Baillee Brown is Head of Government and External Affairs at Inclusive Abundance, which works to help members of Congress get more interested in abundance-policy areas, principally housing, energy, science, innovation, and good governance.
She worked on Capitol Hill for 10 years, for Congressman Scott Peters from San Diego. She began as scheduler, moved to the legislative team, and was most recently his chief of staff in the DC office.
Thanks to Harry Fletcher-Wood, Shadrach Strehle, and Jasper Placio for their support in producing this episode.
For a printable PDF of this interview, click here:
Baillee, hi. The reason I wanted you to come on Statecraft is a summer internship I did in the office of a representative from Nebraska. I spent two months sorting mail and responding to constituent calls in DC — very rewarding stuff, but it’s grunt work.
In that office, the scheduler called all the shots, deciding what the boss did hour by hour. The chief of staff — a more senior role on paper — often followed the scheduler’s lead. Since that experience, I’ve been struck by the fact that somebody else manages the time of representatives and senators: some of the most important people in the world. A scheduler has an enormous amount of responsibility.
So today, I want you to explain how a Hill office works.
It’s interesting, the way you frame it. When I was an intern, I decided I wanted to stay and work in Congress, and I was cautioned away from being a scheduler because it’s administrative. It can be seen as a more junior position.
I don’t think all scheduling positions are like that. What was most compelling to me is the relationship you can have with the members themselves. You get to know someone very well. Being a scheduler taught me more about being a chief of staff than even my legislative work did — in terms of taking the member’s perspective.
The most valuable thing in a congressional office is your boss’s time. You’re trying to think about how they’re using their scarce free time. Each person in your office — the legislative team, the communications team, the district team, even family — has their own priorities and obligations.
A congressman has an office back home in their district, and an office in DC, where you’ve spent most of your career. I walk in the front door of Representative Scott Peters’s office. Walk me through the space.
I’m speaking from a House perspective — Senate offices are different. Typically, when you walk into an office, you’re greeted by either a staff assistant or an intern, whose job is to receive visitors. You get so many people who come into a congressional office day to day:
Constituents coming in from home,
Lobbyists and people coming in for meetings,
Advocacy groups,
Sometimes other staff,
Sometimes strangers off the street ask for a meeting that same day.
While there’s security at the front of Longworth House Office building, anyone can come in. You don’t need an appointment.
You just need to not carry a knife.
That’s right. Sometimes people forget not to take their knives or guns out of their pockets, even staff. They have had consequences for that. There’s security everywhere on the Hill.
When you walk into a congressional office, what you’ll see is usually some congressional district pride decor — awards that the member has received, pictures of the district if it’s particularly pretty. In the office that I worked in, it was San Diego — that’s a lovely place to advertise, and people got jealous of the nice photos. But it’s a pretty small entry room. In the receiving room of some offices, there’s a side table that you can meet at. If you’re the staff assistant, you may have one other front desk person to assist you, but it can be challenging: you’re in charge of people coming in for meetings, then also managing staff-level meetings at the side table that the member isn’t taking.
In the Rayburn House Office Building, there are smaller offices that the chief and the scheduler sat in. It was helpful to have them be in the same room because, going back to the tight relationship, those are the two folks who are most regularly thinking about, “What is the member doing? What are their priorities? What’s the next thing on their to-do list?”
Is it fair to say those two people are staffing the principal most closely, and the legislative and comms team are not necessarily as focused on the person of the representative?
Actually, no. The chief and the scheduler are staffing the boss in a sense of anticipating what the full day is looking like, but they’re quarterbacking. The legislative and communications teams are with the boss most frequently. A legislative staffer who covers energy will be staffing the boss at the Energy and Commerce Committee. The communications director may take them to go to an interview. The chief and the scheduler aren’t necessarily doing the day-to-day staffing. The chief usually staffs for unofficial business — fundraisers and that kind of thing. And they may join certain meetings, depending on the attendance.
So legislative staff is who?
The legislative staff is composed of a legislative director, legislative assistants, and a legislative correspondent.
The legislative director is the person who oversees the legislative team and the legislative agenda. The team is in charge of anything that a member needs in order to introduce bills, write letters to agencies, and staff committee hearings — it provides vote recommendations for the member.
