New data may change what we know about staffing, stability, and capacity on Capitol Hill

Terry Gerton Talk about a new tool that you’ve built called Hill Climbers and you built it I think out of your own experience working in the house. What problem did you see from the inside that convinced you that there needed to be a more public structured picture of the congressional workforce?

Omar Awan When I was at the house, I spent 20 years working on strategy and budgets on the operational side of the house. And you learn quickly that people are both the largest expense and the biggest determinant of whether an office can function effectively. And so we started with just the salary data because compensation affects who you can hire, who you can retain, and whether people can build real expertise. And I kept thinking, the staff data has been public for years, but it’s scattered and really hard to use. So Hill Climbers began as an effort to structure that workforce data so it could actually inform staffing and compensation decisions for members of Congress. But once we built the data set for the first time, we could see offices as teams, not just individuals with job titles and salaries. And that’s when it became clear that we’d only scratched the surface. Patterns began to emerge and that ultimately led to the creation of the Hill Climbers Index asking not just what offices pay, but how they’re structured to operate sustainably over time.

Terry Gerton Every house office has its own sort of structure, and members have a lot of prerogatives here. As you built this index, who did you intend to be the main users? Chiefs of staff, members themselves, managing offices? Who’s it for?

Omar Awan Well, it’s, you know, there’s a number of different people that it’s for. It’s for offices themselves. It creates like a mirror, not to name and shame, but to see what their peers are doing differently and what small organizational changes they could make that could really make a difference. It’s also for schools and universities. It helps students see the value in Hill careers and how quickly they can move up into positions of influence. And for job seekers, it answers practical questions like, what kind of office am I walking into? Is there a path to grow or am I stepping into constant churn?

Terry Gerton That’s some useful information there. How do you want especially members and their staff to use this data? What kind of decisions do you imagine they’ll make with it?

Omar Awan Well, you know, we’ve always had public data on individual staffers and members have had that, but what’s been missing is a way to see the entire system. And that’s had real consequences. For example, new members of Congress, they’re expected to run a small organization almost immediately after they get elected. Many of these people don’t come from positions of leadership potentially. They just get elected and now they have to run this almost like a small business. And within weeks from election day, they have to hire staff, set pay, decide who does what, all while learning how Congress itself works. And what the index helps, it helps make that system visible. It shows how offices are set up to do the work by looking at three simple things, capacity, stability, and structure. Do they have enough people? Do people stay long enough to build experience and is a work organized in a way that reflects a healthy, balanced office?

Terry Gerton One of the really interesting features I see in this is a career tracker. People who might want to become a Hill staffer and what a career on the Hill might look like. What building blocks and public data did you use to create that part of the tool?

Omar Awan So I used public statements of disbursements going all the way back to 2009 we looked at and tracked every person who’s worked on the hill since 2009 what their career progression has looked like and based on that, we were able to then build this model that shows how long it can take going, for example, we saw that it only takes seven years and 11 months to go from intern to chief on the chief of staff on the most common path that’s taken, which is basically through the legislative part, the legislative team. And you know that — the great thing about that is that helps explain some of the anecdotal data on the hill that’s been there for years. You know, we’ve talked about it for a long time, like, why do you see so many chiefs of staff in their late 20s? And with this data, I can prove it’s not a myth anymore. The career ladder is simply faster than people realized.

Terry Gerton How did you standardize job titles and experience across all of that? Part of the challenge of building a model is getting your data straight, right?

Omar Awan Yep, so the house is interesting. Members of Congress can give their employees whatever job title that they want. And that’s where the challenge has always been. Somebody had to go through the hard work of going through thousands and thousands of different job titles and classifying them. Like a policy director is a legislative director. An LD, the abbreviation, is a legislature director. Going through all of those thousands of variations. But where we differ is not only did we do that, we also accounted for people that hold multiple roles in an office, like deputy chief slash comms director or something like that. And then the other thing that we did is we cleaned up the data by looking at shared staffers. There’s this thing where, you know, members of Congress can have, let’s say they have a chief of staff and they pay them, you know a certain portion of money out of their personal member budget and then they’re also on the foreign relations committee so they’ll say okay but you know you also work for them and you’ll get paid the rest there and there are a lot of analyzes that … don’t account for that and they’ll just take the smaller portion of the members paying into the average and we take the time to make sure that all of those different criteria and variables are accounted for

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Omar Awan. He’s the founder of Hillclimbers.org and a recently retired staff member on the house. Omar, you’re going live today. What will be on the site day one? Is it dashboards? Is it committee office views? Is it trend lines? What should people be looking for if they go to the site today?

Omar Awan So what they’re going to see on Hill Climbers today is a new index that we’re rolling out and it’s a comparative ranking of organizational conditions, not ideology or policy positions of a member. Every office operates under the same budget and structural constraints. The index measures how offices build and sustain their teams within those shared limits. And the great thing is that there isn’t a single blueprint for success. The index doesn’t simply reward the biggest office or the highest paid. Some top performing offices have smaller, highly experienced teams with low turnover, and others have larger teams with strong internal balance and mobility. But what we do see is a maturity pattern. Offices often experience more churn early on and become more intentional and stable over time. On average, what they’re going to see on the index is that offices in the top 100 are led by members with more than twice the seniority of those in the bottom 100. In fact, there’s only two freshmen that break into the top 100. There’s 35 of them in the the bottom 100. But what that suggests is that organizational learning plays a meaningful role on the Hill. And the value of the index, for members of Congress especially, is that it can shorten that learning curve for new members by now providing real comparative data from the start.

Terry Gerton That’s really fascinating. So if this index works the way you intend it, let’s say two or three years down the road, what will be different? Will offices hire and staff differently? Will staffers come with a different perspective? What do you think will change?

Omar Awan Well, I think what’s gonna change is first off, just using our basic salary data that Hill Climbers has, legislative staff themselves can better advocate for themselves and make sure that they can baseline their salaries, make sure they’re actually being compensated fairly. But for members themselves using the index, they’re gonna be able to see how every quarter. Their decisions are improving their management structures or hurting their capacity or their stability. So they can see almost, during the year, they can kind of get this quarterly check on how they’re doing.

Terry Gerton Go live is not the end of your journey. It’s just kind of like the beginning of it. So not only do you hope for growth in the way that people use it, but I’m sure you have other plans for what you might add into the index. What will you be looking to add in the future?

Omar Awan So one of the areas that we’re looking at is we have data on members on their seniority. We know who the freshmen are. We also have data provided by that clerk, I believe, it’s called the casualty list. And one of things that I’m gonna try and look into is whether there are certain shifts in an organizational structure. Or decisions that a member is making that can signal whether they’re planning to actually leave the Hill. So maybe there’s a way we can actually predict who is gonna announce that they’re gonna run for governor or something like that. And just see if the data tells the story there. We’re also working really closely with legislative researchers to help validate the data as well, but they’re actually looking into more questions on things that we at Hill Climbers as nonpartisan really don’t touch, but they are gonna look at more questions like is there any kind of partisan story or is there anything in the data that we can use to infer political science related things, but that’s on them.