Blog Posts (page 119)

“The entire House and Senate combined now spend less on staff ($2 billion a year) than corporations spend on reported lobbying ($2.6 billion a year). But since that reported… Read More

  Senate appropriators did not follow the House’s lead and increase funding for personal staff…(Read more at RollCall.com) Meanwhile, a recent report by the Congressional Research Service shows… Read More

The federal government has seen a century of growth. In 1915, the government had only a handful of departments, 400,000 employees (half of whom worked for the U.S. Postal… Read More

Something remarkable happened a week ago: a committee in Congress voted to spend a little bit more money on congressional staff. Rep. Sam Farr, D-Calif., offered the amendment to… Read More

“House Republicans may soon require members who wish to amend spending bills to file their proposals in the Congressional Record before a floor vote — a maneuver designed to… Read More

we want our meetings and research to focus on your interests. So please complete the survey at: http://www.legbranch.com/theblog/2016/5/12/survey It takes 3 minutes and is utterly anonymous. Thank you!… Read More

Lee Drutman and Steven Teles’ article, “A New Agenda for Political Reform,” include charts showing the decline in the number of staff….(Read more at Washington Monthly). This… Read More

Congress has a big problem when it comes to oversight. The federal government has grown vastly larger over the past century, but Congress has done little to empower itself… Read More

Rep. John Sarbanes speaks. Also pictured: Kevin R. Kosar and Lee Drutman. More than 50 staffers, think-tankers, and academics attended the inaugural meeting of the Legislative Branch Capacity Working Group. Read More

Professor James Curry (University of Utah) is the author of Legislating in the Dark: Information and Power in the House of Representatives (University of Chicago Press, 2015). He writes: “Public… Read More