The legislative director has to manage the legislative staffers. The legislative assistants and the director have different portfolios. When I was a legislative assistant, I managed eight issue areas, including housing, transportation, infrastructure, budget, tax, immigration, and labor — it’s a broad swath. You can only be an expert in so many things, but you needed a certain proficiency for each of your issue areas. Housing took up a lot of my time, but that may not be the case in another district where housing may not be as prominent an issue.
So that’s four or five people out of maybe a dozen in the office?
There’s about ten people, and maybe four or five on the legislative team.
Then we’ve got the chief, scheduler, staff assistant, maybe a handful of interns, who don’t count necessarily towards your quota. What’s the remainder - comms?
The communications team is extremely important. They are almost part of the legislative team, because if you are working hard to produce, introduce, and get a bill passed, you need a communications team to be able to explain what it does. We’re often writing very wonky-weedsy legislation. The communications team makes it clear to constituents, “This is why this matters to you.” They are also focused on bigger brand issues: “What do you want to be known for? Who are the folks that you should be talking to, the people that you want to get in front of?” That team can vary in size. You could have one communications person who is stretched too thin.
Because they’re doing tweets, press releases, video, booking them on Fox News or MSNBC?
It’s bookings, it’s writing or reviewing any talking-points, speeches. If the legislative team is the folks who take the first pass at remarks during a hearing, the communications team typically has to review that to make sure that it’s relevant:
Why are we questioning a witness in this way?
How is this going to come across to constituents?
Is there a way that we can pitch this to a reporter?
Are you going to say something interesting at this press conference that you want to give a heads-up to reporters?
So there’s a lot of strategic planning that the communications team has to do. Both the leg team and the comms team are strengthened if they see themselves as partners and amplifiers of the work that they do — rather than leg vs. comms, which is often what it comes down to.
You’re describing the modal member of the House of Representatives, and that layout of talent is pretty common. But you get different kinds of members: members who care a lot about legislative work, and are not interested in making a public name for themselves. And you get members who are not there to pass legislation — they’re there to get on TV as much as possible.
Tell me about that variation. Does that change how members staff their offices?
There’s no office I’ve known which had seven comm staffers and one legislative staffer. I don’t think that’s a realistic layout. But you could have a substantial comms team with three people — a communications director and a press secretary in the DC office, say, and then a district press secretary. Or a communications director, a digital director, and that’s it.
There are certainly members who demand or prioritize press. But because the House already has such small legislative teams, I don’t think you can make too much of a dent slimming that down. When I first started in my office, our legislative team had only two legislative assistants. As the MRA — the Members’ Representational Allowance — increased, and the budget got bigger to pay staff, we ended up expanding and having three legislative assistants. I would say it typically sits around there.
The Members’ Representational Allowance is what every member receives each year to pay for everything that they need. This includes salaries — which takes up the vast majority of the MRA — office expenses, including rent for your district office, printers, computers, telephones, and paper.
Salesforce subscription?
Or whatever your constituent resource management system is. And then travel — if a member needs to fly or take the train to and from the district, it has to include that. The MRA is typically around $2 million, but it varies depending on how big your district is, and how far away it is from DC.
The budget allocation is interesting. The budget increased by 20% in 2022, which was the first huge increase in a long time. That was explicitly for staff salaries to go up — a concerted effort to try to increase congressional staff retention.
Within that bucket of money, do Congressmen and women have wide discretion on how they want to break it down? Obviously every office has some distribution of these titles. But is that simply because it’s evolved? Could you say, “Screw this, I’m going to run my office completely differently”?
You could. But there are core functions — as a member of Congress, you need to fulfill your constitutional duties, know how you’re voting, and be prepared when you go to committee hearings. I don’t think it would work if you decided, “I don’t want a legislative team. I’m going to do it all on my own.”
But each office runs as its own small business. Each budget is totally at their discretion. There are obviously things that you can’t spend money on — there are ethics rules against spending money on campaign things. At the same time, there’s a lot of wiggle room in terms of salaries — some offices don’t pay much. Others say, “I’m going to pay at the higher end of the salary band in order to get talented staff.” They may spend up to 90% of their budget on salaries.
