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These rules, taken together, essentially stripped all congressional Republicans, especially those in previously senior positions, of power; instead, whether or not they advanced in their careers—whether they were reappointed or on which committee they were appointed—would be determined by party leaders based on their loyalty and subservience. (Two years after the Democrats took the majority in the House in 2007, they eliminated the term-limits rule; Speaker John Boehner reinstated it when the Republicans regained control in 2010.) “If you were thinking about the next stage in your career, you did what you were told to do,” observes Scott Lilly. The point of this centralization of power was to give the leadership maximum control of the legislative agenda and to jam through as many conservative bills as possible. That, it achieved: the Gingrich House passed 124 measures in 1995, more than double the 53 that Tip O’Neill’s House passed in 1981. But over time it also had the effect of dumbing down the ins ution.
After the first round of term-limit expirations rolled around in 2001, for instance, Republican Representative Ralph Regula was termed out of his chairmanship of the Interior Subcommittee, a position he had held off and on for twenty-six years, during which time he had become the chamber’s de facto expert on public lands and natural resources. Regula was famous in environmental circles for his relentless interest in the unglamorous issue of national park infrastructure maintenance. (At one point his committee uncovered a $330,000 outhouse complete with a slate roof, picture windows, and a twenty-nine-inch-thick earthquake-proof foundation.) His detailed understanding and thrifty instincts helped Regula win support in his caucus for increased funding to reduce the backlog of national park maintenance projects. But that knowledge and clout went with him when he was termed out.
It’s worth noting, of course, that term limits do, in theory, have an upside. They sweep away lawmakers who, over the years, have been captured by the agencies they oversee and the special interests they interact with. And they bring new blood into the committee leadership. In the 1970s, many liberal reformers advocated for term limits for these reasons, and as a means of limiting the power of long-serving southern Democrats who then dominated the chairmanships of the powerful committees. But in order to work, limiting committee chairs’ power and hard-won knowledge needs to be offset by enough staff who have sufficient ins utional memory to educate the new members and explain, for instance, when they’re being lied to by the agencies and the special interests. Gingrich, of course, cut the staff, too.
And anyway, the problem with term limits in the mid-’90s was not only a loss of experience in a given subject; it was also a decline in the motivation to learn a subject in depth in the first place. After all, members who know they will move to a new committee in a few years are sometimes hard-pressed to really dig into a subject matter. That natural inclination has been greatly exacerbated by the fact that, beginning in 1995 and continuing to the present day, the leadership often dictates to committees what it wants bills to look like or drafts them outright. So instead of learning deeply about a given subject, debating various policy options, engaging in the nitty-gritty of a topic over the course of years and sometimes decades, committee members nowadays are often asked either to reverse-engineer a piece of legislation based on party leadership’s description of what kind of bill they’d like to see or to simply vote on a bill they did not write to begin with. Is it any surprise that, under those cir stances, deep policy knowledge, curiosity, and innovation have gone out the window? “What’s the payoff for doing a good job? If you take your job seriously as a chairman, who gives a ?” says Bruce Bartlett, who worked as a congressional staffer in the 1970s and ’80s for Representative Jack Kemp, Representative Ron Paul, and the Joint Economic Committee.
In the past, members angled for committee assignments in part based on their personal backgrounds and the interests of their states or cons uencies—another factor that favored the ac ulation of subject-area knowledge—but under the new rules, leadership made the choices based more on political calculation. Seats on the “prestigious” committees began to go most often to members who were likely to face a strong challenger in the next election, so that they could brag to cons uents about their powerful role or, more to the point, position themselves for corporate campaign contributions. “There was an immediate atrophy of the professional qualifications of the committees,” said Mike Lofgren, a former Republican congressional aide who has since been publicly critical of the Republican Party. “Knowing anything about the committee’s jurisdiction just didn’t factor in.”
