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Source: Congress.gov
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This is fiscal year 2026 legislative branch subcommittee public witness day hearing. I'd like to thank ranking member Espiat and committee members for being here today. A special thank you to our witnesses for being here today. We appreciate your interest in the legislative branch and for taking time out of your busy schedules to testify before this subcommittee. In addition to our witnesses here this morning, additional witnesses have submitted testimony for the record, and their statements may be found online. I would also like to note that this hearing serves as a vehicle for one of the member of Congress who submitted testimony for the record, and her statement can also be found online. I now recognize Ranking Member Espaillat for his opening remarks. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I'm pleased to see so many outside public witnesses attending our hearing this morning. The subcommittee needs to hear the concerns of our constituencies and members of the public before us will provide that kind of input. We begin work on marking up our fiscal year 2036 subcommittee bill. It's great to see some familiar faces on our witness list. We have made progress over the years regarding many of your past requests to improve the operations of the ledge branch. Your presence today means we have a lot more work to do. I look forward to hearing your suggestions.
Thank you, and I yield back. Thank you, Mr. Espaillat. We will hear from our witnesses and our panels of four. Each witness will deliver a short three-minute summary of their written testimony. Their full testimony has been submitted for the record. Following the testimony of each member of the panel, I will call on members for any questions. I now recognize our first panel, and Mr. Alwan, you are now recognized for your three minutes.
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Mr. Omar Awan
Chairman Valdeo, Ranking Member Espaillat, members of the subcommittee, thank you for allowing me to testify. As you know, actual staff salaries have, they vary between offices and account for about three-fourths of a member's budget. But each member is provided the same amount. It's known as the clerk hire component of the MRAs. If we want to stop the revolving door that's draining institutional knowledge and undercuts legislative and constituent services, we have to align MRAs with real-world staffing costs. Before I retired from the House, I was asked to set all 441 bespoke member budgets in just three months for the incoming 111th Congress. It was then that I learned that the clerk hire was set as $944,000 back in 2010, and I couldn't find any kind of supporting analysis for where that number came from. It was marginally increased to $994,000 in 2020. I knew we could do better as an institution when it was my job to set those MRAs in 23, so I conducted a comprehensive salary analysis that categorized thousands of unique job titles into the typical roles found in a member office. I accounted for staff that wear multiple hats, and I also made sure that shared staff didn't skew the numbers downwards. This led to the first meaningful increase in the clerk hire in more than a decade, from 994,000 to 1.434 million for every single member office. Even with that increase, turnover in 2023 was still high, over 60% among ledge assistants and over 70% among ledge correspondents. Since salaries continue to rise with inflation and market demands, members are increasingly basically robbing Peter to pay Paul. just to maintain competitive pay. They buy less supplies and equipment, they send less official mail, or worse, they hire less staff so that they can adequately pay the staff that they have. In February, I launched hillclimbers.org. It's an online platform that transforms House SOD data into salary and staffing insights for member offices. Our newest data shows that the average member office will spend more than $1.5 million this year on salaries and $1.55 million by 2026.
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Mr. Omar Awan
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