Congress needs to invest in itself

It's time to spend more on building legislative capacity

Spending an election year debating the finer points of policies that will likely never come to pass is a time honored tradition in Democratic politics, so I’d like to begin today’s piece by setting some realistic expectations.

If Kamala Harris wins the presidency, she will most likely need to contend with a Republican- controlled Senate.¹ A President has not entered the White House with their party not controlling both houses of Congress since George H.W. Bush in 1989. The idea of beginning a presidency with such little legislative support is a distant, if not nonexistent, political memory for many people.

But that doesn’t mean nothing can happen. From energy permitting reform to a border security bill, real bipartisan legislative victories are still possible. And today, I’d like to add another one to the list: investing serious resources into improving the functionality of Congress.

Spending money on a famously unpopular public institution isn’t a great way to win support from the public, but it’s a wise investment that would pay dividends. And if Congress implements the famously popular ban on stock trading, they’ll have just the political cover they need to do it.

Congress (still) needs to invest more in staff

Legislators are not allocated enough funds to properly pay their staffers, a well-documented problem that leads to constant turnover at the mid and senior levels as the private sector lures some of the best policy minds away.² It’s a vicious cycle: Elected officials, aware of their association with a deeply unpopular legislative body, don’t want to be seen “wasting” taxpayer dollars increasing staff salaries, and while congressional capacity isn’t the only reason why people are dissatisfied with Congress, the lack of capacity certainly contributes to public disappointment.

Matt wrote in favor of increasing legislative salaries back in 2021. Later that year, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (presumably because she’s a big Slow Boring fan) attached a 21% increase in House budgets, along with a $45,000 pay floor for House staffers, to the 2022 budget. Senate staff also got a raise, but don’t have the same pay floor as the House. As a result, the number of DC-based congressional staffers making less than a living wage was cut in half in the following years, with the gains primarily for House staffers.

But the problem still persists, and is even more problematic at the mid and senior staff level. If you're a Legislative Correspondent making $70,000 a year, it's hard to pass up a private sector job that could pay double that. Legislative Directors make significantly more, but by that point, we’re talking about mid-career professionals with even more lucrative opportunities outside of Congress. And it’s just not reasonable to ask these staffers to stick around for the love of the game.

Michael Beckel, research director at the bipartisan political reform organization Issue One, has conducted a lot of the research on the subject. He told me that even after the 2022 increases, “mid-level staffers on Capitol Hill who are frustrated with low pay can frequently take their talents, skills, and connections with them to the private sector and be far better compensated.” Kevin Kosar is the co-author of Congress Overwhelmed: Congressional Capacity and the Prospects for Reform. He told me the problem isn’t just paying staff a sufficient salary to reduce turnover, it’s having an office budget sufficient to hire enough staffers to do the work. Kosar noted, “The responsibilities of Congress have multiplied by an order of magnitude over the last 40 to 50 years,” with tens of thousands of pages of laws on the books and far more constituents to respond to. Yet the number of Congressional staff has not changed to meet this complexity, and the number of committee staff has actually gone down.

No one I spoke to dropped a magic number that would magically solve the staffing turnover. But in some peer countries, namely France, median salaries are nearly double what our legislative staffers make in the United States.

Our country is much bigger. Our GDP is much higher. And our legislature is endowed with greater responsibility. There’s no excuse for the United States Congress to not have sufficient staff capacity.

Bring back the OTA

Boosting congressional capacity is crucial. After the Supreme Court's decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo to overturn the Chevron Doctrine, federal rule-making power has diminished, putting the responsibility on Congress to draft clearer regulatory statutes.

Increasing the financial support for congressional offices is a part of meeting the new challenge, but it isn’t the whole story. Congress also needs to invest more in its congressional support agencies.

About 25 years ago, as the digital era began in earnest, Newt Gingrich, in his anti-government wisdom, killed the Office of Technology Assessment, the agency that provided non-partisan analysis of technology and science issues for members of Congress. Obviously, this was a terrible idea. When members of Congress spout nonsense in hearings with Silicon Valley CEOs or release a “technically illiterate” bill on encryption policy, the elimination of the OTA is, in part, to blame.

