Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Fixing the House means more staff pay and member budget sway, panel concludes

U.S. Capitol, Committee on Modernization of Congress
Samuel Corum/Getty Images

Its nickname has been the Fix Congress Committee, an unusually bipartisan effort by House members to make their workplace a bit more functional. On Thursday it wrapped up work by endorsing 40 more ideas — including on such politically dicey topics as Capitol Hill's spending on itself and lawmakers steering federal spending toward home.

The panel has been something of a pet project for good-government groups inside the Beltway, who engineered its creation two years ago, pelted it with ideas and prodded it toward consensus.

For these democracy reform advocates, the formula for quelling Washington gridlock and poisoned partisanship includes boosting a legislative branch that's fallen way behind in balance-of-power struggles — and that won't happen until Capitol Hill is a place where politicians and their aides actually want to work for more than a few years and have realistic hope of getting something done.


That's why the recommendations from the panel, formally the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, aim to "help the legislative branch reclaim its Article One responsibilities, reform the broken budget and appropriations process and ensure the people's house has the capacity to meet the needs of those we serve," Rep. Derek Kilmer of Washington, the committee's Democratic chairman, said after the meeting.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

The proposals were all about the House, because two years ago the Republican-majority Senate declined to get involved in a similar self-assessment.

The recommendations by the panel, six members from each party, won't take effect until turned into a combination of leadership decisions, House rules changes or enacted legislation — meaning they will fade away unless an array of internal turf battles and partisan spats can be set aside. And, to preserve the panel's rare record of bipartisan accord, the sharpest edges of some of the more provocative proposals were sanded down to vagaries.

Nonetheless, the committee's final proposals touched on almost all the main problems lawmakers and experts identify as hobbling Congress.

To allow a possible revival of a collaborative legislative process in which all members participate, instead of only a handful of the most powerful, the panel would revamp the House calendar to guarantee time for more committee work — and have some staffers work for both parties.

To stanch the Hill's rapid brain drain, where aides routinely turn just a few years of underpaid experience into lucrative corporate or lobbying work, the panel would increase budgets for member offices while ending staff salary caps and enhancing some health and student loan payment benefits.

Arguably most importantly, the panel would move to revamp processes for routine budgeting and the allocation of federal funds, which have been almost completely useless for more than a decade pockmarked by government shutdowns and last-minute stopgap spending deals.

Beyond switching from writing a budget blueprint every year, which no longer happens any time there's divided government, to shooting for one in every Congress, the panel made a gentle but firm proposal for reviving a limited and more publicly transparent version of so-called earmarks, essentially line items in spending bills directing federal cash to parochial pet projects.

Lawmakers who secured such provisions — which were banned more than a decade ago on the somewhat unfair grounds that they bloated the budget with "pork" — tended to vote for the spending bills on which they caught a ride, one of the main reasons why annual budget bills used to draw solid bipartisan support. Reviving them, the theory goes, would make the budget process smoother and less partisan once more, and give members more buy-in to their "power of the purse" responsibilities.

Thursday's package was adopted by voice vote, ensuring the panel's record of consensus was preserved to the end, although Republican William Timmons of South Carolina made clear he was no fan of what the panel dubbed a new "Community Focused Grant Program."

Two earlier sets of recommendations, 57 in total, were largely embraced by the full House in March but were focused on much less politicized matters — improving technology, modernizing personnel practices, streamlining antiquated bureaucracies and incubating some restoration of a bipartisan culture at the Capitol.

"You can have very divisive issues and still reach agreement if you take the time to listen and work things out," was the main lesson for Congress from the panel's work, said its top Republican, Tom Graves of Georgia.

"Our democracy is under incredible strain," added Jason Grumet of the Bipartisan Policy Center, one of the think tanks and advocacy groups behind the effort. "The committee's own resilience sets an example for the rest of Congress.

Read More

As Trump policy changes loom, nearly half of farmworkers lack legal status

Immigrant farm workers hoe weeds in a farm field of produce.

Getty Images//Rand22
Bird Flu and the Battle Against Emerging Diseases

A test tube with a blood test for h5n1 avian influenza. The concept of an avian flu pandemic. Checking the chicken for diseases.

Getty Images//Stock Photo

Bird Flu and the Battle Against Emerging Diseases

The first human death from bird flu in the United States occurred on January 6 in a Louisiana hospital, less than three weeks before the second Donald Trump administration’s inauguration. Bird flu, also known as Avian influenza or H5N1, is a disease that has been on the watch list of scientists and epidemiologists for its potential to become a serious threat to humans.

COVID-19’s chaotic handling during Trump’s first term serves as a stark reminder of the stakes. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention, last year, 66 confirmed human cases of H5N1 bird flu were reported in the United States. That is a significant number when you consider that only one case was recorded in the two previous years.

Keep ReadingShow less
People voting
LPETTET/Getty Images

Attention must be paid to working and retired Americans

There is no question that the Democratic Party has lost touch with the working class. Candidates actually rarely use the phrase "working class," while they never stop saying "middle class." Working class, to most Democrats, feels like a pejorative term. Everyone, after all, wants to rise up to the middle class, which makes up 50 percent of the country.

The 35 percent of the public who fit into the working class, in Rodney Dangerfield's terms, don't get no respect.

Keep ReadingShow less
USA China trade war and American tariffs as opposing cargo freight containers in conflict as an economic and diplomatic dispute over import and exports concept as a 3D illustration.
wildpixel/Getty Images

Are Trump's tariffs good for the economy or will they increase prices?

As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to return to the Oval Office, there is much talk about tariffs as the foundation for his economic policy. Trump himself says he’s “a Tariff Man,” and in fact implemented tariffs on a number of countries in his first term. But what are tariffs exactly, and how do they work? What are the pros and cons?

There’s a lot at stake, and like many things “economic,” it’s kind of complicated. So let’s break it down.

Keep ReadingShow less