Legislative Branch Appropriations Recap
A special Friday addition to dig into a busy week of action
The House Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee plowed through four budget request hearings and a member day last week. To recap all the activity, we have published this special edition of the First Branch Forecast. Monday’s edition will capture what else is going on that impacts Congress.
Before getting into the details of the hearings, here is a recap of the shared office and House-side office requests for FY 2027 submitted to the subcommittee, by order of size of the request:
The Architect of the Capitol: Total budget request of $1.6 billion – an increase of $788 million over FY 2026, a 105% increase
The near-doubling of the AOC year-over-year request is to launch a major renovation of the Rayburn House Office Building, which is at risk of “catastrophic systems failure.”
United States Capitol Police: Total budget request of $1.02 billion – an increase of $169.7 million over FY 2026, or nearly a 20% increase
$734 million for salaries and benefits – an increase of $89.6 million over FY 2026.
$273 million for general fund expenses – an increase of $69.5 million over FY 2026.
$15.7 million for additional security enhancements.
Government Accountability Office: Total budget authorization request of $910.3 million, with offsets bringing the appropriation down to $860.1 million – an increase of $48.2 million over FY 2026
The additional funds will cover cost-of-living increases that GAO has absorbed because of flat budgets since FY 2024.
GAO is proposing cutting 143 full-time positions through early retirement and voluntary separation to lower personnel costs.
Office of the Chief Administrative Officer: Total budget request of $253.1 million – a $19.8 million or 8.5% increase over FY 2026
$15.9 for increased sustainment costs for personnel ($5.2 million) and program ($10.7 million) like cost of living increases, software license renewals, and increased contractor costs.
$3.4 million for a variety of new high-priority projects.
House Sergeant at Arms: Total budget request of $147.3 million – an increase of $6.7 million or 4.75% over FY 2026
$23.75 million for 221 FTEs, an increase of five from FY 2026.
$2.1 million in additional funds for the Residential Security Program – a 2% increase from FY 2026.
$2.8 million in additional funds for the District Office Security Program – a 2.5% increase from FY 2026.
Congressional Budget Office: Total budget request of $76.3 million – a $1.5 million or 2% increase over FY 2026
85% of the increased funds would go to staff pay and benefits.
House Clerk: Total budget request of $51.8 million – a 5.71% increase over FY 2026
A $1.7 million net increase in program changes.
Office of the Legislative Counsel: Total budget request of $19.2 million – a 2.5% increase over FY 2026
Additional funds would go to cost-of-living increases. It should be noted that OLC was able to hire an additional 17 attorneys this Congress with additional investment in FY 2026, increasing its attorney pool by nearly 60%.
Office of Inspector General: Total budget request of $6.4 million – a $134,000 or 2.2% increase from FY 2026 to keep up with inflation.
Office of Law Revision Counsel: Total budget request of $4.1 million– an 18% decrease over FY 2026
Office of General Counsel: Total budget request of $2.1 million – about a 2% increase over FY 2026.
SUMMARY & ANALYSIS
This set of requests is the kind of perfect storm we always fear. Congressional preference to defer maintenance on its buildings once again has come back to bite appropriators, as it did with the Capitol’s crumbling dome and the similar need to make emergency renovations of the Cannon Building. Adding the funding increases requested by AOC and USCP, the legislative branch budget would need to increase by $958 million before appropriators even get to the rest of the requests enumerated above. That’s more than 13% of the FY 2026 appropriation for the entire legislative branch. (also recall, the Library of Congress asked for an additional $34.4 million several weeks ago.)
The roughly $80 million in additional funds requested in last week’s hearings reflect the increasing costs of doing business that Congress is experiencing along with every other American employer.
If appropriators try to whittle down a nearly billion-dollar increase figure by imposing blanket austerity, they will break the legislative branch. Members’ increasing demands for services from these offices already are overheating their capacity. The inflationary environment will worsen the impact of freezes and cuts to other offices in the search for what would really amount to spare change with the numbers involved. If the AOC and USCP cannibalize more of the legislative branch budget, Congress will face a human capital crisis.
As a reminder, we keep a repository of previous legislative branch appropriations documents on GitHub.
FROM THE HEARING ROOM
In keeping with First Branch Forecast practice, I tried to attend most of the hearings. I was the only person from civil society to attend any as far as I could tell, and I saw a reporter only at the Capitol Police hearing. The lack of a public witness day may have dampened interest, but it was discouraging given the importance of these offices to the institution.
