TOP LINE

Member and committee office staff on Capitol Hill work in an environment with very little incentive or opportunity for their employers to compensate them fairly for their abilities. Committee budgets are uncertain from term to term and Members pay staff out of a fixed allotment that has declined year-over-year until recently. The prestige of working for Congress – and for many staff, the promise of a much larger pay day in the private sector because of the experience – means that despite low pay, a steady stream of applicants is ready to fill any vacancies. Members, meanwhile, try to score small points with constituents by touting their frugality even as they undercut their policymaking and constituent service capabilities.

As a result, Congressional staff remain significantly underpaid while being asked to live in an expensive municipal area. The median House staffer salary is $59,000, more than $5,000 lower than the median private sector salary nationally. It’s the equivalent of a mid-grade GS-7 position in the executive branch in the Washington metropolitan area. The starting salary for a US Capitol Police officer is nearly $74,000 – only requires a high school diploma – and they’re eligible for a signing bonus.

One major difference for the Capitol Police is they have a union, which advocates for greater funding and benefits for the agency. (Most non-political congressional employees are on the Congressional equivalent of the GS scale.) Unionization levels the playing field with employers significantly by making workers part of the management discussion. Across the American labor market, nonunion workers make 83 percent of what unionized ones do.

Unionization, therefore, is one of the few forces that can push Congress as a whole toward pay equity with the private sector and executive branch by addressing the underlying structural problems. It also allows employees to turn improved resources at the office level into wins for employees. Within the nascent staffer organizing movement, we saw the first green shoot of impact last week when staff in Rep. Andy Levin’s office tentatively agreed to the first union contract in a Member office. The new contract raises median junior staffer pay to $76,000, or the equivalent of a bump to GS-9, and gives everyone a $10,000 raise. The figure well exceeds the $45,000 minimum salary set by Speaker Nancy Pelosi in May that came into effect in September. It also surpasses the $52,000 salary minimum Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez voluntarily set when she came to office in 2019, which was long before the MRA bump was passed into law — a bump AOC advocated for.

Even though Rep. Levin will be leaving Congress, the successful negotiation of the contract is an important demonstration of how Member offices can navigate this process going forward and negates the argument that the unionization process inherently will be contentious. Setting a median salary well ahead of the current minimum, meanwhile, creates a solid target for other offices to shoot for and provides appropriators a rough idea of how much further to expand the MRA.

Because of Members’ preference to handle their own political staff hiring, it will take much more time for unionization to impact salaries across the House. For now, the half-dozen Democratic offices that have started unionization can use Levin’s office as a benchmark. Eventually, disparities in pay will push Democratic offices to close pay gaps to remain desirable workplaces. Perhaps the comparison will prod Republican offices to keep up as well. If Republican members hold out both on unionization and on wage increases, over the years the Hill may evolve into a workplace where tens of thousands of dollars separate staffers doing the same work in one party than the other.

TOP LINE

Abby Livingston has had enough. After carving out a successful career as a Capitol Hill journalist – becoming a one-woman DC bureau for the nonprofit Texas Tribune – she quit. The trigger, she shared last week, was realizing a corridor in the Capitol that had felt like the safest place in the world to her 15 years earlier had been the same spot where January 6 insurrectionists mercilessly beat Capitol Police officers. Even though she wasn’t there that day because of the pandemic, the ghosts of the mob were everywhere. Meanwhile, Members of Congress reinforced the mob’s message or focused on becoming internet famous.

Livingston didn’t go into Hill journalism to become internet famous: she did it because she found Congress to be a challenging puzzle she wanted to understand. We certainly can relate to that. If you’re reading this newsletter, you probably do, too. When word of her resignation spread, Livingston said that her fellow Hill rat journalists and staffers shared their own “private stress of finding their own paths through whatever it is this country is going through.”

Such folks, she writes, “came to Washington out of patriotism and wanted to devote whatever God-given gifts they had to the country’s business. They don’t make the big salaries or receive the kinds of validation that make the terrible days manageable. And the fact that so many of them are at the end of their rope should worry every American about what comes next.”

This feeling of exhaustion within the institution has bubbled for years, rising even to touch a Speaker of the House who quit Congress entirely rather than deal with ideologues in his own party one more time. (That former Speaker, it should be noted, first came to Congress at the head of a wave of bomb throwers who thought Reagan-style conservatism wasn’t ideologically pure or combative enough.) But we worry at the close of this Congress that what will come next will be a further exodus of people attached to the institution for all the right reasons who are sick of the bullying and the possibility of violence and are tired of political theater designed to extract one more dollar out of a MAGA constituency living in a closed feedback loop of their own fears and desires.