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.

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 Housein 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

Homelessness and Mental Illness: How Trump’s New Executive Order Could Backfire

A homeless woman sets her tent up in an encampment in Skid Row on July 25, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. The U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order for changes to make it easier for states and cities to remove outdoor encampments get people into treatment for individuals struggling with mental health issues or addiction.

Getty Images, Apu Gomes

Homelessness and Mental Illness: How Trump’s New Executive Order Could Backfire

In late July, President Trump signed an executive order urging local authorities to find ways to force homeless individuals with mental illness into hospitals. On its face, some observers might find this move appealing. Homelessness has skyrocketed across American cities, generating headlines about homeless encampment waste and public substance use. And mental health care, which many of these individuals need, is difficult to access—and arguably easier to obtain in a hospital. But Trump’s order may in fact undermine its own aims.

Research shows that psychiatric hospitalization has little impact on “Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” as the executive order puts it, and which it purports to address. Instead, while the order and other Trump Administration policies may remove homelessness from public view, they neither house nor heal those suffering from it.

Keep ReadingShow less
Understanding the Debate on Reparations for Native Americans

Native American reparations are designed to remedy the U.S. government’s historical treatment of indigenous tribes, ranging from monetary compensation to land redistribution and recognition of cultural rights.

Getty Images, anilakkus

Understanding the Debate on Reparations for Native Americans

Native American reparations are designed to remedy the U.S. government’s historical treatment of indigenous tribes, ranging from monetary compensation to land redistribution and recognition of cultural rights.

Hallmarks of Support for Reparations for Indigenous Peoples

Keep ReadingShow less
The Climate Bill Is Here—and Republicans Just Handed You the Check

Climate change isn’t a distant threat. It’s an everyday expense. And for millions of Americans, the costs are already piling up.

Getty Images, Andriy Onufriyenko

The Climate Bill Is Here—and Republicans Just Handed You the Check

Introduction

Donald Trump ran on fighting inflation. Instead, he’s helped push prices higher—and made life more expensive for everyday Americans. As climate disasters disrupt farms, raise food prices, and strain household budgets, GOP leaders are attacking the science and policies that could help us adapt. From wildfires in California to droughts in Arizona and floods in Texas, extreme weather is turning climate denial into a hidden tax on working families.

Keep ReadingShow less
Pharma Industry and Ballard Partners Dominate the Lobbying Space in Second Quarter of 2025
Douglas Rissing/Getty Images

Pharma Industry and Ballard Partners Dominate the Lobbying Space in Second Quarter of 2025

Pharmaceutical and health products companies continued to dominate the lobbying space in the second quarter of 2025, spending $105.4 million to influence public policy. That industry has spent more on lobbying than any other, during every quarter but one, since 2010, according to an OpenSecrets analysis of disclosure reports.

That total was down from the industry’s first-quarter total ($121.4 million) but still 38 percent more than the second biggest spender, the electronics industry.

Keep ReadingShow less