Congress may finally receive the inflation adjustments lawmakers have spent years blocking. But before legislators get a raise, Congress should first do its most important job: budgeting responsibly.
A federal judge recently ruled that Congress likely violated the Constitution’s Twenty-Seventh Amendment by repeatedly canceling automatic cost-of-living adjustments for lawmakers’ pay. Since 2009, congressional salaries have remained frozen at $174,000, even as inflation steadily eroded their value by about 31 percent.
Members fear the political backlash of voting for higher pay. But the broader issue is not whether congressional compensation should keep pace with inflation. The real problem is that Congress routinely fails to fulfill its most basic fiscal responsibilities while operating one of the largest and most indebted governments in the world — an increasingly dysfunctional enterprise.
Imagine executives at a major corporation repeatedly failing to adopt budgets on time, relying on temporary patches to keep operations running, and allowing debt to spiral out of control. Smart shareholders would not reward those executives with automatic raises. They would demand financial accountability and better performance.
Meanwhile, in Congress, legislators regularly miss budget deadlines and fail to pass appropriations bills before the fiscal year begins. Instead, Congress lurches from continuing resolution to shutdown threat to a budget package passed in the middle of the night when few people are watching.
The result is a less transparent, less accountable, and more expensive federal government that adds trillions annually to an already dangerously large national debt that is on track to exceed its record high last seen in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
Americans care about attracting and retaining a highly qualified Congress. But lawmakers should not receive automatic pay increases without accountability for results. More important than how much Congress gets paid is what taxpayers can expect in return.
Any future congressional pay adjustment should be paired with meaningful pay-for-performance reforms tied to Congress’s fulfillment of its most basic responsibilities: passing budgets and appropriations bills on time, avoiding government shutdowns, and putting the federal budget on a sustainable fiscal path.
If lawmakers carry out the basic work of fiscally responsible governing, they should receive their cost-of-living adjustment. If they fail, pay should be withheld or delayed until they complete those responsibilities.
Congress has already demonstrated that these incentives can work. In 2013, after the Senate failed to pass a budget resolution for three years in a row, Congress adopted a “No Budget, No Pay” policy. The threat of withheld compensation helped motivate the Senate to pass a budget within three weeks of the statutory deadline.
More recently, the Senate unanimously advanced a resolution sponsored by Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) to suspend senators’ pay during a government shutdown. The measure reflects a growing recognition that lawmakers should face direct consequences when Congress fails to fund the government. It’s absurd that air traffic controllers and TSA agents will miss paychecks during a shutdown while the members of Congress responsible for the funding lapse continue collecting salaries.
Incentives matter. Congress’s institutional incentives are poorly aligned with fiscal stewardship. Legislators are rewarded for seniority, toeing the party line, and fundraising success over doing the difficult work of responsible budgeting and engaging in fiscal oversight.
Competitive compensation can help attract and retain qualified legislators. But compensation should be tied to performance in carrying out Congress’s core constitutional responsibilities in managing the public purse. A Congress that cannot carry out the basic functions of funding the government responsibly on time and fix an unsustainable debt trajectory should not expect automatic raises with no conditions attached.
A deeper irony is also at play here: Congress’s fiscal failures contribute to the very inflation that has eroded the buying power of lawmakers’ salaries in the first place. Persistent deficit spending and chronic budget dysfunction reduce investor confidence in the future value of US bonds, and inflation expectations rise with unsustainable debt accumulation.
Absent automatic inflation adjustments, members of Congress can protect the purchasing power of their salaries by governing in ways that help keep inflation under control.
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