Sure, Raise Congress's Salary

The real value of congressional salaries has fallen

If you’re following congressional news closely, you’ll have learned that for the first time in more than a decade, the House of Representatives has decided to accept its cost of living increase. This will lead to a roughly $8,000 increase in congressional pay, should the Senate agree. (Technically, this isn’t a vote to increase pay but rather a refusal to vote to disallow an automatic cost of living increase, a distinction with constitutional importance!)

Everyone needs one cranky hobbyhorse, and mine happens to be that federal officials are not paid enough—they shouldn’t get rich but they also shouldn’t be paid so little that only the wealthy or about-to-be wealthy can get by. (There’s been a recent fracas over a career public servant who appears to have been income-compressed out of consideration for a major job, for instance.)

I put together the numbers for congressional pay from the Senate website and used a great inflation converter to prepare the above chart. This is for non-leadership members and I’ve used the highest number for the handful of years with multiple salary figures. (Pre-1913 numbers are unavailable but the 1913 numbers will be a pretty good guide because that was a time of stable to deflationary currency.)

The red line is nominal pay and the blue line is real pay. As you can tell, congressional pay in real terms peaked in about the early 1990s and has been on a long slide since then—we are basically, in real terms, at where we were when Richard Nixon, as vice president (and on congressional pay), lived in a very modest home. And at current payscals, indeed, that’s…about where he could live on a single-income salary! (He’d probably want to move over to Fairlington, though.) Another way of thinking about this is that the Congress has voted itself a more than $50,000 pay cut since 2009 in real terms but nobody has exactly claimed credit on this.

Political scientists are required to note that this dynamic results because voting to raise pay is an easy target—very easy to message on. I will note, however, something a wise staffer once told me: you only get time to make 1-3 real attacks in a campaign ad, and if people aren’t going to hit you on something in that ad it doesn’t hurt as much. In an era of hyper polarization and vast policy differences, it seems unlikely that anyone will go after the salary rise—there’s easily six or eight major issue points to raise before this!

A constant inflation-adjusted salary target of about $225,000 seems in line with historical expectations. That’s likely out of reach now, since Congress skipped the 2010s. In the meantime, let the COLAs flow.