Of course, it’s hard to learn much about the substance of the issues if you’re spending four hours a day “dialing for dollars” to raise campaign funds, as both parties recently instructed their members to do, in addition to another hour or two of attending fund-raisers. Compare that to the three to four hours per day members spend on average attending hearings, voting, meeting with cons uents, studying, debating, and legislating. But while both parties are equally aggressive in hunting for money, Democrats have repeatedly tried to pass public financing bills to lessen the fund-raising burdens on in bents and challengers alike. Republicans have just as frequently (and successfully) fought those bills. That’s an indication of how the parties differ philosophically on the role of private money in politics. But it’s also a fair gauge of how much weight each party gives to the importance of lawmakers knowing the substance of the issues they are legislating on.
Gingrich’s second move in 1995 was to go after the pooled funding that paid for the so-called professional staffers, who worked for the ins ution itself. Professional staff, most of whom were not explicitly partisan, were often deeply knowledgeable not only about policy issues within their expertise but also about the ins ution itself. They knew what had worked in the past, what members’ preferences and personalities were like, and how to draft a bill that would pass. As one member described it to me, professional staffers are “legislative lubricant,” often acting as referees or liaisons during committee debates. Within months, Gingrich had laid off about 800 of them. All told, he cut the total population of professional staffers by more than a third—a wound from which Congress has never recovered. In 1993, Congress employed nearly 2,150 professional committee staff; in 2011, there were just 1,316, according to the most recent data.
The professional staff also helped to run legislative service organizations (LSOs), informal study groups where members, often of both parties, would discuss specific issues, debate, share information, build trust, and “gain expertise on ‘big-picture’ national issues outside the jurisdiction of committees,” notes the New America Foundation’s Lorelei Kelly. The LSOs vanished along with pooled funding and shared staff in 1995.
Those professional staffers who were there at the time remember the atmosphere changing. “After Newt put the kibosh on shared staff, the whole place began to work more like Politico,” said one former senior staffer who worked on the Hill for two decades, referring to the website’s 24/7 attention to scandal, intrigue, and political strategy over deeper policy discussions. “No one was asking, What kind of legislation will this be? How can we make it better? Where do we need to go to get a compromise? They were asking, What kind of political fallout will this have? Who will look good? Who can we make look bad?”
Gingrich also cut the number of staffers working directly for House members. While those numbers later rose, they did so in a way that further reflects the intellectual hollowing out of the ins ution. Nearly all of the net increase in member staff since the late 1990s has been not in Washington, where the actual legislating happens, but in district offices, where the main jobs are handling cons uent complaints, shuttling members around to local events, and getting them press—in short, ensuring their reelection. Not surprisingly, in the past decade, members have moved roughly 33 percent of their staff capacity away from policymaking and toward communications roles, according to a recent Congressional Management Foundation report.
Keeping good staff, professional or otherwise, is also a struggle considering the pay scales. While it’s difficult to compare salaries—the direct equivalent of a “legislative assistant” in the private sector is hotly debated—a measured 2009 report by the Sunlight Foundation concluded that Hill staffers are paid roughly a third less than they could make in the private sector. The on-the-job knowledge and connections staffers ac ulate become exponentially more valuable over time to the lobbying shops on K Street, and the opportunity costs of staying become hard to ignore. According to a 2012 Washington Times analysis, 82 percent of Senate staffers and 70 percent of House staffers hired in 2005 had left the Hill by 2012.
The one thing that has traditionally kept at least some Hill staffers from leaving for the private sector is the heady nature of the work on Capitol Hill—the ability to fight for issues they believe in, to be in the room when the big decisions are being made, to put their personal stamp on legislation that will change history. But even that motivation has been undermined by the Tea Party-inspired gridlock that has blocked most major legislation in both houses since 2010 and squandered staff energies in pointless budget standoffs. “Those who are nourished by accomplishment are starving,” observes former Senator Byron Dorgan. “People who come highly motivated, they want to feel good about their challenge, their work, what they’re doing for the country. When they’re not getting that, they start looking around.”