In 2021, Darrell West, a Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution, released a report that recommended bringing back the OTA. He said that existing congressional agencies like the Congressional Budget Office and Congressional Research Service are too focused on other responsibilities to handle a technology portfolio. And, he noted, the Office of Science and Technology Policy “exists to advise the president on related issues, but it is strictly embedded within the White House.”

According to West, the OTA could could help answer questions about issues like how AI impacts job displacement and workplace safety or regulations on social media. The previous iteration of the OTA had a $20 million budget — equivalent to about $38 million today. This is a substantial investment that would significantly enhance congressional capacity to tackle some of the most pressing public policy problems of today.

Make Congress Great Again

Some good news is that the topic of congressional reform is in vogue on the Hill.

The House Committee on the Modernization of Congress recently adopted 202 bipartisan recommendations to improve Congress. And while most of the recommendations were relatively minor, revitalizing Congress’ in-house think tank, the Congressional Research Service, would have a major impact.

In an especially grim congressional hearing on the subject, the interim director of the CRS noted that meetings frequently get cut off at 40 minutes due to their low-cost Zoom accounts. The organization has lost a quarter of its staff since 1994. As Daniel Schuman, a former legislative attorney for CRS, said, “Right-wing political attacks drove out experienced analysts and intimidated the leadership into making the organization’s policy analysis cautious and insipid.”

The CRS needs more money. And its sibling agencies, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Government Accountability Office (GAO), need investment and reform, too. The CBO is in an odd position, acting as a budgetary referee between political parties in Congress. Subsequently, it is forced to give concrete answers on the fiscal impacts of legislation, even when it doesn’t have the capacity to do so. As Matt wrote previously, “A saner approach would be to give the CBO more resources but less power.” The GAO is the government spending watchdog, but as congressional reform expert Zach Graves noted in his testimony to the House Committee on the Modernization of Congress, the agency has also been chronically underfunded — despite the fact that every $1 of funding actually results in savings of nearly $100.

There’s a laundry list of reforms that could improve these agencies. But the core problem is that they are resource-constrained and have been since Gingrich’s war on Congress in the 90s. It’s time to change that.

A lesson from the 1970s

Such sweeping changes to increase congressional capacity might seem far-fetched, but there have been significant efforts in the past.

In the 1970s, Congress found itself overwhelmed. The “Imperial Presidency” of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon left the institution diminished, struggling to assert its authority, and in urgent need of reform to effectively carry out its Article I constitutional duties. Kosar likes to tell his exasperated friends on Capitol Hill about what Congress did next:

It created a new budget process. It created new budget committees. It created the Congressional Budget Office. It took the little old Legislative Reference Service and turned it into a full fledged think tank called the Congressional Research Service. They created OTA. They reorganized committees. They added more committee staff. They did what they had to do to meet the workload.

Evidence on the success of those reforms is mixed. However, the investment in congressional research undeniably made legislators more informed, and historians generally view this period as a time of significant progress. It proved that congressional operations weren’t set in stone and that, with the right tools and effort, even the most rigid structures in Congress could be reshaped, polished into something more effective and responsive to the nation's needs.

Everyone I spoke with for this article pointed to political pressures as a key obstacle. Members of Congress are reluctant to be seen using taxpayer dollars to fund their own offices. While the modest salary increases in 2022 went largely unnoticed, allocating the substantial financial resources needed to improve Congress could provoke backlash. But I just finished listening to 60 hours of Robert Caro’s epic biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, “Master of the Senate,” so I’m ready to propose the legislative deal that will make this work.

Next term, House and Senate leaders should introduce a reform package that boosts congressional office pay and increases resources for research agencies. However, the centerpiece should be a ban on congressional stock trading — a reform backed by nearly 90% of the public, with strong bipartisan support.

There are documented instances of members of Congress making trades based on classified information, an act that erodes the public’s trust in government. It’s not the most important reform, but it’s something that would boost congressional legitimacy with the public and give them credibility to spend taxpayer money on critical internal reforms.

These proposals probably won’t go anywhere, but they could. And while it’s still a good time for austerity, that shouldn’t come at the cost of disinvesting in Congress.

1. Reform could of course happen in a Trump presidency, but I’m less optimistic

2. According to a 2020 report by New America, 40-45 percent of legislative staffers consider the position a step on the road to the private sector.