Then where are they cutting corners, elsewhere in the budget? The boss is traveling less, or the furniture is dinky?
The main place of discretion in the MRA is on communications and franking. Franking is a weird privilege that members of Congress and government officials have where they can send mail with their signature — it’s taxpayer-funded communications. Different offices have a variety of franking budgets. Members who are in tighter seats, in competitive reelections, typically put more money toward franking, because they want to be communicating with their constituents. So, while that is not a campaign-related expense, you often see a correlation with members who want to get their name out there.
It’s an interesting dynamic, where there is a clear firewall legally between campaigning for reelection and governing. For instance, congressmen have to step off the Capitol grounds to take fundraising calls. You see them across the street, then they finish their call, and come back inside. But there’s a lot of overlap between talking to your constituents about the good work you’re doing and campaigning — even if they’re formally separate activities.
Members of Congress, especially House members, always have reelection in the back of their mind. They are reelected every two years. They’re basically always campaigning. The separation is distinct there — there are a lot of rules, and the vast majority of offices strive to be very ethical and spend their money in appropriate ways.
There’s this perception that members of Congress are wheeling and dealing in their congressional offices when they meet with lobbyists — that’s really not true. There are very regimented ways that members of Congress can set up meetings off the Hill, not in their congressional office. There’s a firewall.
The two people in a congressional office who experience both the official and unofficial side are the scheduler and the chief. The scheduler has latitude to see the member’s entire calendar, and needs to schedule both official and unofficial business. The chief of staff often has to be the person staffing those unofficial meetings.
I like how people on the Hill almost always refer to their boss as “the boss.”
When I called Derek my “boss” in front of people, he was like, “Please don’t call me that.” And I was like, “It’s a habit. I can’t help it. I’m so sorry.”
The last core function of an office is “constituent services.” Say a bit about what that is and who does it. Because a question a lot of folks have about this is, “Should I call my congressman? Does it matter?”
I love that question. Yes, it does matter. The way you do it matters too. Constituent services is such a big category. The job of every single person in the office is constituent services. That’s why people come to work on the Hill — to serve the 750,000-plus people who elected your boss. You’re always trying to make their experience special. The legislative correspondent is the point person who manages all of the constituent incoming to a member’s office — whether you call in to the office, you mail, or email, that person will be reading your message, and trying to figure out the best way to respond to it.
The way an office manages that is by batching. If you are writing about a particular topic, typically it will get marked as, “It’s a housing issue.” Or if there are a lot of letters coming in about a particular housing bill, then there may be a new batch that’s made to say “HR 677,” or whatever the bill is. “It seems enough constituents care about this particular bill. We should figure out if we have a response to address this specific concern.” So it matters if a lot of people are calling in about something.
What happens to those batches? People call about this housing bill. Those calls get batched. Then what?
The batching helps organizationally. It gives you a clear understanding of what has been responded to, and what types of letters you need. Do you already have a letter? Have people written in on this before and do we already have a position for the member to describe? Sometimes it’s a novel issue — something will pop up, maybe in foreign affairs, and the office needs to have a position on it. So the legislative correspondent may talk with the legislative assistant who handles that issue and say, “How is the boss thinking about this issue? What’s our position here?” The other way that your calls and emails make a difference is by making the office think about the issue — which is an underrated thing — even if they may not necessarily be taking a position or an action.
Why does an office have to think about every issue? I can imagine a boss from a very rural district or one that’s relatively untouched by — pick some topic — saying, “I don’t want to make a name for myself on foreign policy. I’m not going to engage on that.” Or more cynically, “I don’t have time for responding to constituents. I’ll just do TikTok, and we’re going to seal reelection that way.”
What is forcing an office to respond to people?
You raise an interesting point, which is that offices vary in their constituent mail program. I have never met anyone who’s worked for an office who simply says, “None of this is worth responding to.” But there are some members — particularly older members who have been in office for 30 years and never got around to setting up a constituent resource management system — that have never set up a way to receive digital notes.
These are all representatives in safe seats?
