Witness urges overhaul of Member office budgets, cites rising staff costs and turnover

A former House staffer told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch during a fiscal year 2026 public witness hearing that Member Representational Allowances are out of step with real-world staffing costs and are driving turnover in congressional offices.

The witness, identified in the hearing as Mr. Awan, said the clerk-hire component of the MRA — the allotment intended for member office staff salaries — has not been set based on up-to-date, institution-wide data. "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," Awan said.

Awan said the clerk-hire amount was set at $944,000 in 2010 and was "marginally increased to $994,000 in 2020," and described a later institutional increase to $1,434,000 that he said he produced in 2023 when he recalculated member budgets. He said turnover remained high despite that increase, and that many offices must reallocate resources — buying fewer supplies or hiring fewer staff — to keep pay competitive.

Awan proposed two changes. First, he recommended that House Administration (CHA) and appropriators coordinate earlier in the annual cycle so that overall MRA budgets set in February reflect up-to-date salary data, rather than forcing CHA to "reverse engineer" individual MRAs at the end of the year. "CHA and the appropriators should work closely together in February to figure out using real data...to set an overall MRA budget that actually reflects the actual needs of members and the market demands," he said.

Second, Awan urged improvements to the Clerk's Statement of Disbursements (SOD) dataset. He told the subcommittee that adding unique personnel identifiers and a field marking whether staff are permanent or temporary would allow more accurate salary and staffing analysis. "We need to be able to know who that person is," he said, and argued better data would help measure whether offices are staffed to their potential under the existing 184 framework referenced in testimony.

Awan also said he launched hillclimbers.org, a platform he described as converting House SOD data into salary and staffing insights; he cited its findings when estimating current and projected salary spending in member offices. He concluded by urging the subcommittee to adopt data-driven budgeting and dataset improvements to reduce turnover and better align MRAs with market costs.

The hearing transcript records no formal action or vote on Awan's recommendations.