The Boy Who Could Change the World (18 page)

There's drinking and dancing and hugs and high-fives and all the stress of the campaign, of the months of ceaseless toil, the blood, sweat and tears—all drains away . . . at least for one night.

Part Two: Legislation

The next morning is like the hangover after any good party. The hotel room is trashed, the office is a mess, everyone's stumbling around in a daze, half dressed. But the job isn't over yet—it's just beginning.

As the campaign ends, the job begins. And like any new job, it has its orientation session. Every new member of Congress receives a passel of training: there are events held at Harvard's Kennedy School, orientations held on Capitol Hill, and education programs given by the Congressional Management Foundation.

The Congressional Management Foundation is an odd creature: a nonpartisan, independent foundation whose only goal is to teach members of Congress to be better managers. A newly elected member of the House of Representatives doesn't just get a key card valid for two years of voting—they also get a multimillion-dollar budget to spend on their official duties.

It's tempting to just hire the people from your campaign, but being a member of Congress is a serious job and requires serious skills—experience above all, according to those with experience. When searching for a new campaign staff, you can't just
choose anyone off the street. You need someone who knows the Capitol—because you sure don't! This means typically hiring people from other offices, where they've been groomed in “the way things are done around here.”

But these staffers also have divided loyalties. Most newly elected members come from either the handful of competitive districts, which are likely to swing back to the other party just as they've swung toward you, or are the result of a fluke or a wave year, in which case the other party will be heavily gunning to reclaim the seat in the next election. Either way, more often than not your new boss isn't going to still be here in two years.

So if you want long-term employment as a congressional staffer, it's not your boss you need to keep happy—it's your previous employer. Many long-serving members of Congress build a power base by grooming new staffers and sending them out into the world to serve other members. When they need that member's vote or some other favor, help is just a phone call away.

But even these staffers are chosen from a narrow pool. How does someone get experience in Congress in the first place? By applying to be an intern. Imagine the sort of college student whose idea of a great first job is to run errands and fetch coffee for whichever random person happens to represent their hometown. They're not likely to be someone who cares passionately about making the world a better place—if they were, they'd be working for some activism group. They're not someone who's interested in judiciously weighing the facts and trying to come up with good solutions—if they were, they'd be working for a think tank. Instead, they're someone who gets excited by proximity to power—who's turned on just by striding the Capitol's marble halls, by sitting in a closet next to a Man with a Vote, by running into the leaders of the Free World in the elevator. There are people who thirst for a chance at power, and for them, fetching coffee is a trifling price.

By and large, these people will not be powerful themselves. Some of them have the spark of ambition and will go far, will become one of the people they once longed to be near. But most aren't interested in power for themselves, but merely being in its good graces. They have a sensitive antenna for who's in charge and what it is they
want. And the result is that a congressman who actually wants to accomplish things, who doesn't want to be just another pawn for the people who actually run the game, starts off with a team full of saboteurs.

At every turn, they will insist “that isn't the way things are done around here.” Even when given direct orders, they will often find ways to shirk them, to avoid the stain of their boss's uncouth requests harming their own reputation. But most bosses never get that far. They don't want to stand out either—like any good politician, they yearn to fit in. So they follow their staff's instructions and fall in line.

There are many talented and competent people in the world—people who have risen to high positions in business or academia—who would gladly leave their post for a couple years to help run a congressional office. Think of the resources at their disposal! There's the millions of dollars, of course, but that's nothing. There are the votes, but even those are tiny. But there's the prestige—just say you're calling on behalf of a member of Congress and everyone returns your calls. And there's the attention—make a statement or a pronouncement and it's instantly newsworthy. “Area Man Calls for Higher Taxes”? It's a joke. But “Area
Congressman
Calls for Higher Taxes”—now that's news.

But more than all of that—much more—is the access. Every day, whizzing through the halls of Congress, are the words that will bind the world's only superpower. Even changing something as simple as a single letter can affect the lives of not just thousands, not just millions, but hundreds of millions of people—for good or ill. And as a member of Congress you can get those letters changed—just by asking! Where else can you regularly help millions of people just by asking someone to fix a typo?

Paul Thacker was a low-level journalist for the incredibly obscure journal
Environmental Science & Technology
(an official publication of the American Chemical Society). And he hadn't even had that position for very long. He had a taste for writing hard-hitting chemical exposés, including one about how a D.C. consulting firm, the Weinberg Group, helped corporate giant DuPont cover up how the toxic acid they produced was poisoning West Virginians. DuPont, as
you might imagine, was not amused. Not long after that story came out, he was fired. Of course, even when he had his job, publishing hard-hitting pieces in
Environmental Science & Technology
wasn't exactly world-changing.

