Policy Studies Governance

Human capital and institutional decline in congressional appropriations committees

by Casey Burgat AND Ryan Dukeman, research assistant, R Street Institute

Dec 14, 2018

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Authors

Casey Burgat

Former Associate Fellow

Ryan Dukeman

Former Research Assistant

Key Points

As the size of the federal budget has continued to increase, House and Senate Appropriations Committee staffing levels have not kept pace. As a result, each House Approps. staffer is responsible for 52% more federal dollars than he or she was just 16 years ago. And each Senate Approps. staffer’s workload has increased 30% during the same period.

Appropriations committee posts are known as premier jobs on the Hill. We confirm that staffers on these committees earn higher salaries and maintain longer tenures when compared to their peers. But, there are still very real gender discrepancies both in terms of what types of jobs women hold on the committees, and in being paid less than men despite holding the same title.

Because of these capacity deficiencies, Congress is unable to provide vital oversight over the $4 trillion they appropriate each fiscal year and we can fully expect the new normal of funding the federal government through short-term and omnibus legislation to continue.

Press Release

R Street policy report: How congressional staff levels adversely affect the federal budget

Foreword

Given their authority over the purse strings of the federal government, the House and Senate Committees on Appropriations are two of the most prestigious in all of Congress. Yet, despite their notoriety, not much is known about the inner workings of the two committees responsible for overseeing a $4 trillion government budget.

We know they are important and we often decry their processes as broken but do we know how the appropriations committees actually work?

In an effort to answer this question, we felt it warranted to focus on the relatively anonymous individuals who execute much of the committees’ day-to-day work: House and Senate Appropriations Committee staff.

Read the full Foreword and study here.