They don’t need to worry about responding to constituents in the same way, or providing thorough responses. There can be diminishing rates of return: you don’t necessarily want to respond individually to every single message that comes in. You could spend all of your time doing that, and it won’t make a big difference.
I’m familiar with representatives who I’m told spent a huge amount of time reviewing legislative correspondence and making sure it sounded like them. I know people who thought that was a very poor use of the boss’s time and talents.
That’s a fair opinion. It totally depends on the member. Some see their job as being responsive to constituents, and literally responding to their incoming is the best way to be responsive to their concerns. I have friends who have worked for bosses who read every single word that goes out that has their name on it. If they have signed it, they will have read it. I had a friend who worked for a member who wrote handwritten thank you notes to every single constituent they met that week — that would be their task on the plane. It depends on the member’s priorities. That’s not the case for every office.
The overarching point here is that calls generally do matter. The way that it gets presented to members of Congress varies. Typically members of Congress will get a report of, “Here’s what constituents are writing in about this week.” If we are voting on a big issue, there may be a tally of how many people wrote in for or against a side, and a bit of color on what the vibe is in the district.
A week in the life
When you’re scheduling a member’s week, what do you have to balance? In your case, it’s been Scott Peters, but I know we’re not going to stick to that office.
I can talk about it generally, because when you are a scheduler, you have lots of scheduler friends. You trade notes, and you really want to have scheduler friends who can get information or do favors for you when you need it.
Your goal is to use your member’s time most efficiently and effectively. Say you’re coming in to work for someone who has been a member of Congress for a while, and they know what their priorities are. The first thing you think about when things come in is, “Is this meeting even practical?” Many people request meetings when Congress is out of session and the member is back home in their district. If that’s the case, you know immediately you’ve got to “staff that out,” the member can’t meet with them.
The reason members of Congress come to DC is the vote schedule. In November of each year, the majority sends out a calendar that’s usually pre-negotiated with the minority and says, “Here are the days that Congress is in session. You can plan your lives now.” Members of Congress and staff depend on that calendar. You can’t take vacation when there are votes, because you need to be in town doing your constitutional duty. So when members are in DC you have to schedule around votes, committee hearings, and markups.
Generally members fly into town on Mondays, they’re called fly-in days. Votes are always at 6.30pm, reliably for about half an hour. Members like my old boss who fly in from California — they only have a couple of hours before votes. We would typically do a scheduling meeting and a staff meeting before votes, then maybe have an evening event afterwards. The committee hearings are typically in the morning, and votes are in the afternoon. So you get a sense of what the cadence of scheduling looks like around that, and what time you have.
Then you have to layer on caucus meetings. Both the Republican Conference and the Democratic Caucus have their meetings, typically the morning after fly-in. They bring in different guests to talk to members, or committee ranking members or chairmen present on what bills will be on the floor that week. The members who are more focused on the communications aspect will talk about what the message is. It’s trying to get everyone on the same page.
If a representative is a member of other caucuses — those squeeze in weekly, biweekly?
It depends on the caucus. Some meet frequently, some are less active. The most active ones are typically the ideological caucuses. Speaking for my background as a House Democratic staffer, the primary ideological caucuses are the Progressive Caucus, the New Democrat Coalition, and the Blue Dog Coalition. Those typically have standing meetings, typically a lunch, and they always bring in guests to speak. Other caucuses are scheduled ad hoc. Depending on your boss’s priorities, they will want to make time for that. If they have a caucus leadership position, they’ll often have to ask other members to come and whip attendance.
What we’ve talked about — votes, committee meetings, caucus meetings — is a ton of time. That could be your whole week. But you also have a ton of meeting requests. Constituents come all the way across the country to talk with a boss about an issue they care about. Industry comes in to talk about a business issue. You can have press and speaking events, maybe TV. Time gets scarce very quickly. We didn’t even talk about fundraisers or campaign events, which typically consume anywhere from 2 to 15 hours of a member’s time a week.
Even in the first year? Because in the second year, obviously it’s election season.
