A House-led push to give lawmakers their first raise since the Great Recession is running into familiar fears that a pay bump is a political third rail.
Lawmaker pay has been stuck at $174,000 a year since 2009, a salary that, while far above the income of most households, has decreased 29% in value in the face of inflation. Members of House and Senate leadership earn up to $223,500.
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Both parties are reluctant to raise that pay, well aware it will be used against vulnerable members on the campaign trail. Yet House appropriators feel it’s time to end that streak, at least for the coming year.
Ironically, the pay raises are automatic — by statute, lawmakers receive a cost-of-living adjustment based on a formula. But Congress has for years inserted language into the annual spending bills prohibiting the increase.
The bill that passed out of the House Appropriations Committee in June dropped the prohibition, raising speculation that Congress could actually give itself a raise for the first time in nearly 15 years. For 2024, that bump would be 4.6%, or $8,000. Yet appropriators in the Senate voted in committee to keep the ban in place.
The situation is something of a role reversal. House conservatives are waging an anti-Washington, slash-the-budget crusade that Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has embraced, given his four-seat majority. The Democrat-led Senate, on the other hand, has a far bigger appetite for spending.
The House has yet to bring its Legislative Branch appropriations bill to the floor, meaning the prohibition could still be added back in. Barring that, however, the two chambers will need to resolve the matter in conference, all before a Sept. 30 deadline to fund the government.
When that time comes, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (CT), the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, believes lawmakers will opt to keep the prohibition.
“I think that’s what will happen in conference,” she told the Washington Examiner.
She’s not alone in that prediction. Appropriators in both chambers speculated the pay increase is just too politically unpopular to make the final cut.
“I think people hate Congress, and I think the last thing they want to see is Congress getting a raise,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who sits on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Legislative Branch.
Lawmakers have long channeled that resentment, introducing legislation that goes as far as tying higher salaries to passing a balanced budget or, more recently, the election of a speaker.
“I think talk about pay raises for Congress with the kind of output we’ve been producing would be silly at this stage,” said Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN), a wealthy former businessman, in a jab at the Senate’s slow start this legislative term.
But quietly, many lawmakers feel a pay raise is deserved.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the ranking Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, noted that Cabinet secretaries in the executive branch make more than members do, while Rubio lamented the salaries of some local officials.
“I always shake my head when I see, like, some county — mayor or commissioner of a small town somewhere making three times what members of Congress make,” he said.
Those frustrations are unlikely, however, to outweigh political reality, and ideological conviction, on Capitol Hill.
The House is currently consumed by the appropriations process, which House conservatives are leveraging to demand spending cuts the Senate simply won’t agree to. For now, pay hikes are not on their radar. But members of the Freedom Caucus could insist on an amendment vote to restore the prohibition on pay raises.
Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), the chairman of the caucus, acknowledged the possibility his members will press the House to ban the proposed pay hike.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), another Freedom Caucus member, seemed open to the pay raise but said it must be accompanied by new limits on stock trading by members of Congress.
“I think we need to figure that out if we’re going to go down that road,” Roy said, noting the bipartisan legislation he’s co-sponsored to that end with Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA).
The divide over member pay is not merely partisan, however, according to Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), another Senate appropriator. The upper chamber is chock full of millionaires, while fewer House lawmakers are independently wealthy. The House feels more pressure on the matter, he argues, as a result.
“There’s less urgency on this issue in the Senate in part because we have a lot of members who don’t rely on their Senate salaries as their primary income,” said Murphy, a House member for six years before winning his Senate seat in 2012.
Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE), the ranking Republican on the Appropriations Subcommittee on Legislative Branch, told the Washington Examiner she had no illusions coming into Congress that pay would change.
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“We all know what the pay is when we run for this job. It hasn’t changed the entire time I’ve been here,” said Fischer, elected to the Senate in 2012. “A pay increase for myself is not a priority.”
Fischer, while a millionaire, ranks in the middle of the pack for senator net wealth, according to OpenSecrets.
