National Journal: How Congress Cuts Its Own Budget

National Journal - Rachel Roubein

A cam­era fol­lows House Speak­er John Boehner as he walks out of his of­fice and through Statu­ary Hall, show­ing off his cham­ber, as the video’s voi­ceover touts what he’s done to its over­head costs: cut them.

“A 14-per­cent cut in what Con­gress spends on it­self is a big suc­cess,” Boehner says. “It doesn’t hap­pen any­where else in gov­ern­ment, even though we keep try­ing.”

When the House be­came Boehner’s to run after the 2010 elec­tion, he was ready. He and his fel­low Re­pub­lic­ans slashed his cham­ber’s budget by $35 mil­lion the first week on the job, tout­ing his ful­fill­ment of a GOP pledge “to make Con­gress do more with less.” But not all cuts are cre­ated equal, and the le­gis­lat­ive branch’s ac­counts didn’t go down across the board, se­quester-style.

In­stead, fund­ing for some pri­or­it­ies—in­clud­ing of­fice budgets for in­di­vidu­al House mem­bers and com­mit­tees—dropped pre­cip­it­ously, while oth­ers were cut just a bit. A few—in­clud­ing the Cap­it­ol Po­lice—even man­aged to grow.

Along the way, Con­gress has had to weigh the value of tight­en­ing the purse strings against po­ten­tially com­prom­ising the le­gis­lat­ive branch’s re­spons­ib­il­ity to per­form over­sight of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment.

“There’s al­ways that bal­an­cing act,” said Steve El­lis, vice pres­id­ent for the non­par­tis­an budget watch­dog, Tax­pay­ers for Com­mon Sense. “You don’t want to seem like you’re feath­er­ing the nest or be­ing too gen­er­ous, but by the same token, you want to make sure that we have some of the best and bright­est run our coun­try.”

From fisc­al 2010 to fisc­al 2015, the House has cut its budget more than double the per­cent­age that the Sen­ate has re­duced its funds. The then-Demo­crat­ic-con­trolled up­per cham­ber de­creased its budget by 6.7 per­cent dur­ing this time­frame, while the House’s went down 13.8 per­cent, ac­cord­ing to data com­piled by the minor­ity side of the House Le­gis­lat­ive Branch Ap­pro­pri­ations Sub­com­mit­tee. Over the years, this has left of­fices and com­mit­tees to make do with smal­ler funds.

“The budget cuts on the Congress in the individual House and Senate offices have had a specific and ma­ter­i­al im­pact on every Con­gres­sion­al of­fice,” Brad Fitch, Con­gres­sion­al Man­age­ment Found­a­tion pres­id­ent and CEO, said, “and we hear about it in al­most every type of ses­sion we do for train­ing and pro­fes­sion­al de­vel­op­ment.

This isn’t the first time Re­pub­lic­ans took over and vowed to tight­en Hill spend­ing. When Newt Gin­grich be­came Speak­er of the House in 1995, the GOP was com­ing off of four dec­ades of be­ing in the minor­ity. Com­mit­tee staff was re­duced by one-third, and some com­mit­tees and sub­com­mit­tees were elim­in­ated.

Since fisc­al 2010, mem­bers’ rep­res­ent­a­tion­al al­low­ances in the House are down 16 per­cent. Com­mit­tee funds have de­creased nearly 19 per­cent, with some of the most dra­mat­ic re­duc­tions right after the GOP gained con­trol of the cham­ber, ac­cord­ing to the data com­piled by the le­gis­lat­ive branch sub­com­mit­tee’s Demo­crat­ic wing.

Fund­ing for the House has stayed re­l­at­ively flat since the fisc­al 2014 en­acted budget with mem­bers’ rep­res­ent­a­tion­al al­low­ances and com­mit­tees fund­ing frozen dur­ing this time­frame.

At a full House Ap­pro­pri­ations Com­mit­tee markup in late April, Sub­com­mit­tee Chair­man Tom Graves lauded the bill and the sub­com­mit­tee—and how mem­bers have saved tax­pay­er dol­lars since the GOP came in­to the ma­jor­ity.