Members are always fundraising. I see it more in terms of quarters — maybe you would have more fundraisers at the end of a quarter, because you report fundraising quarterly. But for House members, the fundraising doesn’t slow down. If you’re in a competitive district — which not too many members of Congress are these days, most get reelected fairly easily — but those who are in tight seats are obligated to do a lot of “call time,” which is getting handed a list of people you need to call and ask for money. People in competitive seats may spend up to 15 hours a week on call time alone, which is pretty miserable.
That’s literally going down the list and saying, “Joe, how you doing?”
It can be that, or it’s, “We’re hosting this lunch event. We’d love for you to join. Please come to my lunch and you can pay $1000 to be there.”
As we were talking, I realized I don’t know the etymology of the word “caucus.” I would’ve guessed it’s Latin, right? It apparently has an Algonquin root — it means “advisor” and pops up in the mid-1700s.
That is fascinating.
Let’s say I am a constituent, and I’m going to DC. It’s a family trip, but we want to stop in and meet the boss. I have to make sure Congress is in session; not a Monday morning. What else do I have to do to maximize my chances?
I love this question, because these were the types of meeting requests we were most excited about scheduling. People don’t think that they can visit their member of Congress when they go to DC. It was always fun when constituents would drop in and say, “We’re visiting, you guys helped us get a Capitol tour, but we wanted to stop by and say ‘Hi.’” What separates a good scheduler from a great one is noticing that as an opportunity. “It’s so great that these constituents are in town. What can we do to make their visit even more special?” Sometimes a drop-by works. If the member happens to be around, our scheduler would typically say, “Congressman, the constituent family is here to visit. Would you want to say ‘Hi’ and get a photo?” Members of Congress are more than willing to do that.
My old boss loved to take kids on the floor. You can take kids under 12 years old on the House floor, which is a cool experience. So there were some times — and this is rare — if folks are in town, votes are about to happen, and you stop by the office, we could facilitate meetings like that, or some of those more special engagements.
If folks want to meet their member, they can also do it in the district. They are there a third to a fourth of the time. There is less time in the district, and there are a lot of demands on their schedule, but they live there and they have a whole team there. So dropping by the district office and trying to meet your member that way is also great.
You’ve mentioned a bunch of things that are fixed: floor votes, committee markups, caucuses. Fundraising is not fixed, but necessary if you want to keep your job. What else are you trying to slot into your boss’s week?
Lunch. I remember, probably my first week of scheduling, I don’t think I made sure that my boss had lunch. It’s very apparent when you start that you’re scheduling for a human. So “lunch” is my shorthand for saying that each member has their own human priorities. If their family’s in town, setting aside time for that. Making sure that they have time to go to the gym and the things that you need to do in order to be a healthy, happy human.
What percentage of congressmen would you say go to the gym on a semi-regular cadence?
I have no idea, but I would say more than 50%.
Huh. Good for them.
DC is a walkable city. Maybe they walk, maybe they take the metro.
When lobbyists, business interests, or issue advocates are trying to get on the boss’s schedule, what are your heuristics for deciding who gets face time?
The trickiest part of scheduling is trying to figure out, in the limited discretionary time that you have, who is going to be able to meet with a member of Congress? A lot of it comes down to — practically speaking, when can the requesting person meet and when does the member have time? Sometimes someone will ask, “We can only meet between 9:00am and noon on Tuesday.” At that time, he’s already got a committee hearing, or an interview, or a speaking event. Those are the easier ones where it’s, “Sorry, we can’t make it work.” If it is a CEO, they probably don’t want a staff meeting. If it’s someone who is open to being staffed out, we’ll say, “Our legislative director would love to meet with you. We can pass that message along and hope that the member can meet you next time.”
You always have to think about the priorities of the member. Is this an issue within their purview, within their committee jurisdiction, or one of their priorities? Are they going to be interested in hearing about it? Sometimes you get folks who want to meet every other month. We don’t have time for that. So it’s also a matter of, “How recently have you talked with this person? Do you need to catch up? Can it be a staff meeting, or skip for now?”
As a scheduler, you can track all that information? You can pull up that person’s name and be, “Oh, you were in here last month. Sorry”?
You can look at the calendar and say, “When was the last time we met with this person?”
