Congressional Staff Shock Therapy: Fellowships and Internships as Diversity Superchargers?

Latinos are roaring into political relevance in the United States, with a population growth of 23% over the last decade, compared to the national rate of 7%. This includes significant dispersion beyond traditional Southwestern states. Yet, the United States’ changing demographic is not well reflected in congressional offices. While Congress boasts a 59% increase in Hispanic representation since 2011 between the 112^th and current 117^th Congress, the congressional staff that turns policy ideas into tangible legislation remains less diverse.

These teams draft, introduce, negotiate, and collaborate with relevant stakeholders to turn bills into law through the legislative process. As such, it is the legislative assistants – with their racial equity optics and expertise – that craft policy. It is the makeup of these congressional staff offices and committees that most requires an equity focus for diversity on Capitol Hill to be representative of a changing America.

However, tracking this diversity, or lack thereof, proves challenging because there are no mandates for Congress to collect, publish, or distribute employee data for public use. Two initiatives do exist within Congress to provide demographic data: the House Office of Diversity & Inclusion’s survey and the Senate Democratic Diversity Initiative. Nevertheless, neither provides the raw data for analysis, and both are limited to aggregate percentages by topic. Despite this, one solution is to analyze how diversity changes in the Senate over time through the Senate Diversity Survey’s breakdown of Democratic party member offices in combination with individual placements by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute (CHCI).

 

The data in Table 1 tells us that from 2020-2021, fellowships and internships focused on placing Latinos into offices had a sizable improvement on staff demographics after their programs concluded. Latino representation increased 22% across six of seven CHCI office placements. These same staff members also retained their jobs on Capitol Hill after their temporary position. However, zooming out, the general three-year trend for Latino staff in the powerful Senate Committees is more worrisome. The graphic below displays representation trends for 10 out of 18 committees that recorded that hold 10% or greater in representation. The greatest share of Latino staffers are found in the Indian Affairs Committee, with over 40% representation but trailing in the rest with under 30% across nine of 18 committees. However, lacking a minimum of 10% are the powerful and influential committees such as Appropriations, Armed Services, Commerce, Finance, and Foreign Relations.

Increasing these fellowship and internship opportunities may open a pipeline for diversity, especially among the Democratic Caucus. The composition of the Democratic Party in Congress remains disproportionally non-Hispanic white-dominant. This disparity might be due in part to the design of congressional offices and Committees themselves. Congress has no human resources department, no standardized hiring process or dedicated academy training. Rather, individual offices and Committees hire on their own.

The result of this varied, unaccountable hiring is decades of high turnover, nepotism, and a lack of equity or transparency to civil servants and the public. These faults were in part put on display this year through an Instagram account known as “dear_white_staffers.” The account accepted anonymous experiences by former Capitol Hill staffers and gained further notoriety through a press release by Politico to publicly circulate inequities and incompetency across congressional offices and committees.

In response, leadership from the Democratic Party acknowledged the backlash and signaled support for unionization, approving protections for staff to engage in collective bargaining in the House. Yet, more is needed. Efforts in the Senate collapsed in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the predominantly white status quo will continue to foster an environment for civil servants of color that is inequitable and not culturally representative.

Economists might have an answer to this problem in what is commonly referred to as “shock therapy” – a set of domestic neoliberal “free market” economic reforms that alter institutional structures and policies. A prescription for a series of swift recommendations reflects a “shock doctrine” to reshape congressional practices and improve Latino representation. In this context, there are three recommendations that could be made to improve Latino representation.

The first is to professionalize the congressional staff by amending Title 2 of U.S.C. to establish The Capitol Office of Civil Service (COCS), a standing congressional human resources office for specialized labor. The Senate Legislation Council and similar entities would be housed within the COCS, and it would serve as a centralized hiring, training, development, and retention hub for all congressional staff. Legislators could craft the COCS to be apolitical and to mirror the design of the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

To address accountability, Congress should amend The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 5 U.S.C. § 552, and subject the COCS to its requirements to allow for public access to demographic hiring data. A further step toward greater accountability would be for Congress to create an interactive dashboard and an application programming interface (API) for the public to reference salary and demographic data.

Finally, Congress should modify the Rooney Rule to require that a minimum of two tri-caucus associated fellowship programs participants are placed within congressional committees, including the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee and the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Expanding the Rooney Rule to open opportunities to fellowship programs would diversify committees.

As the 2022 midterms usher in change to Capitol Hill, it is imperative that members of Congress shock themselves to reality by tracking diversity. A recent poll by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund (NALEO) found that 52% of Latinos support Democrats and 35% support Republicans, offering a either party a path forward to a competitive election if they mobilize the Latino electorate. With a shock doctrine, the 118^th Congress will professionalize its staff, capture data in the onboarding process, and swing the gates open for more diverse fellowships. Shock therapy can become the new baseline for policymakers in exchange for electoral support. Looking past 2022, it is important that electoral support continues to turn into representation within the legislative teams to inform more equitable policy.