If you’re a member of Congress hoping for a raise, you’ll have to wait at least another year.
The vast majority of House and Senate members will continue to earn an annual salary of $174,000 — a figure that hasn’t budged since 2009 — after President Donald Trump signed a bill to fund the government and end the longest shutdown in American history.
While the bill only keeps the entirety of the government funded through January 30, it includes funding for the legislative branch for the entire fiscal year, which ends after September 30 of next year.
That portion of the bill contained language that blocked an automatic cost-of-living adjustment — something most other federal employees receive each year.
“I would like to see how well that would go over if we did that to all federal employees,” Republican Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia told BI in July. “I mean, do you think that would survive?”
A version of that provision has been included in every annual government funding bill over the last 16 years.
On the one hand, it’s to be expected. It would be an optics nightmare for lawmakers to allow their salaries to increase on the heels of a shutdown that left hundreds of thousands working without pay, caused air travel chaos, and eventually threatened SNAP payments.
At the same time, it means that lawmakers’ salaries will continue to not keep pace with inflation, which some argue limits the pool of people who run for office and incentivizes lawmakers to leave Congress to cash in on their service.
Something Mike Johnson and AOC can agree on
Members of Congress from both parties have acknowledged, in one way or another, that they may not be getting paid enough.
Earlier this year, House Speaker Mike Johnson — who, due to his title, makes $223,500 rather than the $174,000 earned by his rank-and-file colleagues — indicated his sympathy to the argument while discussing his opposition to stock trading in Congress.
“Look, you know, the salary of Congress has been frozen since 2009,” Johnson said in May. “Over time, if you stay on this trajectory, you’re going to have less qualified people who are willing to make the extreme sacrifice to run for Congress.”
That puts him on the same page as Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
“If we want working class people who don’t rely on independent wealth, to represent people in Congress, we have to make it work,” Ocasio-Cortez told BI last year.
If Congress hadn’t proactively blocked cost-of-living adjustments each year since 2009, the salary for rank-and-file lawmakers would be $221,600, according to the Congressional Research Service.
That’s despite the unique demands placed upon lawmakers, especially having to maintain two residences: One in their home state, and another in Washington, DC.
Last year, lawmakers almost got a modest pay bump. A package of government funding bills would have allowed the cost-of-living increase to go through for the first time since 2009, which would have increased rank-and-file lawmakers’ salaries by up to $6,600.
Then, Elon Musk and others helped tank that bill, in large part by arguing that it gave members of Congress a larger raise than it actually did.
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