Opinion | How a Capitol Hill Union Might Start to Fix Congress
Along with addressing terrible bosses and poor working conditions, a union could begin to repair a profoundly broken legislative process.
Signs reading "Help Still Wanted" sit on the east front lawn outside the U.S. Capitol on January to call attention to small businesses in need of further government assistance. | Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Opinion by Winslow T. Wheeler
02/23/2022
Winslow T. Wheeler worked on national security issues for Senators Jacob K. Javits (R-N.Y.), Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), Nancy Landon Kassebaum(R-Kan.) and David Pryor (D-Ark.), the latter two simultaneously. He also directed multiple major studies at GAO and authored or edited books, anthologies, commentaries and articles while at the Center for Defense Information and the Project On Government Oversight.
It should be no surprise that support is growing among congressional aides to form a union. Staff complain about low pay, long hours, poor conditions, racism, sexism and lousy bosses. These complaints are certainly legitimate; they are also ancient.
I worked in Congress for 31 years — 22 years in the Senate and nine years at the Government Accountability Office, the Hill’s watchdog agency. I worked for members on both sides of the aisle, both liberal and conservative. I saw what today’s staffers are complaining about time after time. I hope a union can fix these problems. But if staffers do unionize, they should do more than just tackle workforce issues: They should push lawmakers to make Capitol Hill a less dysfunctional place for both itself and the broader public.
When I started with former Sen. Jacob Javits, a liberal Republican from New York in 1971, I worked in a typically over-stuffed room in the Russell Senate Office Building with five others and their desks, bookcases, file cabinets, partitions and an occasional intern or two. I couldn’t help but overhear the horror stories of one officemate about the racism she encountered when she started with Javits, years before. One of the very first African Americans to work in a professional job in the Senate, she recounted how one senator would refuse to ride the elevator with her in it. It was Richard B. Russell, a Georgia Democrat. They didn’t exactly punish him for his widely known and unapologetic racism; they named the Senate office building after him — and still do to this day. The disturbing message, then and now, is clear.
Sexism? It wasn’t exactly subtle. Congressman Wayne Hays (D-Ohio) putting a woman on the House payroll to make her available to him for a sexual relationship was only one of the endless examples of a culture rampant with misconduct. It was not a problem just at the member-of-Congress level; as with most things, the behavior of the bosses was license for anyone else. It also translated into top staff refusing to protect women other than with feckless advice such as “Don’t get on an elevator with him alone.” Even if today’s accounts of racism and sexism are not always so blatant, they are serious, and too few on Capitol Hill call them out and impose sanctions, especially when it is a lawmaker who performs the dog whistling or the predatory behavior.
I often heard about some bosses acting like jerks. Throwing typewriters, or laptops now; ordering staff to walk the dog or get the dry cleaning, tantrums and crude, arrogant behavior result in the Caligula-like lawmakers having poor staff retention. The awful bosses become known, but rarely does the behavior really change. The only real solution has been to move on to somewhere else. Don’t for a moment think that this problem pertains only to certain political orientations or party affiliations.
In addition to the problems that can plague any workplace, Congress also presents some unique challenges.
For instance, Capitol Hill badly needs hardcore protection for its own whistleblowers. Today a staffer complaining about acts of racism, sexual predation, illegal behavior and more has little to no real protection. If offending lawmakers and staff knew that behavior beyond the pale was more likely than not to be reported, the deterrents would be far stronger than they are now. In this election year, one particularly relevant test of real protection for staffers is for those who might complain that Hill aides illegally work for a member’s reelection campaign. This frequently occurs either on the job in Washington or back in the state, sometimes while staffers are on what they euphemistically call “vacation.” (Campaign work is no vacation.)
But if the newly unionized workforce really wants to improve Congress, staffers should push their bosses to overhaul the way they do Congress’ business more broadly. There is a whole universe of problems that neither union advocates nor the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress are talking about.
One proposal: Staff should press lawmakers to pursue more investigations in the public interest. Anyone watching knows that agency oversight is dead on Capitol Hill, especially on national security issues which I still observe closely. Today members do not even know how to ask real questions. Genuine, not grotesquely politicized, investigative reports are harder to find out of Capitol Hill offices than dinosaur bones. Committee staffers who produce unfettered reports, not fluff, should be prized, especially when those with a vested interest want them suppressed and the authors punished. Beyond committees, investigations are also something that staffers on members’ personal staff can produce, if they are only a little enterprising.
Congressional aides should also push for both majority and the minority leaders to insist that both Congress and the public be fully informed on what’s in a bill. Today, legislation is sometimes thousands of pages long, and yet typically there is no official report, jointly written by the Democratic and Republican staff, to explain the major provisions. Obscure parts — often profoundly important — are left unidentified, unexplained and a mystery to the public and even most in Congress. There is no complete and accurate staff analysis of the provisions, with both sides of any argument being fully aired. All we get now are pathetically biased and dueling, incomplete press releases. If senior members on committees and in the leadership demanded more and better products from staff, we’d have a vastly more trustworthy legislative process than the one we have now. If the members don’t ask for such improvements, a more professional and union-empowered staff should go ahead and produce them anyway. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Why shouldn’t publicly minded, union-protected professional staff lobby for some real fixes in the legislative process? While the Senate filibuster is certainly too hot and political to handle, what if staff petitioned their respective members and leadership to do their collective job by enacting appropriations by the start of the fiscal year — rather than today’s risible practice of stumbling along with “continuing resolutions” with last year’s (i.e. the wrong) amounts of money for virtually every program in federal agencies. A staff-led move to perform this work on time would be the ultimate _expression_ of doing what the Constitution, appropriations law, the Budget Act and conscience all call for.
Most on Capitol Hill would view these proposals as an outrageous breach of propriety, considering the usually servile relationship congressional staffers have with most elected members.
However, it should not be wrong for scrupulous staff to lobby the members, especially when basic legislative functions are not being done. Congress, especially the Senate, has become a parody of itself: Doing things patently wrong or not at all has become a major part of the job. Why must a conscientious, union-empowered staff be complicit?
None of this is to advocate a certain policy or provision; it is to allow Congress (and the public) to see and understand what it is doing and whether basic functions are being performed.
Staff in a better position to leverage what goes on, and what doesn’t, on Capitol Hill could make it a far better place. Even better would be members of the House and Senate demanding these and other changes. My short list here is only a beginning.
As a Senate staffer I attempted as often as possible to achieve what I saw as the acme of good staff work: not necessarily to give the boss what they wanted, but what they needed, even (rather especially) when they didn’t ask for it. If a union on Capitol Hill will result in diligent staff more able to influence today’s dismal culture, I am all for the union. If a union just means more of the same under more pleasant circumstances, let’s just forget about it.