Congressional Staff: Overworked and Undervalued (Issue 1: Staffing Levels and Budget)
This blog series outlines the current state of Congressional staffing. In the coming weeks, we will discuss the current pressure staffers are under due to staffing levels, overwork, and turnover in order to demonstrate why Congressional Communities is advocating for Congress to have more and better supported staff.
“Since the hiring freeze for the House of Representatives was imposed in the 1970s, the budget has increased tenfold — yet we actually have less Congressional staff now than we did then.”
Is Congress really as overstaffed as most Americans seem to think? Let’s take a look at the numbers when it comes to Congressional staff levels in order to examine the notion that Congress is overstaffed.
Below is a graph of staffing over the past 50 years.
Office and committee staff increased rapidly in the first half of the 1970’s, driving the upward trend viewed above.
This growth was in response to increased workloads and the Watergate scandal, which prompted Congress to expend more effort to flush out corruption. New committees and intelligence agencies like the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) were created with this aim (Hammond).
The sharp growth in staff between 1970 and 1976 was followed by several decades of a relatively flat staffing situation. Staffing reductions returned to their pre-Watergate levels over a two year period, 1994 to 1996, when Congress focused heavily on cutting the spending of Congress, particularly that of legislative agencies (The Atlantic). Under the reasoning of wanting to “keep government small”, as well as wanting to cut waste, legislative agencies suffered the heaviest losses of any part of the legislative branch (WaPo).
Furthermore, over the 40 year period between 1975 and 2015, legislative agency staff working at the GAO, CRS and CBO fell nearly 45% from a high point of 6,497 employees (1978) to a low point of 3,667 (2013) (Brookings Data) (Figure 4). The Office of Technology Assessment was also completely abolished in 1996.
And it isn’t just about staff numbers being cut — it’s about funding being cut, as well. As recently as 2016, both the House and the Senate cut the budget of the CBO, the CRS, and the GAO (Figure 5).
By and large, the public views spending on Congressional staff as a proxy for government spending in general — reduce Congressional staff and you help shrink the government. The belief is widespread, and perhaps stems from a misunderstanding of the role staff play. It would appear that many Americans think that more staff means more opportunity for members of Congress to pass more bills and add more costs. If that were the case, we’d see some correlation between reductions in staff and reductions in spending. But there is little evidence of that.
Since the hiring freeze for the House of Representatives was imposed in the 1970s, the budget has increased tenfold — yet we actually have less Congressional staff now than we did then (National Affairs). And the Legislative Branch, on the whole, takes up far, far less spending than other parts of the government:
“…the entire Legislative Branch represents only about 0.1% of the cost to operate the federal government. In 2015, that was around $4.3 billion, or less than $20 per eligible voter in the country. The entire Legislative Branch costs less to operate than the Army Corps of Engineers ($6.7 billion), the National Science Foundation ($6.8 billion), or the Judicial Branch ($7.1 billion), which receive some of the lowest outlays among all federal government entities.” (CMF)
To assume that cutting spending on Congressional staffing, which only accounts for a portion of total legislative appropriations, will correlate to deficit-reduction sounds nice in theory, but it is unsupported by real world data. All these cuts have succeeded in doing is ensuring that our Congressional offices have less staff available to help constituents communicate with their representatives.
On the flip side, there is a widespread assumption that increasing staffing budgets (and thus staff counts) will, in turn, increase the national deficit.
But, while that might sound logical, the data doesn’t support it.
Since 1990, Congressional staff have either remained flat (House), risen modestly (Senate), or fallen significantly (Legislative Agency). How do these staffing levels compare to the deficit?
Cumulatively, despite the 1990s moving steadily from deficit to surplus, the overall picture has been one of an enormous increase in the deficit.
We are not saying that the cuts in staff are directly responsible for the burgeoning deficit of the last two decades. We are saying that cutting staff does not correlate with a smaller, more fiscally responsible government.
It’s important to give further context to the House figures. District and D.C. staff make up a total of three-quarters of the House’s entire staff. While the physical staff count of House district staff has actually increased since 1977 , these increases have been marginal. Focusing on the staff count’s small increase alone omits the stagnant trajectory that staff counts have been on for the last four decades in the House (Figure 7) — a trajectory that does not factor in the much larger population changes over those years.
Just to keep pace with staffing levels from the 1970s, and to stay proportional to population growth — which has increased by 50% from 220 million to 330 million — the lines on this graph would all have to be tilted up. Instead, they are effectively flat.
Both the Congressional concern about the surge in Congressional staff that led to the hard limit of no more than 22 staffers per House member and the continued popular notion that the number of Congressional staff are somehow a symbol for bloated government are not borne out by the numbers over the past 45 years.
This is why Congressional Communities is trying to educate the public about Congressional staffing, a topic few ever think about. To us, there seems little financial risk in increased funding to staff the Senate, House, and our legislative agencies properly. Just compare how spending on Congressional staff compares to how much lobbyists spend. Collectively, corporate America as a whole spends more on lobbying ($2.6 billion) than Congress spends on staffing for both the Senate and the House ($2 billion) (Vox). In other words, Corporate America puts its money where its mouth is; we, the people, need to insist Congress do the same for us.
Investing in the staff that interact with us directly is hardly outlandish. Investing in the legislative staff that interact with and inform members of Congress can only lessen the influence of industry lobbyists. At Congressional Communities, we believe investing in all levels of Congressional staff is necessary and essential if Congress members are to represent us as intended.
If you want to learn more about issues like these, we hope you’ll consider getting involved with your Congressional Community and letting your neighbors know concrete steps we can take to make Congress better.