The number one screen is, “What is the district nexus?” Is there a constituent in the meeting? Sometimes you would get requests from big fly-ins, where it’s a conference that’s being organized for some advocacy issue, say for breast cancer. There’s someone from Los Angeles who’s requesting a meeting and it’s, “We don’t have time to meet with someone from Los Angeles, because we represent San Diego.” Of course any member from California has an interest in other parts of the state, but they can’t care about the whole state. That’s the reason why there are 52 of them. They each have their own neighborhoods that they have to look out for. If you met with every Californian — that wouldn’t work. I sympathize with the senators who get requests from every Californian.
What external resources do offices get? For instance, Statecraft alum Matt Weiner advised the California Democratic Caucus on wildfires and forest management. Those 40-odd California representatives didn’t have to staff their own fire expert in each office. What else exists — with caucuses, the party leadership, or the Architect of the Capitol — to support up your team?
The Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) is an enormous resource. There’s a whole staff support team. They have done a lot in the past several years to professionalize congressional staff in a way that it previously had not been. Each congressional office is run as a small business. We talked about budget, but it’s much more than that. There are not the same standards for promotions, titles, or salaries. The CAO has done such a good job at training staff and saying, “This is how you become a legislative correspondent. If you’re a staff assistant, this is how you can stand out in your office. This is what you can do to volunteer, write letters, and have a relationship with your senior staff in order to progress in your career.” Prior to the CAO providing some of those resources, it was one-to-one mentorship. If you’re in an office that strives to support junior staff in getting ahead, that’s great, but not all offices are like that.
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is the best. [Statecraft on the CRS here.] They are a team of impartial experts. If you ever have any question about the legislative history of a particular issue, or there’s this problem in the district, “What are some potential solutions to this? What existing programs already tackle this issue?” It’s a remarkable service, because you can submit a request, and they’ll call you back and say, “What do you need?” Sometimes they’ll write reports for you. The value of the CRS cannot be understated. There are so many issues that pop up — you’re like, “I never knew I had to learn about this very obscure grant program that affects my district. I don’t know what the acronym stands for.” You’re able to call someone and say, “Help me understand this.”
Your boss moved offices three times over the 10 years that you were there. How much does moving affect the day-to-day operations of an office? Is there a lot of serendipity in who you get placed next to and the bills you go on to co-sponsor?
I wish I could say that, but not necessarily. You mentioned earlier the Architect of the Capitol. They’re an entire resource to serve the House and Senate office buildings and make sure that anything your office needs gets taken care of.
Members move from office to office as their seniority increases. At the end of each Congress, there’s essentially a room draw. As members retire, or lose their seats, their offices are vacated. Given that a lot of retiring members are more senior, they typically have the biggest offices, or an excellent view of the Capitol. It’s a nice perk.
The room draw gives members the option to move. Some choose to stay in their offices — that makes sense if you have a good office setup and location. Others want to mix it up. Rayburn is where a lot of the House committees are. Sometimes members want to be closer to their committee. If you’re all the way in Cannon and you have to go to Rayburn for your committee, it’s a long walk. But different members prioritize different things. Some want to be close to the entrance so their constituents can find them more easily.
Rayburn, Cannon, Longworth — am I missing one?
Those are the three primary house office buildings that members of Congress are in. There are also Ford and O’Neill, which mostly have committee staff.
You said Rayburn has more committees. Do the offices have different stereotypes?
A bit. Cannon has been under construction for the past eight years. They’ve gone wing by wing — there are four wings; they’re on their last one now. They’re the fancier offices — they have tall ceilings, lots of natural light, many offices have built-in standing desks. That is not the case for Longworth and Rayburn. Longworth typically has more junior members of Congress, and some of the offices are a bit smaller. Rayburn is seen as the more senior building. It’s very sterile. It feels like a hospital. But a lot of members like the offices because the room the member gets is pretty big.
Part of my motivation behind wanting to hear about this is — and this is a treat for readers who’ve gotten this far — my dad proposed to my mom in Cannon.
Oh my God, that’s so exciting.
Two more questions for you on the scheduling. Are you scheduling in five-minute increments? Mechanically, how closely do you measure the boss’s time?
The sophisticated schedulers will see timing as more of an art than a science. Different members prefer different things. Some require travel time explicitly on the calendar: “You need to leave this meeting by this time. I’ve mapped it because it takes this amount of time to get to your next meeting.”