But the pan­el’s rank­ing mem­ber had a dif­fer­ent take: “Now I know,” Rep. Debbie Wasser­man Schultz said, “if there was over­all re­lief in the budget al­loc­a­tion that we’d see more in­vest­ments in the staff and fa­cil­it­ies in the le­gis­lat­ive branch. But we’re start­ing to cut in­to bone in some places—and that is un­wise.”

Over the course of two days in Feb­ru­ary, the House Ad­min­is­tra­tion Com­mit­tee held hear­ings to help de­cide just how much money each of the cham­ber’s pan­els would re­ceive. The chairs and rank­ing mem­bers came be­fore Chair­wo­man Can­dice Miller, some de­tail­ing how their staff­ing levels had de­creased, how it’s hard to at­tract and re­tain em­ploy­ees on gov­ern­ment salar­ies, and how field hear­ings had de­clined. Miller asked many of the chairs their wish lists, while hedging the ques­tion with a budget real­ity: There’s just a “fi­nite pie of funds to go around.”

Take the House Per­man­ent Se­lect Com­mit­tee on In­tel­li­gence, Miller said in an in­ter­view: “If you’re a re­tired CIA in­di­vidu­al with all kinds of op­por­tun­it­ies here to go to work for a home­land se­cur­ity firm or a de­fense con­tract­or or whatever, it’s just hard for the In­tel­li­gence Com­mit­tee to get the really good staff and keep them here.”

That’s be­cause those with ex­pert know­ledge on a niche sub­ject are in high de­mand in the private sec­tor. “You don’t have to ne­ces­sar­ily match their salar­ies,” said Harry Stein, Cen­ter for Amer­ic­an Pro­gress fisc­al policy dir­ect­or and a former staffer for Sen. Herb Kohl. “I loved work­ing on the Hill. It’s a great job, but you’ve got to be com­pet­it­ive, and I think it can also be­come a miser­able job if you’re staffed so short that people are al­ways over­worked.”

For Miller, the gen­er­al House trend of opt­ing for email over franked mail—which mem­bers pay for out of their MRAs—is a vivid rep­res­ent­a­tion of in­di­vidu­al of­fice cost-sav­ing meas­ures. “Be­cause when we were cut­ting all the budgets, al­most every­body had the same situ­ation and de­cision to make: You were either keep­ing staff or you were do­ing franked mail. And people went with the staff, for the most part,” she said.

And while few­er staffers may be work­ing on help­ing con­stitu­ents, of­fices are do­ing their best to avoid an ac­tu­al re­duc­tion in ser­vice.

“It de­pends on how you de­ploy your forces,” said Rep. Tom Cole, the im­me­di­ate past Le­gis­lat­ive Branch Ap­pro­pri­ations Sub­com­mit­tee chair­man. “It does mean the people that are do­ing that work, in many cases, we’ve lost one or two po­s­i­tions to main­tain salar­ies where you want them to be, so they’re work­ing harder, but I have not no­ticed the av­er­age con­stitu­ent not get­ting taken care of. But there’s tough de­cisions to be made in terms of, ‘OK, do we mail ahead of town hall meet­ings or do we just an­nounce them?’ “

There’s a ra­tionale be­hind the budget cuts, Re­pub­lic­ans say. “When most of these cuts were im­ple­men­ted, we were run­ning budget de­fi­cits of over a tril­lion dol­lars a year, and we felt very strongly that we were go­ing to have to make some pretty tough spend­ing de­cisions,” Cole said. “I don’t think you have much cred­ib­il­ity telling oth­er people you need to re­duce their budget without re­du­cing your own.”

Spend­ing for the le­gis­lat­ive branch en­com­passes about 0.4 per­cent of total dis­cre­tion­ary budget au­thor­ity—the smal­lest of the ap­pro­pri­ations bills, ac­cord­ing to a June Con­gres­sion­al Re­search Ser­vice Re­port. And some crit­ics ar­gue the budget cuts are simply polit­ic­al talk­ing points.

“The main thing that’s go­ing on here is this sort of short term polit­ic­al game of pos­tur­ing as strong on de­fi­cits by cut­ting spend­ing for your­self and the agen­cies that serve you,” Stein said. “I think that’s a piece of it. This is purely polit­ic­al pos­tur­ing. It does noth­ing meas­ur­able at all to the budget.”

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