A bill that could have ended a long-standing freeze on lawmakers’ pay increases passed committee Thursday with an amendment to keep the freeze in place.
The House Appropriations Committee sent the annual spending bill to fund the Legislature to the full House for consideration by a vote of 33 to 24. The House is scheduled to take up the bill in July, with leaders pursuing an aggressive timeline to pass all 12 budget bills before the August recess.
Notably missing from the initial version of the bill was language that would have frozen cost-of-living adjustments for lawmakers for 15 years.
But just before it was due to go out of committee Thursday evening, lawmakers voted to add back language that would maintain the suspension, but not without opposition from both parties.
Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., a former House Majority Leader, called the issue “a serious question about whether the only people we can serve here are the wealthy.”
“I know this is a politically hot-button issue and I know that members of Congress, both mine and yours, will inflame this, and that’s unfortunate, because it’s like cutting your nose off to disfigure yourself,” he said at the hearing.
He also agreed with comments made by Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, at an earlier hearing, that an amendment to keep the pay freeze in place would be “constitutionally problematic.”
“this [cost-of-living-adjustment (COLA)] “The annual COLA cap would have been set at an annual percentage of what all other federal employees receive,” he said. “In exchange for the annual COLA, all members of Congress would have been prohibited or severely limited from earning additional outside income, such as speaking fees or other compensation that could easily be converted into fee-for-service arrangements, which, for particularly popular or powerful members of Congress, could lead to tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income.”
“While I certainly support banning this type of outside income for lawmakers, I disagree with the way the management amendment addresses COLAs,” he said. “If Congress wants to eliminate annual COLAs, Congress can do so. But it can’t be done through the appropriations process, and it can’t be done in a constitutional manner.”
Rank-and-file members of Congress received a 2.8 percent pay increase in January 2009 and have since earned $174,000 a year. Congressional leaders receive higher salaries, with the highest being the Speaker of the House at $223,500.
Although members of Congress are set to receive annual increases under the 1989 Ethics Reform Act, members’ salaries have not changed by law for more than a decade.
a report If the salary increases had been implemented, members of Congress would have received salaries of more than $200,000 per year in 2023, according to Congressional Research Service (CRS) estimates.
But some are strongly opposed to the possibility of a wage increase.
In a letter earlier this month, Reps. Angie Craig (D-Minn.), Chris Pappas (D-Hawaii) and Eric Sorensen (D-Ill.) called for enacting the fiscal year 2025 budget bill to block pay increases for lawmakers.
“Now is the time to focus on bipartisan solutions that invest in hardworking Americans. We need legislation that focuses on the issues facing our constituents: rising costs at grocery stores and gas stations, addressing security challenges on our southern border, and ensuring economic opportunity for the farmers and small businesses in our districts,” the lawmakers wrote.
“Americans deserve to know their lawmakers are fighting for them, not to boost their paychecks, but to lower costs for working families.”
The three Democrats are on the Democratic House Campaign Committee’s list of front-runners running in battleground elections this year.
Some conservatives, including prominent hardliners such as Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), have spoken out against the move.
“What I ran on was something I knew I could make money on,” Burchett told The Hill. “As my banker always tells me, I’m the poorest member of Congress from Tennessee, but I’m also the most honest, so that’s where I am.”
“And I’ll probably just be patient and stay where I am,” he said.
Others, however, say lifting the pay freeze is important for lawmakers who come from less affluent backgrounds.
“I think locals will say, ‘Everybody’s going up. They’re getting richer and richer. I’m going to get a paycheck for the rest of my life,’ but that’s not the case,” Rep. Byron Donald (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, told The Hill.
“If we don’t address the issue of salaries, we’re going to, frankly, lose the economic diversity of our congressional ranks,” he said. “It’s going to be harder for those congressional ranks that aren’t as well off to be here because they have to maintain their homes back home, maintain their homes here, pay for travel, and all that other stuff.”
Some Democratic lawmakers are also pushing the effort, making similar arguments, amid persistently high inflation.
“Inflation driven by corporate greed is certainly fueling this,” said Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), pointing to “home prices and barriers to entry for housing.”
“Hopefully, this will lead to more working families being represented in Congress,” Frost said Wednesday.
Frost, who gained national attention when she became the first Gen Z member elected to Congress in 2022, has spoken publicly about being denied an apartment in Washington, D.C., because she had “very poor” credit.
At the time, Frost said his credit rating was low because he had “run for Congress for a year and a half and gotten into a lot of debt.”
“This is not for people who don’t already have money,” he tweeted.
Both chambers are already behind on funding their annual budgets, and lawmakers from both parties are seeking stopgap measures to fund the government beyond the September shutdown deadline and the November elections. The measures could also shield any vulnerable lawmakers from potentially tough votes before voters go to the ballot box.
Lawmakers have made similar efforts to address the pay freeze in recent years, but they also failed earlier this year when the issue emerged as a sticking point as leaders crafted their fiscal 2024 budget.
A bipartisan group of current and former lawmakers is suing, arguing that the freeze is unconstitutional, while others have argued the issue should be handled in court.
