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"How many staffers are Senators allowed to hire? Recently Sen. Schumer allegedly increased his staff from 73 to 90. ... There was a list of his staff (25 of them) and it showed their salaries and recent increases some of them had received, 113%, 60%, 57%, etc, and the total for those mentioned was over $2 million." – Werner Keil, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
The House and the Senate both have rules regarding expenses and budgeting for members of Congress through which members are given allowances to use in paying staff.
All House members are given a Members' Representational Allowance (MRA) for use in paying employees, renting office space in their districts, and other expenses incurred each year.
The amount allocated varies slightly by member – from $1.3 million to $1.9 million for 2009 – and is calculated based on three components: personnel, official office expenses, and official mail.
The office expenses and mail allowance vary from Member to Member due to distances between the Member's district and D.C., the cost of office space in a district, and a few other variants.
Allowances are authorized from Jan. 3 of each year through Jan. 2 of the following year and regulated and adjusted by the House Administration Committee.
The personnel allowance component is the same for all Members. In 2009 this was $922,350 for each Representative and could be used to employ no more than 18 permanent full-time employees.
This total excludes employees drawing compensation from more than one employing authority of the House. No employee could be paid more than $168,411 annually.
Since 1964 Congress has been required to publish the Statement of Disbursements of the House, a quarterly public report of all receipts and expenditures for Members, Committees, Leadership, and other House offices. These reports have been available online since June 2009.
Senators have far more flexibility regarding the number of staff members they may employ, as long as they stay within their budgets (which are also significantly larger than House members' budgets).
Allowances are laid out in each year's legislative branch appropriations bill and made official in a budget issued by the Financial Clerk of the Senate after enactment of the bill.
Senators have three official allowances available to them for personnel and office expenses; an administrative and clerical assistance allowance, legislative assistance allowance, and official office expense allowance.
The administrative and clerical assistance and office expense allowances are determined by state population and distance from D.C. to home states, and thus vary among Senators.
Unlike House members, Senators may interchange the funds in the three allowances, whose totals ranged from approximately $3 million to $4.9 million a year for fiscal year 2010.
The Senators from New York, including Schumer, were allowed just over $4.3 million each for fiscal year 2010, the third highest appropriation after the amount allowed for the Senators from Texas and California.
This amount was up almost a half million dollars from the appropriation for fiscal year 2008, which was $3.9 million for each of the New York Senators.
All expenses reimbursed to or on behalf of a Senator are published in the semiannual Report of the Secretary of the Senate. Another useful source of information is Legistorm, a nonpartisan site with searchable databases of information about Congress.
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