Written public testimony from 17 witnesses is posted on the Appropriations Committee’s Member Day hearing page. AGI submitted testimony requesting the committee set aside funds for the Congressional Data Task Force to hire a full-time coordinator position to facilitate greater institutional awareness and collaboration regarding available data, ongoing tech projects, and AI experimentation.
AGI’s full set of policy recommendations for the FY 2027 legislative branch bills can be downloaded on our website.
Only Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington testified in person on Member Day, urging the committee to support an independent audit of the Congressional Budget Office. Only two members submitted written testimony: Rep. Sylvia Garcia in support of restoring the House Office of Diversity and Inclusion and job eligibility for DACA recipients, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib to propose a $20 million child care benefit for all House staff, including district office employees.
TL:DR
What stood out across the hearings I attended was that members of Congress have steadily ratcheted up their demands on legislative branch agencies without making commensurate investments in their capacity. Although this observation is not novel, it was evident in the details of the answers of witnesses across the hearings.
At times, members of the subcommittee (plus full committee ranking member Rosa DeLauro) asked witnesses in subcommittee hearings if their requests actually reflected what was needed to fulfill their missions. Witnesses demurred, but we know the answer is “no.” Leaders of legislative branch offices were cautious with their requests, with a few asking for additional money for programs in the single millions of dollars.
We would encourage members of the subcommittee to follow up with offices about not only the minimum they need for their missions, but the added capacity that would benefit the legislative branch overall. Legislative branch appropriations has been stuck in a cycle for some time where offices react to, and to some degree, anticipate member requests for services. The leaders of these agencies are disincentivized from proposing their vision for what they actually could deliver to the legislative branch if resources were less of a constraint. There should be more two-way dialogue about finding institutional solutions for the multitude of members’ needs.
US CAPITOL POLICE
Chief Sullivan framed his request for additional funding in terms of the increasing threat environment facing members, their families, and staff. It wasn’t clear, however, in the subsequent discussion how much the explosion in recorded threats was responsible for the 20% increase in his budget request. Instead, the hearing generated a picture of a department stretched thin to secure the sprawling Capitol campus and respond to ever-growing member demands for added security. Sullivan mentioned an “exponential growth in the asks” made of the department. Members’ requests for USCP presence at codels, for example, have more than doubled since last year.
When pressed on staffing levels and high rates of overtime, Sullivan explained that the 1250 uniformed officers in posts around the Capitol complex were 150 short of the number needed to staff every post without having to use overtime. Reliance on overtime plays a role in officer turnover as Sullivan said the department has to draft officers regularly into overtime roles involuntarily. He also noted that every time members request additional doors of congressional office buildings be opened, it costs the department about $650,000.
How many officers would Sullivan want to add to be fully staffed? Although the department has added about 360 officers since 2021, he thinks the department is still about 500 short “to complete the workload that is being asked of the Capitol Police.” A question for the record on how the 15,000 incoming threats the department has cataloged adds to that workload would be useful, as it sounds like physical security from uniformed officers is the greatest demand driver.
The physical and architectural composition of the Capitol complex should be recognized as part of the problem. The older office buildings have many, narrow entrances. Closing some invariably adds to the lines on the sidewalks. The road network creates a maze of vehicle checkpoints. Nobody wants a Congress that is less accessible to the public, but the current threat reduction posture might simply be untenable with the number of manned posts it requires.
Despite the sticker shock of the budget request, members generally accepted the USCP description of need and solution, declining to interrogate how the other half of the force not patrolling the campus or manning checkpoints is making use of its resources. When subcommittee Chair David Valadao asked how many of the 15,000 threats required a significant level of investigation by the department, Sullivan had no numbers at the ready. Other members did not follow up on the investigative burdens of the department, which Sullivan said were complicated because “direction of interest” cases rarely lead to prosecution, but are done anyway to contribute to larger cases of threats.
Members did not raise governance or oversight issues with Chief Sullivan, who was making his first appearance in front of the subcommittee. We are hopeful that additional questions for the record will elicit Sullivan’s views on the independence of the USCP Board and whether it has the resources to provide sufficient oversight of the department.
HOUSE LEGISLATIVE SUPPORT OFFICES
Witnesses and staff from four of the seven House offices crammed into a Capitol meeting room the afternoon after Sullivan’s testimony, including House Clerk Kevin McCumber, Sergeant at Arms William McFarland, Acting Chief Administrative Officer Anne Dressendorfer Binsted, and Legislative Counsel Warren Burke. Here’s what stood out from statements and discussion:
HOUSE CLERK
McCumber highlighted a number of modernization efforts and service improvements over the last fiscal year, including taking responsibility for the House digital calendar, closed captioning and Spanish language coverage of floor proceedings, and the completion of a report with the Office of Legislative Counsel on a legislative drafting portal.
