The once-popular House Page Program has been shut down since 2011, but it isn’t dead thanks to a few members and page alumni who hope to revive it to give some lucky high schoolers an inside look at America’s democracy in action.
“I, for one, lament that we do not have a House Page Program any longer,” said Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz. “Generations of young people were inspired by their participation in that program to engage in public service, and I remain convinced that we could go back and try to reform that program.”
It was nixed in 2011 when Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and former House Speaker John Boehner said it had become too expensive at $5 million a year. They also cited new technology that made the job of pages delivering notes obsolete. The program also had been dinged with scandal when a former Florida lawmaker engaged in explicit texting with a male page.
With the end of the program, the former page dorm has been idled and the new speaker, Paul Ryan, wants it turned into a staff daycare center.
That would essentially end any hope to restore the program, and Wasserman Schultz is moving to make sure that the dorm remains available for a new page program.
“I believe we should create another working group and take a look at the page program,” she said. “I’m just trying to be protective and at least preserving of the possibility of it being able to be restored at some point. And if you do too much construction [to the dorm] that changes it from it being able to go back to being a dorm, then we’ll never be able to go back to the page program.”
For more than 100 years, thousands of high schoolers filed through the page system. Several went on to become House members.
Former pages have created an alumni group to push for restoration and are planning to present their ideas to Ryan and House officials in May.
Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic Party chief, said it shouldn’t be hard to revive the page program into a model like the Senate Page Program or other Washington internships.
“There are other residential intern programs that don’t have the problems that the page program had. It’s just a travesty to me that we don’t have the opportunity for young people to learn about public service and be immersed in workings of the greatest democracy that the world has ever seen — unless you go and do it for a senator,” she said.
“I want to make sure that we don’t forever more prevent that page program from coming back.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
