The Numbers Are Against Good Government

I have been in a running debate with a friend and colleague generally about the topic of whether or not our elected officials are able to vote knowledgeably given the large number of bills they need to track, the size of their staff, and the competing need to raise money and attend to constituents. It got me to wondering about what kind of numbers are we really talking about so I went looking.

Here are the raw numbers for the 111th Congress according to the Library of Congress:

• House Bills: 6097
• House Concurrent Resolutions: 100
• House Joint Resolutions: 95
• House Resolutions: 100
• Senate Bills: 3751
• Senate Concurrent Resolutions: 71
• Senate Joint Resolutions: 38
• Senate Resolutions: 100

That’s a lot of bills and resolutions, particularly given our legislators spend only about 140 days a year on the business of the people. Obviously there is a big difference between the number of things that are introduced and the number that our elected officials need to pay attention to. So let’s check out a couple of those.

One of the bills that has gotten a lot of attention lately is H.R.4173 – Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act: “A bill to promote the financial stability of the United States by improving accountability and transparency in the financial system, to end “too big to fail”, to protect the American taxpayer by ending bailouts, to protect consumers from abusive financial services practices, and for other purposes.”

Bills go through a number of iterations from the time they are introduced to the time they get passed. Checking in over at OpenCongress here’s what we find:

The big health reform bill is H.R.3590 - Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. As passed it weighs in at 327,911 words. Keep in mind that both of the bills cited contain vast tracts of language the direct the relevant regulator or agency to promulgate hundreds of thousands more words in the form of rules and regulations to sort out what those original 700,000 words really mean.

Just as an aside on this one, check out this link if you want to see the stunning amounts of money that were given to various of our elected officials, I assume in order to influence their votes (could there be another explanation?). The one I like the best is Senator Scott Brown from Massachusetts. He managed to be on the job for a few weeks before role call. That didn’t stop him from taking in $997,923 from parties specifically interested in this bill.  But I digress.

Those seem like pretty hefty numbers to me.  All those bills. Two big ones adding up to 700,00 words all by themselves. But surely our elected officials have a big staff to help? So off I went to check out one of my senators, Patty Murray.

Displaying salaries for time period: 10/01/09 – 03/31/10

Keep in mind that this is half the term so the payroll for a fiscal year is roughly double. A couple of things stand out on this one.

Ms. Murray spent nearly $4 million in one month in her campaign for reelection. Not to worry, she still has another $3.2 million in the bank. If I were more ambitious I would go looking for her total campaign spend but those two numbers are impressive enough . . . and they’re trivial in comparison to some of the big bucks campaigns going on in California and Connecticut. Juxtapose that against her total pay of $174,000 and her entire payroll of about $2.6 million. Representative Scott Murray of New York took in half that amount of money just from spenders with an interest in one bill relating to health care reform.

On purely dollars and cents basis, Senator Murray spends considerably more money to get the job than she does on doing the job.

Of the 55 names I count just 15 with the word “legislative” in the title. The highest paid is the Legislative Director who is raking in $145,000 which is less than a first year associate makes at a front line law firm.  There are a couple of others who make $80,000ish, and the rest are making less than $20 an hour. The staff of the various House and Senate committees are paid similar (low) dollars and are stretched every bit as thin . . . the ones I know work punishing hours, don’t take vacations, and don’t get outside nearly enough.

I’m not picking on Senator Murray. She is no worse than representative of the other 99 Senators when it comes to the size of her staff, what she pays, how much money she raises, and how much she spends on her own election as well as those of her Democratic colleagues. In fact, she probably comes off as cheap.

Maybe it’s just me, and I say this with all due respect to the smart, motivated, hard working members of our legislators’ staffs, but this doesn’t seem like the kind of firepower you need to deal with the blizzard of bills and resolutions yet alone face off against all the big money players who are trying to influence the direction, course, and outcome of legislation.

Tagged as: Decision Making, Decision Quality, Dodd-Frank, H.R. 3590, H.R. 4173, Patty Murray, Word Count