Congressional staff are generally overworked and underpaid. Talented employees with vast institutional knowledge are eventually forced to choose between Congress and a sustainable lifestyle; the result is a Legislative Branch brain drain with employees leaving for better paying jobs in the Executive Branch or private sector. On top of that, Congress has a diversity problem: staff don’t reflect the constituency their bosses represent.
The House released a study on staff pay, benefits, and diversity in September 2019. Our team has advocated for the collection and release of this information, so we were very pleased that the House conducted the study. While incredibly valuable, one of the failings of the report is that it did not publish the underlying information as data — the information was locked inside PDFs.
Today, we are proud to announce that we have re-keyed all the information in the report and are publishing it as data for everyone to analyze. We spent 20 hours manually converting the reports into data, which you can download here as an excel spreadsheet. You can also download data on personal offices, committee & leadership offices, and House officers individually as CSVs.
We urge the House to continue requiring these reports, but next time, please make sure the information is published in a data format, like a CSV, and not locked in a PDF.
