This is one in a series of podcasts celebrating the 50th anniversary of the National Conference of State Legislatures. On this episode we focus on legislative staff, the approximately 30,000 professionals who keep the trains running at this nation’s legislatures.
This is one in a series of podcasts celebrating the 50th anniversary of the National Conference of State Legislatures. On this episode we focus on legislative staff, the approximately 30,000 professionals who keep the trains running at this nation’s legislatures.
While legislative staff outnumber legislators by more than 4 to 1, their role is often poorly understood by the public and even by their own families. Yet the work they do from drafting legislation to providing bill research to keeping the IT systems running is critical to these institutions.
We talked to a variety of staffers and others who reflected on the growth of staff, their critical role in providing nonpartisan professional advice to legislators, the changing role and challenges staff have faced especially in the last 50 years and what the future holds for them.
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Ed: Hello and welcome to “Our American States,” a podcast from the National Conference of State Legislatures. I’m your host, Ed Smith.
RH: We’re the silent witnesses to state history every single day. We take a lot of pride in that and I think that people should know that and that staff to a person whether they are partisan staff, nonpartisan staff are dedicated to the institution of helping members succeed and that’s our entire goal.
Ed: That was Rob Hunt, a clerk in the Maine House of Representatives and the current president of the American Society of Legislative Clerks and Secretaries or ASLCS. He is one of several guests on this special episode of “Our American States,” one in a series of episodes celebrating the 50th anniversary of NCSL. On this episode, the focus is on legislative staff, the approximately 30,000 professionals who keep the trains running at this nation’s legislatures. While legislative staff outnumber legislators by more than 4-to-1, their role is often poorly understood by the public and even by their own families. Yet the work they do--from drafting legislation to providing bill research to keeping the IT systems running--is critical to these institutions.
There has always been some legislative staff going all the way back to 1619 in the first meeting in the Virginia House of Burgesses. Hunt noted that clerks and secretaries have existed in some form in legislatures from the beginning.
RH: It’s pretty fundamental to have some sort of administrative staff to oversee what’s happening and document it and publish the record.
Ed: But the advent of staff agencies to consistently serve legislators goes back only to the start of the 20th century. The legislative reference library in Wisconsin, which was founded in 1901, is generally regarded as the first such agency in the country. It evolved into the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau, where Steve Miller served as director from 1998 to 2015.
Miller pointed out that Charles McCarthy, who taught political science at the University of Wisconsin, spent a lot of time at the capitol in Madison and realized lawmakers would benefit from more information on laws passed in other states.
SM: He got in the habit of writing letters to other states and asking them about what laws have you passed or have you passed any laws dealing with these topics and then he would take the responses that he got usually letters or clippings of newspaper articles and he organized them according to the Dewey Decimal System. If you were interested in automobiles or horses, you could look them up and find them so that’s how he got started. By 1910, he recognized that legislators really could use a little bit of help with bill drafting so he added that to the services of what was then known as the Legislative Reference Library.
Ed: Wisconsin continued to be a trailblazer in the legislative staff world. Like other states, Miller told me, legislators recognized that they needed help if they were going to be a coequal branch of government.
SM: Wisconsin has a strong governor and has had a strong governor. Legislators recognize the value of having staff who were nonpartisan and no beholden to the Executive Branch. And so, they were in favor of having legislative staffers who worked for the legislature.
Ed: Wisconsin was not alone. In the mid-20th century, many legislators began to see the necessity of having nonpartisan information that did not come from the executive branch. Bill Pound, NCSL’s executive director for 32 years before retiring in 2019, noted that soon more expertise was needed.
BP: They began to particularly get more specialized budget staffing in that which began in California I guess in the late 30’s or early mid-40’s, but had spread to other places. States developed their legislative councils which meant they had a number of generalists and still do, but they also got far more specialized on having full-time knowledge and somebody who had to report to the legislature not to the gutter.
Ed: Kirk Fulford is the assistant director of the Legislative Fiscal Office in Alabama and the current president of the National Association of Legislative Fiscal Offices. He bolstered the notion that fiscal staff working for the legislature were indispensable.
KF: It’s critically important for the legislature to have their own fiscal staff. Without a legislative finance office, the members would be left with only information provided by the Executive Branch when it comes to how much money we have available to spend, what are the impacts of these policy changes, who does or does not need additional funds in order to operate. Those things would be entirely left up to the Executive Branch, the governor to decide or to provide to the members without legislative staff.
Ed: Professional staff increased and there was more specialization throughout the 20th Century notes Pev Squire, a professor at the University of Missouri and one of the foremost academic experts on state legislatures. The growth of legislative staff was, in fact, one of the defining characteristics of legislatures in the last hundred years.
PS: This is one area where the states again led Congress. Congress was the first to really give members personal staff and the states lagged well behind there. But in terms of informational resources, institutional resources, they developed at the state level. And so, when you look at the Congressional Research Service, it’s really modeled after Wisconsin’s Legislative Reference Bureau. Assistance with bill drafting developed at the state level several decades before members of Congress got assistance in that area.