Some friends worked for members who were perpetually late. That was just the way they lived. You’d schedule a 15-minute meeting and it would become a 25-minute meeting. If you’re a perceptive scheduler, you’re trying to account for that. Instead of scheduling meetings back to back, you give a bit of extra time so that the next meeting isn’t waiting for longer than you need.
The schedule at the beginning of the week looks very different than at the end of the week. At the beginning of the week, you get a general sense of when votes are going to happen, but you never know exactly when, or how long they will be. There’s a certain amount of debate on the floor — an hour for Democrats and an hour for Republicans. If members don’t have as much to say on a certain bill, the debate runs short. Maybe the floor decides to recess, and give members the votes at the time they were predicted. Or maybe they decide to call votes now and there goes your hour.
The boss is jogging down one of those tunnels to get to a vote on time.
There’s wiggle room. When they first call votes, members get around 15 minutes — in reality, it’s more like 25 — but you get some notice. The vote series may be short or long, depending on how many votes you have. If it’s an appropriations bill, and you have a lot of amendments to vote on, that may take a two-hour vote series.
During COVID, voting increments were blocked by last names, so people had a much longer time period to vote. Voting took a long time. There was also proxy voting, so if you needed to stay home because you or someone in your family had COVID, you could delegate to another member your proxy. Then a member of Congress — potentially a DMV-area member — held a lot of proxies for people and would have to say, “I’m voting yea for this person, nay for this person.” It’s run as a much tighter ship now that there’s no proxy voting. Floor staff try to make it as predictable for members as they can, but they can’t control everything. A trait that you need to have as a scheduler is zen flexibility. Things will change and you need to be able to adjust to make things work.
What lessons from being a professional scheduler should us normal schedulers take away? Any tips and tricks that you bear in mind when you’re scheduling your own week?
Professional scheduling and personal scheduling are two different beasts.
That’s so dispiriting. That can’t be true.
I learned how to be a much better flight booker after being a professional scheduler. I was able to scout flight rates better. I also developed the trait that if you really want to make something happen, you can. It’s about will. There are times when it’s difficult. But if it’s a priority of yours, you can get it done. So that’s a nice motivational thing. The other thing I learned is not to over-schedule yourself. Try to be kind.
I’m still working on that one.
After a period as scheduler, you ended up as Representative Peters’s chief of staff. You and I got into a deep conversation a couple of months ago about the different kinds of chiefs of staff — that there are as many archetypes as there are bosses. What does every chief of staff need to have, and what are some of the different ways you can approach that job?
To be a chief, first and foremost, you need to know your principal well. What are their priorities? Stick to those priorities. We talked about how different members of Congress see themselves in different ways.
For some, their primary goal is, “How do I be the best legislator? I want to pass bills.”
Some are messaging-focused. They want to help shape the narrative, or be known for taking stances on certain things.
Some members, whether they want to or are obligated to, need to prioritize their campaign. They need a chief who is focused on fundraising and making sure that they come back to office. This is often the case in freshmen offices — if you’ve been reelected once, you’re much more likely to come back. If you’re a freshman, you have to be scrappier to try to keep your seat.
The chief of staff role is also all about managing staff, and general relationship management. There are so many different stakeholders and opinions, within and outside your team, on what the boss should be spending their time on — whether in a legislative sense or just events that they’re going to. The chief can be a great extension of the member and say to stakeholder groups, “I’m trying to receive everything that you’re explaining to me and delegate it in the best way to make sure that we can manage your request.”
My impression of your old office — this is other people’s perspective as well — is that it was and is well run. That’s not the case for many Hill offices. Gossip on the Hill can be extremely active: who’s a great boss, who’s a terrible boss, and which offices have different pathologies.
What kinds of pathologies can an office display?
That’s a tough one. We all have heard stories about members of Congress who scream at their staff. There’s so many. Those are well covered, so I don’t need to get into them. But some of the dysfunction in offices can arise through not having direction. I was lucky to have a boss who had a vision for getting things done, and a relentless focus on accomplishments. That was motivating as a team.