The third target of Gingrich’s attacks was the legislative support agencies. The Government Accountability Office, Congressional Budget Office, Congressional Research Service, and now-defunct Office of Technology Assessment operated on a bipartisan basis, offering measured reports on topics suggested by members themselves. Sometimes, these agencies act as helpful librarians, and sometimes they’re more like referees, carefully adjudicating among the competing quan ative claims of various members and outside groups.
Gingrich, perhaps not surprisingly, viewed them all as potential rivals to his singular narrative. He particularly despised the OTA, as did many other conservatives, despite its evident usefulness. For instance, Congress saved hundreds of millions of dollars by incorporating OTA recommendations when the Social Security Administration moved to replace its old-school mainframe computers with a new computer network in the mid-’90s. (One wonders how things might have been different if the OTA had been around when the health care insurance exchanges were being built.) But over the years, the OTA had also cast doubt on some conservative ideas—a mortal sin as far as Gingrich and his followers were concerned. For example, an OTA report raising serious questions about the feasibility of Reagan’s Star Wars project was later used by Democrats to help defund the program.
Within a few months of taking the helm in 1995, Gingrich eliminated the OTA entirely and cut roughly a third of the staff in all the other congressional service agencies. According to the Brookings Ins ution’s Vital Statistics of Congress, those agencies have never recovered. The GAO lost more than 2,000 staffers between 1993 and 2010. CRS staff lost about 20 percent of its capacity. All told, in 1993 Congress employed 6,166 researchers; by 2011, that number was down to just over 4,000.
How has the brain drain affected Washington? To begin with, just look at all the construction cranes that dot the city’s skyline. The ongoing migration of talent out of Capitol Hill has helped drive the building boom in downtown D.C. as surely as the Pentagon’s contracting-out craze, which also took off in the 1990s, gave rise to the corporate office towers of Northern Virginia.
You can see the effect in the shabby, politicized work product coming out of many committees. In May, for instance, the House Energy and Commerce Committee released a survey conducted by its GOP staff purporting to show that only 67 percent of people who signed up for health insurance on the federal exchange had paid their first premium—a number that, if true, would have embarrassed the administration. In fact, the survey gave a false impression by counting as nonpayers people who hadn’t yet been billed. Insurance company executives later testified in public to the committee that their estimated payment rate was 80 percent. “Republicans were visibly exasperated,” reported The Hill, “as insurers failed to confirm certain claims about ObamaCare, such as the committee’s allegation that one-third of federal exchange enrollees have not paid their first premium.”
You can see it in the recent string of surprise retirement announcements from House GOP committee chairman who will be term-limited out of their positions next year. That includes Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp, whose committee (which has miraculously retained some level of bipartisan competence) labored to put together a credible tax reform plan. The GOP said the plan was one of the party’s top legislative goals, but John Boehner tabled the measure in an effort not to muddy the midterm elections with substantive issues. “It used to be that the chairman would call the speaker up and say, ‘I want this bill on this floor at this time,’” explains Dingell. “Now it’s the opposite.”
You can see it in frequent little dustups meant to undermine the legitimacy of the findings of congressional service organizations, like the one that engulfed the Congressional Research Service in 2012, when its economics division published a report surveying the effects of tax cuts going back decades and concluding that they do not generate sufficient new tax revenues from economic growth to pay for themselves—the main tenet of supply-side economics. A firestorm of anger from Senate Republicans led the CRS to pull the report.
You can also see the effects in stories like the one that appeared on the front page of the New York Times last May about a House bill that would exempt broad swaths of derivative trades from new Dodd-Frank Act regulations. The bill, which passed the House 292 to 122 before dying in the Senate, was written not only at the behest of lobbyists from Citigroup but by Citigroup lobbyists:
In a sign of Wall Street’s resurgent influence in Washington, Citigroup’s recommendations were reflected in more than 70 lines of the House committee’s 85-line bill. Two crucial paragraphs, prepared by Citigroup in conjunction with other Wall Street banks, were copied nearly word for word. (Lawmakers changed two words to make them plural.)
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