Where Does Your Representative's Budget Go?

Investment in direct constituent care

There's no single “cares more / cares less” metric — the offices lead on different dimensions. Together these numbers add up to a portrait of how each office invests in serving its constituents.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez directs the largest share of her personnel budget to constituent services (29%). Ayanna Pressley has the largest CS team overall (13 staff including paid interns). Ayanna Pressley pays career CS staff the most (median $98K). Ilhan Omar directs the smallest share (21%).

The decade these numbers cover

This dataset spans 2016–2025 — essentially the entire Trump era. It's the same decade in which House Democrats made defending immigrant communities, protecting working families, and making government accessible to constituents central to their political identity.

Casework is where that identity meets reality. The caseworker who answers the phone when an ICE officer detains a constituent's spouse, when a Medicare claim gets denied, when a veteran can't reach their benefits — that is the operational test of the values rhetoric. The numbers above are how those values showed up in actual office spending across this decade.

Across 758 House offices observed in this window, Brad Sherman ranks at the 8th percentile for what he pays his career constituent-services staff — bottom decile, during the decade his party most loudly defended the populations those caseworkers serve.

What the staffing looks like in each office

Functional categories are inferred from job titles in the SOD (e.g., “District Director” → constituent services; “Legislative Assistant” → legislative). Some titles will be miscategorized; the data is what the offices file.

What the data alone doesn't show

• Sherman: Casework forms and ICE privacy-release forms have not yet been made available in Spanish in a district that is roughly 1/4 Hispanic and 1/3 foreign-born.
• Ocasio-Cortez: $52,500 salary floor across all full-time staff, with the office explicitly recruiting to reflect the district's demographics.
• Omar: High casework volume with multilingual constituent-services support reflecting the district's East-African and Hmong communities.
• Pressley: The largest constituent-services team in this comparison (13 staff in 2025, including paid district-office interns), with deep casework focus on housing, immigration, and federal benefits.

Constituent service and labor rights are the same question

The people you call when your Medicare claim gets denied or a family member is in ICE custody are the office's caseworkers. Their pay and turnover directly shape how much expertise an office retains — and therefore how good your outcome is.

Across these four offices, there's a consistent pattern: members who publicly advocate for higher minimum wages, paid family leave, and stronger labor protections tend to enforce those same standards inside their own offices. That investment pays dividends to the constituents on the other end of the phone. See the salary floor comparison on the Staff & Salaries page for the per-office numbers.