Where it can go wrong is if you have offices that are competitive amongst each other and don’t necessarily see themselves as a full team. That can result in communication silos. It’s important to always encourage people in an office to say, “We can share intel amongst each other safely.”
It’s pretty rare to have to work for a member of Congress who isn’t in it for the right reasons. Those exist, but it’s more the lack of focus or priorities — or if you’re a staff member who doesn’t align with their priorities. If you work for a boss, there’s got to be some issue that you personally disagree with them on. That’s totally okay, and encouraged in a lot of offices. But if you work for a member who you’re really not aligned with, that’s always going to cause friction.
What about places that are not necessarily nightmares to be in as an employee, but that don’t function well?
Sometimes it depends on what position you’re in. Is it that you are a legislative assistant, you have a portfolio, your boss isn’t on any relevant committees, and you don’t get a lot of attention? There’s responsive work you need to do, but you aren’t growing because your boss isn’t willing to lead on any of the issues in your portfolio. I may have had this perspective when I was more junior — that you’re not able to grow in a certain way because you don’t have that priority. But maybe a better office would be better suited for you. If you’re in an office that doesn’t function very well, that’s a problem for management. If there’s a team member that’s slacking, it’s very obvious. If you have a team of ten people, you’re going to notice pretty quickly if someone is not pulling their weight.
Let’s say early 2027 rolls around, and you’ve been convinced to go back to the Hill, as chief of staff to a freshman representative you think is fantastic. They are asking you, “Help me get started.” How are you allocating your budget?
The first question to this new member is, “What do you want to accomplish and be known for? What is it that, two years from now, you want to have done? Let’s think about that in a realistic way.” If you’re a freshman, it’s going to be hard to do a lot of the things you’re dreaming about. But the best way to get set up for success is to hire and manage a well-run team.
Let’s imagine this representative is a rock star — she wants to do it all. “I want to put my name on some signature legislation, I want huge earned media, I want TikTok to blow up, and I want to pin people to the wall in committee hearings. I’ve got the energy to do it all. Help me get there.”
I assume most freshmen come in that way. The first thing I would say is, “You can’t do it all. We have to choose. There will be trade-offs, because you can’t do everything, and you can’t be everything to everyone.” Trying to encourage some discipline. By choosing priorities, you are letting some things go, but you’re going to be much clearer to your team and your constituents about what you’re here to do.
The best members I have seen and worked with are the ones who know why they’re in Congress. There are so many members who want to do everything, and end up not getting a lot done, because they are trying to have their hand in every single issue. At the federal level, there’s certainly the opportunity to do that. But carving out and using your personal experience as expertise — each member of Congress has their own background, interests, and skills. Pulling on that, and going back to why they ran in the first place, and what are the things they’re good at? — trying to match that Venn diagram.
The hardest thing is that it takes over your life. You have a scheduler who controls your entire schedule. You have a team that writes words you’re going to speak. You need a team that you trust. You need to be able to empower them to be a multiplier of you, rather than feeling you’re being held back by them.
Let’s say your new boss gets that and says, “I want to invest as much as we can in talent. I want to make sure despite being a freshman, we get the best people. We’re going to go to the top of the pay range, and we’re going to have to find savings elsewhere.” You mentioned one area you could do that, which is franking — you send fewer letters back to your district. What else do you cut in order to get the absolute best people in an office?
There are not too many more changes — especially if you’re a freshman and you need to buy everything from scratch. You may get some equipment and materials that the old district had, but you may need to upgrade a lot of things — if your predecessor was an older member of Congress, maybe they don’t have the latest technology. Freshman budgets are hard, because you need a lot of stuff and you need to set it up.
It’s important to prioritize and hire good staff. You could do that by saying, “We’re not going to get our committee assignments until March or April. Usually freshmen are put onto committees that are a little less demanding. You’re not going to get onto an exclusive committee like Energy and Commerce until a couple of terms in. So let’s hire a really good legislative director who can be great at managing the committees that you do have, and maybe a legislative assistant in the issue area that you want to be a leader on.” You pay those folks well, but maybe you don’t hire three legislative assistants. So maybe it’s less about cutting, and more about how you prioritize and structure the team.
