The Capitol Hill staff squeeze

Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R-Wis., reads everything that crosses his desk—a point of pride, he told me.

“You see these bills? I read all of these,” Van Orden said as he waved a stack of papers emblazoned with the crest of the U.S. House of Representatives. “I read them before I get into town on fly-in days. I read hundreds and hundreds of pages of stuff every week. That’s why I get sent here.”

In Van Orden’s experience, members of Congress more often let their staff members read bills for them and draft legislative language. He says there’s a strong tendency to delegate the workload to the 18 staffers House members are allowed to hire.

After the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the 198 decision in Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council Inc. last month, that pull might get even stronger. The case established something called the Chevron deference, which gave executive agencies broad power to decide how to enforce laws made by Congress. The overturning of Chevron put conservatives closer to accomplishing their longtime goal of limiting the executive branch’s power. Now it’s up to lawmakers and the courts to address ambiguities in future legislation, which could lead to the not-so-conservative result of expanding the bureaucracy that supports Congress.

Rep. Rich McCormick, R-Ga., was one of the conservatives rooting for the end of the Chevron doctrine. He said government agencies overstepped the boundaries set by Congress for too long, affecting all sorts of industries, from energy to firearms and beyond.

“[Regulatory agencies] are making laws,” McCormick told WORLD moments after the Supreme Court released its decision in July. “They’re not elected officials. They are there to enforce laws, not make laws.”

Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, a case about fishing regulations, brought down the Chevron deference in July. The case stemmed from a ban on overfishing that Congress passed in 1976. In 2020, the National Marine Fisheries Service took the law one step further, saying commercial fishermen would have to bring an industry monitor with them out to sea—and pay them to the tune of $700 a day—to make sure they weren’t breaking the law. U.S. fishing companies sued to curb the power of the government and won.

While industry experts have varying opinions on whether Chevron’s overturning is a good or bad development for Congress, almost all of them agree with the short-term need for lawmakers to write more specific laws and review the gray areas. To do that, they will need more help from staff.

“Staff are absolutely essential for House members and senators simply because [lawmakers] have an incredible number of things to pay attention to,” said Kevin Kosar, an expert on the administrative state at the American Enterprise Institute. “They have to show up at party functions. They have to raise money to run for reelection. So, their actual bandwidth for doing deep dive policy is quite limited, which means good members have to rely heavily upon their staff and also develop sound relations with committee staff.”

As many as 10,000 employees work for the House of Representatives. The maximum salary a staffer can receive is $173,900, although the average salary is much lower at just $39,000 annually, according to research by Issue One.

Congressional committee staff members in particular—who usually start drafting legislation—do a lot of the heavy lifting. Since the Chevron decision, the appropriations for committee staff in the House of Representatives has gone from $37.8 million in 1985 to $180.5 million in 2024—an almost 400 percent increase. In the past four years alone, the appropriations for House committee staff have climbed 33 percent, up from $135.4 million in 2020.

Illustration by Leo Briceno

Even if members like Van Orden read every bill they vote on, can they also keep pace with the 200,000 pages in the federal code of regulations—90,000 of which were updated in some way last year? Do they make it a habit to keep tabs on overfishing requirements and comparing those requirements to existing law?

“The GOP has run against the administrative state for a very long time,” the AEI’s Kosar said. “And now, the proverbial dog has caught the bumper. The real challenge is for more members of Congress to understand that this is not a matter of being pro-regulation or anti-regulation. This is a matter of oversight.”

That oversight could occur at the committee level with more staff, but Kosar believes investigations, hearings, and other activities could soak up the extra resources if Congress isn’t careful.

“I have argued that these folks should be civil servants who work either in a new congressional regulation office or they can be tucked inside the congressional budget office,” Kosar said. “That strikes me as the best way to give Congress a core of brain power to handle regulatory oversight.”

Kosar pointed out that Congress did something similar a few years ago when it asked the Government Accountability Office to start addressing science- and technology-based assignments.

In the days after the Chevron decision, Republicans acknowledged they would likely need to beef up staffing to confront the increased workload. But few had a concrete idea of what that would look like.

I asked Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, if he would support revisiting staffing levels in the near future.

“We’ve gotten way too comfortable adopting deliberately, willfully ambiguous [legislative] text,” Lee said. “This is going to require us to pay more attention. So yeah, it’s going to require more work, and to the extent that it requires beefing up staff, yeah that’s something we have to deal with.”

Van Orden, the congressman from Wisconsin, said that even if he has to add staff, it is still his responsibility to make choices on behalf of his constituents: “You leverage your staff because they are subject matter experts but, as George Bush used to say, ‘I’m the decider.’ And if I don’t understand what I’m voting on, I’m not doing the job my constituents sent me here to do.”