignore that give-and-take, refusing to answer questions and hiding their actions from Congress. One of the most prolific overseers of the executive branch and “keeper” of the congressional role was former House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell (D-MI), who wrote missives to agencies under his committee’s jurisdiction known as “Dingell Grams” (you’re welcome for the flashback all my friends and readers who were staffers back then, too) when the agencies had stepped out of line, at least in his opinion. He had skilled and effective staff who knew how to get answers, but it was still sometimes difficult to do so. While agencies were somewhat more responsive to then-Chairman Dingell, they have notoriously ignored congressional inquiries, especially when of a different political party.
The conundrum is this: what makes Congress responsive to their constituents’ needs also makes them sensitive to certain criticisms that can impact their reelections. Politics. This conundrum impacts Congress’s ability to effectively oversee their executive branch counterparts in one key way, which is the relative salaries paid to executive branch staff. According to Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports published in 2023, as well as the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and Fed Smith, the average federal agency worker salary is $143,643 while the average House of Representatives congressional staffer makes wages approximately in between the high $50,000s to the low $60,000s. Yes, that’s a big difference. The maximum amount a staffer can make as of this year is $212,100 and the maximum amount a Member of Congress can make is $223,500. The maximum amount a member of the senior executive service in the federal government can get paid is close to $225,500. The federal government agencies, on average, pay substantially more than does Congress, even though the pay ceiling is similar. Federal government employees also get paid based on a federal “schedule” while congressional staff’s salaries can vary, based on what each individual Member of Congress/Senator wants to do – anecdotally, for example, some Members pride themselves on giving back part of their office budget, even at the expense of their staff, and some Members view these jobs as launch pads for higher paying jobs in the private sector.
The other eye-opening statistic is the amount of staff in each branch -- there are about 15,000 congressional staff expected to oversee the activities of the 2,180,296 agency staff (as of 2023 Office of Personnel Management). While that number has been reduced recently, the difference is still eye-opening. Congressional staff are approximately 1.5% of the total federal workforce (excluding the judiciary, which has about the same amount of staff as that of Congress). The practical implications of this pay disparity and massive personnel disparity is as follows:
Congress is mostly a young person’s game, at least at the staff level. Most of them smart, educated, and very hard-working, but young nonetheless, which typically means lacking in certain experience that could better help them oversee their agency counterparts.
The relatively few staff each Member of Congress has (House Members typically have about 8-10 staff in D.C. and Senators have about 25-30 staff in D.C.) means those staff have a portfolio of policy issues to monitor and advise their bosses on, making them only able to learn the issue from a 10,000-foot level.
These staff usually have to rely on others – constituents, lobbyists, not-for-profits, think tanks and the agencies themselves – for context. The Congressional Research Service helps as well.
Despite these facts, Members of Congress succumb to pressure to limit the size and pay of their staff – back to the conundrum. There are also some constitutional and case law underpinnings. Members of Congress control the purse strings, which means they are, in essence, paying themselves. These are factors as well.
The reason this matters to the theme of this newsletter is because critical infrastructure (CI) sectors must, at times, rely on federal personnel and infrastructure projects. When those interactions are lacking, like in the case of the U.S. Forest Service’s imperfect management of federal forests often resulting in catastrophic wildfire or the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s rocky post-hurricane response, it can impact CI. More congressional staff having the bandwidth and experience to assimilate feedback from these types of events and then being able to help their bosses with pinpointing the problems and suggesting gaps to fill would be an incredible benefit to CI sector as well as taxpayers.
For my part, during my 7-year tenure on Capitol Hill, I worked on a vast array of issues including energy, agriculture, natural resources, environmental, tax, Social Security, banking/financial services, animal rights, and judiciary (FBI). I was in meetings with constituents and other stakeholders for a decent part of every day as well as staffing my bosses in committee hearings and mark-ups and preparing them for floor votes with briefings and memos. This meant I would focus on whatever issue was right in front of me at the time. When my bosses would head back to their states/districts, I would sometimes be able to do deeper dives on my portfolio of issues, depending on my backlog of work.
I suggest that, at some point soon, congressional leadership convene a working group or task force to assess this conundrum further. Investing in congressional staff, in a thoughtful and strategic way would almost certainly help with CI sectors as they frequently depend on, partner with, or otherwise interact with the federal government.