WORKING ON THE HILL: Should Congressional Aides Get a COLA?
Social Security recipients receive annual Cost-of-Living-Adjustments (COLA) that are often the subject of congressional action, debate and correspondence. Some corporations provide salary COLAs for some or all of their employees.
But what about COLAs for the 20,000 or so mostly younger men and women who work on Capitol Hill for an individual senator or representative’s D.C. office or “back home” in a state or district office, for congressional committees and for congressional agencies like the Congressional Research Service (CRS)?
Believe it or not, a kind of COLA has been proposed and is being discussed now, and there is a very real possibility that some form of an annual pay adjustment could become part of many or all Hill aides’ compensation in the not-too-distant future.
A Landmark Report:
The proposal comes from a report prepared by the House of Representatives Inspector General for the Chief Administrative Officer. The original initiative for the report came from the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. You can read the report here.
Here’s the section on the COLA, which would be initially applied to the Members’ Representative Account (MRA), which is the fund from which Hill staffers are paid:
“An annual COLA adjustment component needs to be added to the Clerk‐Hire calculation of the MRA7F 8. The executive branch model could be used for this component with either one nationwide rate or the multiple geographic locality rates.
“The 2020 Clerk‐Hire MRA component was $994,671. Using 2020 as an example, the Clerk‐Hire component of the MRA would have been $1,020,532 using the base increase of 2.60 percent or $1,029,683 using the Washington DC – Baltimore locality increase of 3.52 percent.”
VIP Steps Forward:
Increasing the MRA is an essential first step in the process of raising compensation levels for Hill staffers and the recommendation for adding a COLA to the MRA would be a huge improvement. Better salaries for specific positions would become more feasible.
Hill aides are encouraged to sit down and spend some time reading the report, as it may have more impact on the staff workplace environment than any other document in recent memory.
The report is chock full of additional information and recommendations regarding staff size, positions and compensation. The select committee has been working in the shadows of the political show in Congress, but the panel is moving steadily and effectively forward.
The staff size analysis is based in great part on recommendations from Hill Chiefs of Staff. Check out the chart above that plots the CoS recommendations on a position-by-position basis.