Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah on Capitol Hill on September 21, 2023.
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images
Members of Congress make $174,000 and haven’t gotten a raise since 2009.Mitt Romney is among the lawmakers who say it’s time for members of Congress to get a raise.He specifically pointed to an unseemly fact about Congress: many lawmakers sleep in their offices.
Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah says he believes members of Congress are not paid enough.
Members of the House and Senate are paid $174,000 annually, and have been since 2009. Majority and minority leaders make $193,400, while the speaker of the House makes $223,500.
But Congress isn’t like any old job: Most members travel back and forth between DC and their home districts twice a week, and they need somewhere to sleep when they’re in the nation’s capital.
Rep. Patrick McHenry, the North Carolina Republican who briefly served as the interim speaker of the House following Kevin McCarthy’s ouster, told The Dispatch last week that members of Congress aren’t paid enough.
Asked about McHenry’s comments by Business Insider, Romney declared: “I agree.”
“You have quite a number of members of Congress that sleep in their offices,” said Romney. “In this day and age, it makes sense to have people that feel that they can serve, and still be able to sleep in a home at night.”
He’s not wrong about people sleeping in their offices.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a man of relatively modest means, has long slept in his Capitol Hill office. And former House Speaker Paul Ryan — Romney’s running mate in 2012 — was known to do the same thing.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem were also known to sleep in their offices. Not all of them do it out of financial necessity — some do it as a gesture of fiscal responsibility.
But many lawmakers do, in fact, sleep in their offices because they can’t afford DC rent on top of all of their other expenses.
“We don’t know for sure how many people sleep in their offices. I was one of those,” former Rep. Gregg Harper testified to a House committee in 2022, saying he “couldn’t afford $2,000, $2,500 a month” in rent.