A number of posts have discussed congressional capacity, legislative productivity, and deliberation.
At a House Administration hearing last week exploring how Congress could react to the end of Chevron deference, a panel of conservative and liberal experts all advocated more staff.
Overall, staff levels in Congress haven’t changed much in the past half-century. According to the Congressional Research Service, there were an estimated 8,831 House staffers in 1977 and 9,247 in 2023, although a large part of that growth came from a roughly 300 percent increase in the number of leadership staffers. The number of committee staff, who are generally considered to be the subject matter experts of Congress, fell by more than a third, from upward of 2,000 in 1978 to just 1,170 in 2023.Similarly, even though staff levels in the Senate have risen, committee staff showed the smallest increase, growing just 10 percent over the period between 1977 and 2022, from 1,084 to 1,194.
While adding lawmaking capacity has long been a no-brainer on the left, small-government conservatives have come around to the idea that the way to shrink the overall size of government is to make the legislative branch a little bigger first. “We were designed to be slow and methodical, not responsive, right?” said Rep. Barry Loudermilk, a conservative Georgia Republican. “So, the fallback was let’s just empower the agencies, but that hasn’t worked out so well, as we’ve seen.”
