Opinion - Want to cut government waste? Pay congressional staffers more.
If President Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency are to succeed in reforming and reducing the size and power of the federal bureaucracy, they will need good intelligence. They will need to know the details of programs, the existence of unpublicized offices, the allocation of human and financial resources, the redundancies within and across agencies and, perhaps most importantly, who are the important people within them.
The administrative state has grown into such a behemoth that very few people know “where the bodies are buried” unless they work within one of those bureaucracies. Outside of those executive branch departments and agencies, very few specialists grasp the full extent of what should be known in order to make those agencies leaner, more efficient and more responsive to the will of elected officials.
There are analysts at the Government Accountability Office who audit said agencies in response to the directives of Congress. But insofar as Congress is limited in its possession of the necessary “intelligence,” it has a correspondingly inadequate ability to specify the investigations and evaluations that GAO should conduct.
Congressional limitations are the central problem here. The ability of our elected representatives to make optimally informed decisions about programs and budgets is constrained by the limited capabilities and numbers of congressional staff.
A typical House member’s office has two legislative assistants and a legislative director. Each legislative assistant has a portfolio that includes multiple subject areas, most of which are unrelated to one another — for example, someone might have health policy, Social Security, transportation, homeland security, education and veterans affairs. It is impossible for such an assistant to develop serious expertise in all these subjects and their corresponding government agencies. This is partly because most legislative assistants are very young — usually just a few years into their careers — and because they have no experience working in the executive branch. Members of Congress must then rely on their committee staff, who are more senior and the most knowledgeable of all.
Given the inexperience and paucity of trusted staffers capable of overseeing executive branch bureaucracies, the ability of Congress to gather the intelligence it needs to shape the nation’s laws is grossly suboptimal. And the fact that Congress depends on lobbyists to supply so much of the intelligence it receives makes it difficult for all concerned to evaluate the degree to which that information is biased.
The usual pattern for congressional staff is to serve several years on the Hill and then “graduate” to private-sector jobs or service in the executive branch. Both destinations offer much better salaries. One almost never sees executive branch officials move to congressional offices, because few Hill staff positions pay a family-friendly salary. Yet it is exactly former executive branch officials who are needed on congressional staffs — officials who have served long enough to know the lay of the land as well as the personnel who are likely to be responsive or resistant to the president’s agenda.
This situation is aggravated by false economies trumpeted by some members of Congress who proudly declare that they are “saving taxpayer dollars” by having such lean staffs stuck with substandard salaries. They live in fear that, should they actually pay their staff wages commensurate with the skill and responsibilities these jobs so obviously require, demagogues would accuse them of building an “imperial Congress” that rewards the politically connected. If there is anything in government as penny-wise and pound foolish as this “saving of money,” it would be hard to find.
If the president and DOGE are serious about reducing the power, intrusiveness, waste, fraud and bloat of the administrative state, they would do well to encourage our congressional leaders to improve Congress’s ability to be a check and balance against the federal bureaucracy and to recruit sympathetic members of executive branch agencies who should not have to take a pay cut to render an inestimable national service.
Dr. John Lenczowski is founder, president emeritus and chancellor of the Institute of World Politics. Previously, he served as President Ronald Reagan’s principal adviser on Soviet affairs, as well as a congressional and State Department staffer.
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