Congressional Staff of 15,000 Is Large Enough to Fill a Town

On New Year’s Day, 1934, Alice Klopstad stepped off the train at Washington’s Union Station, a 22-year-old shorthand whiz on her first trip away from her home town of Spink, S.D.

The next day, she went to work as a secretary in Room 452 of the Senate Office Building, one of fewer than 600 employees on the staffs of the 96 senators and their committees.

How that 600 has grown.

Today, about 4,000 people work for 100 senators; committees employ 1,700 more. The story in the House is similar. In 1934 there were 992 employees; in 1989, between members and committees, there are 9,683.

In all, more than 15,000 people work for Congress--enough for a medium-size town.

One is Alice Klopstad Andersen, still deep in the congressional paper chase 55 years after she took her first dictation for South Dakota Democrat William J. Bulow. Since 1973, she has been the administrative assistant to California Rep. Carlos J. Moorhead (R-Glendale).

‘It’s so Different’

“Now, of course, it’s so different,” Andersen said. “You think of a rural area and now it’s a metropolis. It’s that different.”

It sure is.

People worry about it. Political scientists write books about it.

Some say the staffs have grown too big, that all they do is help their bosses get reelected.

Others disagree. Congress needs more staff, they say, because it has more work to do now.

As staffs have grown, so has their work space.

The office Alice Andersen unlocks each morning shortly after 8 a.m. is Room 2346 of the Rayburn House Office Building, one of three House office buildings--and two annexes--tourists encounter as they drive up the long slope of Independence Avenue to the south of the Capitol. On the northern, or Senate, side, are three Senate office buildings.

By mid-afternoon, Andersen has papers spread all around her. Snatching some from a chair so a visitor can sit, she recalls that in 1934 she was one of four people on Bulow’s Washington staff. He kept an office in South Dakota, to be sure, but it was in his home in Beresford.

Her current employer, Moorhead, has a staff of nine in Washington, plus two back home in Glendale and three more in Pasadena.

Such district staffs are typical. In 1959, roughly half the members of Congress had full-time, year-round offices in their states or districts. Now all do, usually more than one.

Sens. George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) and Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.) have eight home offices apiece. Sens. Donald W. Riegle Jr. and Carl Levin, both Michigan Democrats, each have seven. Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) has four district offices, staffed by 57 workers.

Many congressional staff members, both in Washington and at home, work on “constituent services”--dealing with complaints about their bosses’ stand on an issue, answering questions about legislation, helping voters penetrate the bureaucracies of the Social Security Administration or the Veterans Administration, for example.

Others assist their bosses in dealing with the welter of legislation before them.

One recent day, as the Senate debated the budget resolution, four senators were on the floor. Two aides flanked Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), thrusting papers in front of him. Across the aisle, Sen. Jim Sasser (D-Tenn.) conferred with two aides. More than a dozen others sat on a red plush bench in the rear of the chamber.

Or consider the role of staffs in melding divergent House and Senate versions of legislation into one bill both houses can accept. For example:

In Room 2175 of the Rayburn Building, where House and Senate conferees are discussing the minimum wage bill, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Labor Committee, leafed through the conference agenda.

“It is my understanding,” he said, “that there has been agreement at the staff level and we do have recommendations on items 2, 3, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 16. It is my understanding we can just go through those or just move to adopt them if there is no further discussion.”

There was none.

Items 4 to 7, on the other hand, dealt with the sub-minimum training wage, a key point of dispute between congressional Democrats and the Bush Administration.

“We have indicated they couldn’t be part of a staff recommendation and would be decided by the members,” Kennedy said. After brief discussion, the items were left in.

At that point, Kennedy and Sen. James M. Jeffords (R-Vt.), the only senators present, had to leave for a vote on the floor. Representing the Senate side was left to John V. Harvey Jr., 33, chief labor counsel of the committee, and a cluster of other staff members.

That brief meeting on May 2 was the culmination of weeks of staff work, beginning when the bill passed the Senate on April 12.

Democratic and Republican Senate aides met separately to formulate their positions. Then all the Senate aides got together. There were similar meetings in the House. Then there were four meetings of aides with the members of the conference committee, going through the agenda item by item, making objections, agreeing on changes.

After each preliminary meeting, said one aide, the staffs carried the changes to their bosses for approval. “The member is always involved in terms of final approval,” he said.

When the conference committee met, said the aide, who commented on the condition he not be identified, “It was really easy. We didn’t know until that moment that it was going to be easy.”

Andersen, reflecting on what staff members do, said, “There’s a volume of work. I wouldn’t think we needed all those people, but. . . .” She lets the thought trail off.

Others are more blunt.

“Basically, they will get as many staff members as they possibly can,” said Mark Liedl, director of the Congressional Assessment Project of the conservative Heritage Foundation. “As their power grows, they are able to get into more and more mischief, and I think having the staff is just another resource that allows them to.”

