Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [102]
But this problem is not likely to be fixed anytime soon. (And raising salaries without also fixing the way we fund elections would certainly be no solution.) But if we’re not going to decide that members of Congress make too little; if we’re not going to recognize that underpaying people only gets us bad people, or turns good people bad, then the prospect that we’re going to get members of Congress to vote to support a new system of campaign finance just got much, much worse. For the choice to make Washington clean is now a choice to make a member poor.
The Benefits of Working for Members
The bigger challenge, however, may not be with the 535 members, or, more precisely, the proportion of the 535 who are not rich or who didn’t marry rich or who don’t live in West Virginia. The bigger challenge may be with their staff, and with the staff of every major regulatory bureaucracy.
Here, again, we’ve opted for government on the cheap. Staffers on Capitol Hill get paid on average between $29,890.54, for a staff assistant, and $120,051.55, for a chief of staff. The maximum salary earned by any staffer is $172,500. (Forty-three staffers earned this level of pay in 2010.)15 The chairman of the SEC earned $162,900 in 2009. The average starting salary for an attorney at the SEC is $78,000.16 By contrast, the starting salary for an analyst working in investment banking on Wall Street with just a bachelor’s degree is from $100,000 to $130,000 after bonus.17 As study after study has concluded, we pay our government too little.18 The same is true of state and local governments.19
So why, then, do government officials choose to work for so little?
No doubt some of them do it because they believe in public service. They could get a job anywhere, but they work for the government because they want to do something that does something for America. General Petraeus is not wanting for employment options. Neither was David Walker, the former (and fantastic) comptroller general of the United States. These are people who serve because service is in their DNA.
There are many souls like this throughout American society. They are soldiers who work for less because they believe they are working for something more. They are teachers who work for less because they believe they are working for something more. Doctors at NIH, lawyers at the Justice Department, federal judges—the government is filled with people who do what they do for reasons other than money. We are fortunate to have such people among us. We should think hard about how to have more.
Not every staffer working on Capitol Hill, however, is working for nothing because she believes in something. And not every regulator at the SEC is earning less than his equal on Wall Street because he believes his work will make society a better place.
Instead, living in the “farm league,” some of those people see their time on the Hill, or within major regulatory agencies, as an investment. They work for six or eight years as a staffer to a major committee, then they cash out and become a lobbyist. An experienced staffer leaving Capitol Hill can expect a starting salary of about $300,000 per year. Some senior staff members have been known to secure salary and bonus packages of $500,000 or more. If the senator whom a staffer worked for is still in office, the staffer can receive as much as $740,000.20 Heads of agencies do much better: In 2011, Michael Powell, former chairman of the FCC, became chief lobbyist for Comcast, and was reported to be making more than $2.2 million per year. In the same year, FCC commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker left the commission to join Comcast after voting to approve Comcast’s merger with NBC Universal.
This gap in salaries is an enormous change. In 1969 a “newly minted lobbyist with solid Capitol Hill experience could count on making a