House Members Likely to Forgo Pay Raise for 2010

They are probably not headed to the poorhouse quite yet, but lawmakers in the House will soon be getting the same pinch from the economic downturn that millions of other Americans are: a pay freeze.

Party leaders informed House Democrats yesterday that they will move legislative language blocking lawmakers' regularly scheduled salary increase for 2010. "I told our colleagues that because of the condition of our economy and the crisis our country is in, that the leadership will be instructing the Appropriations Committee not to include a COLA for next year," Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said after the meeting.

That COLA is a cost-of-living adjustment, the automatic pay raise that members receive each year under permanent law unless Congress passes legislation to block it. The last time members did not get a raise was 2007; otherwise, members' pay goes up by a few percentage points per year, based on a formula pegged to the employment cost index calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Rank-and-file lawmakers are earning $174,000 this year, although top elected leaders make more (Pelosi, for example, is taking in $223,500).

House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), a longtime proponent of annual raises for members, said the freeze was warranted by these trying times. "We're in a context today where we have extraordinary pain in our community, people losing their jobs, the economy in great stress. It would not be appropriate to take a COLA adjustment in the coming year," he said.

Though members of both chambers currently make the same amount, this move would apply only to the House. The Senate would have to move separately to freeze its own pay.

If Democratic leaders had not made this decision, it probably would have been made for them. Every year, there is an effort on the House floor, usually by fiscal conservatives, to block lawmakers' annual raise. In most years that effort gets voted down, but most members already expected next year's raise to be scratched.

"The current political climate is going to drive decisions that get made right now," said Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.). "The public doesn't have a lot of confidence in this institution, and we have to earn it back."

Adding pressure on the legislative branch, President Obama moved the day after he was inaugurated to freeze the salaries of the highest-paid White House aides. And the administration has also pushed for caps on executive compensation at companies that take public money.

"It's very hard for Congress to say we should be immune from that example," Davis said.

Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) agreed that it might make sense to block the pay raise, given the economic woes, but he said that "it seems to me that it's a little bit pessimistic and little bit early to make that decision" now for 2010.

Peter J. Sepp, a spokesman for the National Taxpayers Union, a spending watchdog group, said: "At least now we know what it takes for lawmakers to freeze their own salaries: a full-blown recession combined with a year's worth of bungled economic policymaking."