On the other hand, Christopher J. Deering, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University who specializes in the study of Congress, said the number of congressional staff members is “hardly outrageous when you compare it to the size of the operation and the responsibilities that they have. It’s really quite an appropriate staff level, it seems to me.”

Still, it is by far the largest staff of any legislative body in the world. The Canadian Parliament, which is second, has an administrative staff of 1,700 and an additional 1,500 employees who work for members.

The swelling of congressional staffs--from just over six per senator when Andersen arrived in Washington to 40 or more today--was sharply criticized in a 1980 book by Michael J. Malbin, then a research fellow at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute.

In “Unelected Representatives,” Malbin wrote that the staggering growth in the number of aides “has reinforced a situation in which the deliberative aspect of representation gets short shrift on all but the broad outlines. . . . The process no longer forces members to talk to each other to resolve the tough issues.”

Deering said members of Congress range “all the way from a member who is pretty much staff-driven to members who don’t deal with their staffs at all.”

‘More Direct Involvement

Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.) has seen the process from both sides. Before his election to the House in 1976, he served for three years as legislative assistant and later administrative assistant to the late Sen. Warren G. Magnuson.

In the House, Dicks said, there is “more direct member involvement and interest” than in the Senate because the 435 representatives are not spread as thinly among the committees as the 100 senators are.

“You hear some grousing in the cloakroom about how we have to go to conferences and the senators sometimes don’t show up and you’ve got to deal with the staff of the Senate,” he said. He added, however, that as a member of the House Appropriations Committee he has been “impressed with the level of knowledge that the Senate subcommittee chairmen have, and you didn’t feel that they were being led around by the staff.

“I think, frankly, that the American people get a good return on the investment in congressional staff,” Dicks said.

So do the members of Congress, he added.

Staff members “can make or break you. If they make mistakes and get you in trouble, it can hurt you. On the other hand, if they do a good job, it can do you an enormous amount of good. It’s a big advantage for the incumbent.”

Indeed it is, say critics, and that’s the rub.

“If they are helping Congress solve national problems, then it’s good,” said the Heritage Foundation’s Liedl. “If they are focusing more on doing activities that help their individual congressmen expand and keep power, as in helping them get reelected, then it’s disturbing.”

Dicks is by no means alone as a member of Congress who graduated from being an aide to a lawmaker from his state.

House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) worked for the late Sen. Henry M. Jackson. Mitchell, the Senate majority leader, worked for Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine. Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum (R-Kan.) worked for Sen. James B. Pearson.

Congressional aides also move on to other jobs in Washington. A check of 58 biographical sketches of key government officials in the Federal Staff Directory for 1988 showed that 10 of them had worked on Capitol Hill. They included an assistant attorney general, two assistant secretaries of state, the director of an independent agency and members of three full-time commissions.

Aides Lobbied

Like the senators and representatives they work for, the staff aides get lobbied.

“To be honest with you, most of our nuts-and-bolts work is done with the staff members,” said Jim Magill, legislative director of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, who sometimes makes his point with staff members over lunch. He buys.

“Probably the most visible of our work is appearing before the various committees and subcommittees where we make our testimony, but that usually is the final stage in a very long and drawn-out process of working with the staff members and drafting legislation, and also working with the staff members to get the member that they work for to offer amendments.”

All in all, said Dicks, “The professional staff up here does a great job and they don’t get paid very well.”

Pay and Travel

Some might disagree about the pay.

Records of the clerk of the House show that Andersen was paid $50,000 last year. Harvey, the Senate Labor Committee counsel, made $52,500. At 24, Michael R. Bushman, press secretary to Rep. Terry L. Bruce (D-Ill.), made $29,000.

For some aides, there is a fair amount of travel at the taxpayers’ expense.

The Senate’s statement of disbursements for the six months that ended Sept. 30 showed, for example, that Daryl H. Owen, staff director of the Senate Energy Committee, ran up $8,860 in expenses on a trip to Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev in the Soviet Union; that Joanne N. Paulk, director of interparliamentary services in the Secretary of the Senate’s office, was paid $3,841 for a trip to London and Geneva, and that her assistant, Yvonne L. Hopkins, got $3,611 for travel to Vienna, Warsaw, Prague, Czechoslovakia, and Reykjavik, Iceland.

James A. Miller, in his book “Running in Place,” about his experiences on the staff of former Senate Republican leader Howard H. Baker Jr., said that in 1982, Baker’s chief foreign relations aide, George Cranwell Montgomery, visited Panama, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Mexico in January; Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel in April, and China and Hong Kong in May.

Defenders of Capitol Hill staffs point to Congress’ greater responsibilities these days, both at home and abroad.

“Congress’ role has increased dramatically because of the Great Society programs . . . our role in the world, what have you,” said Deering. “I don’t think there is any question the size of government itself and government responsibilities expanded in the 1960s.”

It was a simpler capital when Alice Klopstad arrived that New Year’s Day 1934.

“We were in Washington about six months of the year and home about six months,” she said. “Now, everybody’s here all the time.”