Ed: The number of staff and their roles expanded significantly starting in the 1960’s as part of the Legislative Reform movement that itself was spurred in part by the publication of “The Sometimes Governments.”That book was a product of the Citizens Conference on State Legislatures, a group cofounded by California’s then House Speaker Jesse Unruh. It called for various reforms including more legislative staff. Two areas saw significant staff growth in that period according to Brian Weberg who served as a senior manager at NCSL focusing on legislative management for more than 30 years. One was IT.
BW: The big one that started to really ramp up as we got into the 70’s especially 80’s was information technology. People they were professionals so to speak in state legislatures because there weren’t any computers. There were telephones and then some remarkable things started to happen.There were fax machines attached to the telephones and then there were these sorts of central mainframe computer systems started to creep in and that required tech staff to come in and where did we put these tech staff and how does that operate. And then of course the big revolution into personal computers and desktop computing, email, all those kinds of things.
Ed: The other area Weberg pointed out was human resources because people were making the legislature a career.
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BW: Before that it was kind of an ad hoc atmosphere about how you dealt with all these employees and gave them raises and took care of their benefits and all of that stuff so that became a more professionalized area.
Ed: John Snyder is the Transportation Committee administrator for the Kentucky Legislative Research Commission and the current staff chair at NCSL. He said the growth of HR offices has been a vital importance to legislatures.
JS: There has been a great growth in the number of folks who had dedicated HR staffs and that’s a good thing I think because you know a lot of these legislators if they are hiring their own staff and all sorts of things, that’s just another headache that they got if they don’t a HR staff to deal with that and with all the stuff behind the scenes.
Ed: When NCSL was formed in 1975, it was explicitly an organization that embraced legislators and legislative staff. As part of that effort, NCSL provided an umbrella for the staff professional organizations. Most of which started forming in that period. Though ASLCS was on the scene long before NCSL having formed in the 1940’s. The staff professional organizations give legislative staff a place to meet their peers and learn from the experience in other states says Snyder.
JS: Nobody understands this job other than the 30,000 or so people that have it right now and have had it in the past. One of the great things about NCSL is you know those staff associates. We have nine different staff associations and they are no matter what job you do in the legislature if you are a clerk, if you’re a fiscal person, if you are a bill director, if you work for personal staff for legislators, if you are a communications person. I can’t imagine where you wouldn’t fit in.
Ed: Sabrina Luwellan, the assistant secretary of the Arkansas Senate and a former staff chair at NCSL, also stressed the value of these organizations.
SL: It is an irreplaceable necessity to have organizations like NCSL to help ensure that there is professional training, support, guidance and feedback for staff. And this is what state legislatures need, require and deserve for its functionality.
Ed: It is not just legislative staff who see the value they bring to legislators. Colorado House Speaker Julie McCluskie’s view is one shared by many in elected office.
JM: I am so dependent on a nonpartisan staff to help share with me institutional history, the ability for them to be experts in a particular policy arena, the ability for them to share decades often of experiences and challenges to help put what we face in the moment into a prospective that really helps me make a better decision, understand implications.Even learn from past mistakes.Mistakes that happened when I wasn’t there.
Ed: Legislative staff also provide the ongoing and institutional foundation for legislatures according to Raul Burciaga, who retired last year as director of the New Mexico Legislative Council Service and is a former staff chair at NCSL.
RB: We still have a lot of part time legislatures where staff is still a full-time job because the state government doesn’t stop operating and so you have a process by which state legislatures stay abreast of what is going on in their given state. How the Executive Branch is operating. What is going on with the courts. And in every step of the way, you have legislative staff that is providing the information, the background, the research, the bill drafting that’s necessary for legislatures and legislators to be able to do their jobs.
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Ed: As they face the coming decades, legislative staff have plenty of challenges whether it’s complex policy areas such as AI or social media or the growing partisanship in legislatures. But in interviews with numerous staff leaders, they all pointed to the pandemic as a case study in the adaptability of legislative staff. Here is how Alabama’s Fulford sees it.
KF: The COVID pandemic was something that nobody saw coming and we certainly had to change how we do stuff and it wound up changing some things for the better. So, we were able to evolve and adapt in how we crafted budgets and how we thought about what happens if the bottom falls out to make sure when something that’s so out of the ordinary and uncommon happens, how do you deal with that without really impacting your state for years to come.
Ed: But the biggest challenge in the view of many staff leaders, including Snyder, is a more overarching change in society that affects whether people will see the legislature as a longtime career. People under 30 are expected to change careers as many as seven times in the course of their working lives and that will be a sea change in the legislative world.
JS: One of the things that does concern me about staffing is both the nature of work nowadays. I’ve been here for 35 years. I don’t think you’re going to have very many people ever work for the General Assembly for 35 years and up.
Ed: I’ve been talking with Raul Burciaga, Kirk Fulford, Rob Hunt, Sabrina Luwellan, Julie McCluskie, Steve Miller, Bill Pound, John Schneider, Peg Squire and Brian Weberg about the 50th anniversary of NCSL and the critical role of legislative staff. Thanks for listening.
You can check out all the podcasts from the National Conference of State Legislatures by searching for NCSL podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast “Our American States” dives into some of the most challenging public policy issues facing legislators. On “Across the Aisle” host Kelley Griffin tells stories of bipartisanship. Also check out our special series “Building Democracy” on the history of legislatures.
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