House Administrator

The House of Representatives, home to more than 400 legislators and thousands of staff members, has a variety of support services and amenities available. In 1992 revelations in the news media about mismanagement and abuses of some of these amenities—notably the House bank and post office—prompted House leaders to create a new position: a professional administrator to manage their institution in an up-to-date, nonpartisan style. (See House Bank and Post Office Scandals.)

The new director of nonlegislative and financial services was given responsibility for member and staff payrolls, the computer system, internal mail, office furnishings and supplies, restaurants, telecommunications, barber and beauty shops, child-care center, photography office, tour guides, and nonlegislative functions of the House printing services, recording studio, and records office.

The position of House postmaster was abolished along with the scandal-plagued House post office. (The House bank had been closed earlier.) The responsibilities of the three other officers in charge of internal House business were greatly changed—the responsibilities of the clerk of the House and the sergeant-at-arms were scaled back, and the doorkeeper position was eliminated entirely. A new, bipartisan subcommittee of the House Administration Committee was set up to oversee the House administrator.

The first person selected to fill the new position was Leonard P. Wishart III, a retired army lieutenant general who had run two large Kansas military bases. It was hoped that Wishart's administrative experience, combined with his status as a nonpartisan outsider, would bring a new professionalism to the House's internal operations and help improve its tarnished image.

Traditionally, the party in control of the House has handed out most of the institution's internal jobs as rewards for political loyalty, a practice known as patronage. The House specified that its new administrator was to “hire and fire his or her staff on the basis of competency and qualifications, not patronage.” When Wishart assumed the position in the fall of 1992, however, less than half of the 600 or so patronage jobs in the House had been transferred to his control. The law that created the new position left it up to the House Administration Committee to decide if the new administrator should take on additional responsibilities—an expansion that would further reduce the number of patronage slots left in the House.

Wishart had several run-ins with House Administration Committee Chair Charlie Rose, a North Carolina Democrat. The legislation creating Wishart's job included a list of tasks that he was to be in charge of, but Rose said that the law gave his panel the power to change the list and was not binding on the current Congress. Wishart abruptly quit in 1994.

When Republicans gained control of the House in 1995, they eliminated the post of director and created a new office called chief administrative officer of the House, to be nominated by the Speaker and elected by the full House. The new position was placed directly under the Speaker, rather than the House Administration Committee. The responsibilities of the post were more or less the same as when the administrative position was first created in 1992. Each year since 1995 the House inspector general has hired an independent firm to audit the House's finances. Audits in 2001 and 2002 showed that the House's finances were sound.

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