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Nancy Pelosi announced a major pay increase for top House staff members.
This will allow them to make more money than elected members of Congress, Fox News reports. Since 2009, the pay for a member of Congress has been $174,000 with some variance for leadership positions.
Pelosi says the new maximum pay rate for staff will be $199,300. Now they can make more money than their bosses.
This is a 15% increase from the current cap of $173,900 annually.
This is how the public sector operates. While many private businesses have to be extremely cost-conscious, take on immense risk, and work very diligently to turn a narrow profit, the federal government can simply tax Americans or spend further into debt in order to give themselves a raise.
Pelosi said, “This order will help the Congress recruit and retain the outstanding and diverse talent that we need, as it also helps ensure parity between employees of the House of Representatives and other employees of the federal government.”
More from Fox News:
Members of Congress are each awarded a pot of money each year – roughly $1.5 million – to run their offices. The member allowances are used to pay staff salaries, rent for their district offices, and travel and utility bills. It’s up to each member of Congress to hire their employees and determine their salaries.
There continues to be a big disparity between the salary levels of the top employees and entry-level positions. House chiefs of staff have a median wage of $152,100, whereas communication specialists make on average $32,400, according to congressional salary data from LegiStorm.
And there’s still a gender pay gap on Capitol Hill, where wages of female staffers continue to lag behind male staffers, an earlier Fox News analysis found.
The new maximum salary announcement does not mean an automatic pay raise for all employees, just the flexibility for members of Congress to give their top employees more money than them.
But the House in July passed a legislative branch appropriations bill that would boost members’ office allowances to $774 million in 2022, an increase of $134 million from the 2021 fiscal year. If the Senate signs off and the new spending takes effect, members of Congress would then have more money to divvy up for staff salaries.