After the Clerk and Government Publishing Office implemented a process allowing members to waive GPO proofreading services for introduced bill drafts in September, McCumber reported that members chose the option about 10% of the time.
Working with Senate partners, the Clerk launched the first deliverable for the lobbying disclosure system modernization project, a unified public search website (lda.gov).
SERGEANT AT ARMS
McFarland noted that during FY 2026, SSA had deployed a new mobile duress app members could use when in the District but away from the Capitol complex and a secure member portal for their offices to access resources. The duress app, McFarland said, provided an accurate location for users up to 50 yards.
This fall, SSA will deploy a common operating picture system that will be able to provide the location of members in the DC area and in their home districts at once.
SSA projects to install 150 security systems in members’ residences in calendar year 2026 and 200 installations for former members.
CHIEF ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICER
This was the first hearing for Acting CAO Binsted. She highlighted several high-priority projects in her written testimony:
House-wide multifactor authentication for mobile devices. Once deployed, it will allow multifactor authentication on House computers as well.
A secure testing environment within its cloud storage for the CAO to test custom AI tools with House data. Such a resource would allow CAO to experiment without exposing data outside of its own IT environment.
Modernization of House correspondence management systems by procuring a cloud-based bulk email system.
A centralized committee video repository to make archiving hearing video much easier after a change in majority.
OFFICE OF LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL
Legislative Counsel Burke noted that his office was still experiencing a training bottleneck as attorneys needed to train their new colleagues along with completing their existing heavy workload. The training process, as we discussed with Burke’s predecessor Wade Ballou, takes years.
AI, Burke noted, is likely to expand OLC’s workload. “Text produced by outside entities, whether a human or a computer, often takes significantly longer to review and revise as necessary to ensure the text accomplishes the sponsor’s intended policy goals,” Burke writes in his testimony.
GAO AND CBO
In her first hearing as Acting Comptroller General, Orice Williams Brown reasserted the value of GAO to the taxpayer, noting $62 billion in financial benefit last year through implemented recommendations. Staff reductions, however, will force the office into a reprioritization process, focusing on programs in national security and health care along with congressional mandates. These large and complex programs had the most potential for waste, fraud and abuse, she testified. Other audits will take longer to initiate.
Detecting misused funds, of course, is only one part of GAO’s responsibilities to Congress. Through her questioning, Rep. Maloy noted GAO plays a pivotal role in congressional oversight through program evaluation. It isn’t just that money allocated to programs may be wasted in execution: the programs themselves may be wasteful, ineffective, or redundant. But the growth of executive branch funding and personnel has put Congress in an arms race it is losing. “We need to question more often why we’re spending money on things and why we have the personnel in executive branch agencies that we have,” Maloy concluded. “We’re not just here to keep funding everything.” She stopped short, however, of reconsidering GAO’s request.
Rep. Steny Hoyer took the line up later, asking Brown directly if $910 million is enough to accomplish GAO’s mission and if she felt constrained to set a low budget request. After she navigated the questions carefully, Hoyer suggested greater reinvestment was needed. “My presumption is every increment that we cut, which is Miss Maloy’s contention, that as the executive department expands, our ability to oversee it diminishes very substantially,” he said.
CBO, too, was created to provide the legislative branch commensurate evaluative resources that previously only existed in the White House. Although Director Phillip Swagel spoke to revision and greater transparency of the agency’s predictive models, the hearing did not address whether CBO, too, was equipped to go toe-to-toe with executive branch capacity.
ARCHITECT OF THE CAPITOL
In the final hearing of the two-day blitz, Architect of the Capitol Thomas Austin laid out the consequences of deferred maintenance. Last year, the Rayburn Building experienced two electrical fires, 18 major leaks and dozens of elevator and escalator outages. Staff will have to relocate during phases of the renovations to “swing space” buildings. The project, he said, will require 15 to 20 years.
The Longworth Building, Austin noted, is not far behind Rayburn in terms of condition and also needs significant work. The AOC does not have the capacity to do both at the same time, however.
SENATE STIRRINGS
The Senate Appropriations Committee has issued its request guidance for program and language requests and Congressionally Directed Spending requests. The first deadline for programmatic requests is for the Legislative Branch subcommittee on April Fools Day. All deadlines except for Defense are in April.
Thanks for a comprehensive survey of the leg branch appropriations requests, except: no mention of The Office of Congressional Workplace Rights (OCWR)! What happened? In previous years (ok, 2022), the OCWR has been in the spotlight. This important Gingrich- created independent agency has faded into the background. Am I missing something here?