But—what a stroke of luck!—he found a new job working for Sen. Grassley (R-IA), who was then the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, with oversight responsibility for anything involving federal funds. Time after time, Thacker would send out letters on behalf of Grassley, looking into whether federally funded researchers were double-dipping and taking money from the drug companies at the same time. Thacker's repeated exposure of this web of corruption led to a number of prominent resignations and earned him a top spot on Big Pharma's Most Wanted list.
^*
*

It's a powerful example of what just one person in a congressional office can do. And the fact that it almost never happens shows how few congressional staffers dare to rock the boat.

So who does get hired? The vast majority of the budget goes to dealing with constituents. A team of district staffers run one or more offices back home that act almost as branch offices of the federal government. Do “you need assistance with a government agency?” asks Rep. Michael Capuano's (D-MA) website. “Congressman Capuano's office can help. Staff can answer basic questions, point constituents in the right direction, or work with the agency in question to resolve the constituent's case.”
^†
†

In a television ad for his Senate campaign, Capuano dramatized the process. “Sally Bah was a refugee from the civil war in Sierra Leone. She was told that her husband and two little boys were killed,” Capuano tells the camera. “Then they told me, ‘No! Your sons are alive!' but they will not let them come to me,” Sally explains. “Insane bureaucratic red tape left her little boys alone in Africa.” “No
one could do anything, no one could help, until Mike Capuano made them give me back my boys. Mike cut the red tape. Mike cares about people.”
^*
*

Most cases are much less exciting. A typical case is an elderly woman wondering why her Social Security check hasn't arrived yet. (The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have a whole team dedicated to responding to requests from congressional offices.)
^†
†
But, as the Congressional Research Service explains, despite “the widely held public perception that Members of Congress can initiate a broad array of actions resulting in a speedy, favorable outcome,” members are prohibited by law from “forc[ing] an agency to expedite a case or act in favor of a constituent.” Instead, they're limited to guiding constituents through the official process.
^{‡
‡}

In a government as powerful and complicated as that of the United States, it's easy to understand the appeal of hiring someone to help you navigate the bureaucracy. And it's also easy to understand how members of Congress ended up with this job. After all, what other representative of the government is out there on the streets, shaking people's hands, trying to get folks to like them?

But in many ways congressional casework feels like a relic of a bygone age of transactional politics when government favors were doled out as personal patronage rather than provided by neutral agencies. For one thing, they have the same distributional concerns as patronage did. The people most in need of government support are not the sort of people who would ever think to pick up the phone and call their congressman. And I've never heard of a congressional office going out into impoverished neighborhoods and informing people about their services. Why would they? Poor people don't vote.

But getting rid of casework isn't really an option either, because the entitled upper middle class that takes advantage of it is comprised of just the sort of people who are likely to get upset and raise a fuss if it goes away. Perhaps the best solution is to transition the job to the executive branch, like all the others—an office of “Government Ombudsman” could be established at each major post office. On the other hand, whoever directs that office will have much less incentive to keep it from becoming another heartless bureaucracy than a congressman who must regularly face the wrath of the voters.

Just as the majority of in-district time is eaten up by staffers handling casework, the majority of staff time in Washington is spent responding to constituents. Especially in the age of the Internet petition, every congressional office is barraged with phone calls, faxes, and letters. None of this, naturally, ever makes it to the congressman. Instead it is dealt with by a team of fresh-faced staffers who tediously record the topic of each communication and mail them a bland but appropriate letter in response. Write your congressman complaining that the cost of health care is too damn high and you will get back a long and bland letter saying, “Thank you for contacting me to express your opposition to H.R. 4872, The Health Care and Education Affordability Reconciliation Act.” Write saying that you'd like them to vote for the Polis-Pingree amendment to the bill and you'll get back the same thing.

With most of the budget blown on this electoral time wasting, there's only money left over for a small core staff of people to do the actual work of making laws. First and foremost, a chief of staff to manage the day-to-day. The chief of staff typically also has a second job as the congressman's campaign manager during the off-years and typically sees their job as figuring out how the congressman can use the powers of the office to maximize their chance of reelection.

As you might imagine, with every congressman trying to game the system, there is an arcane and lengthy set of “ethics rules” specifying the precise boundary between legislating and campaigning. You're not supposed to discuss raising money on Capitol property, so the chief of staff will often take a break from that job, walk outside,
switch from their congressionally supplied BlackBerry to their personal cell phone, and make a call in their duty as campaign manager. But it's difficult to imagine that the things discussed there don't continue to have an impact when they walk back inside. (It's also difficult to imagine that every chief of staff always makes sure to walk outside.) Other key staffers do the same.

The most extreme version of these arcane rules comes up when exercising the privilege of “franking,” or sending mail for free. If it's a matter of official business, a congressman can use the U.S. Postal Service without providing a stamp—instead they merely need to sign their name in the corner of the envelope where the stamp would normally go. To save them even this expense, every congressional office gets stacks of official stationary including boxes of pre-signed envelopes.