Who Does Casework for Congress? An Unscientific Survey
The most common category of questions asked in our Casework Navigator webinars are about numbers: How many cases do other offices have? How many cases per caseworker? What’s normal? The subtext is almost always “are we doing this right?”
Our team set out to answer these questions in a non-scientific, back-of-the-envelope way. (That is, except the question about whether casework teams are doing it right — we are firm in our belief that Congress and the American people are lucky to have the dedicated, professional, brilliant casework staff who operate below the radar on their behalf.) We hope this data gives some clarity to offices trying to level-set their casework operations, and provides a backdrop for larger conversations around bolstering one of Congress’ most critical functions.
What was our sample?
Starting in January 2024, our team pulled a contact list of Congressional staff and hand-sorted it for titles associated with constituent services. We want to be very clear up front that this is not a scientific survey. This was a hand count, and subject to our interpretation of what was probably a casework-related title (although we’ll note that we were fairly conservative in setting that bar, so we suspect that this is more likely an undercount than an overcount).
The project of building this list was also not as straightforward as it sounds, but in ways that are indicative of the current state of casework.
Congressional offices are, in general, shifting away from “caseworker” titles toward more modern or generic role descriptions like “constituent advocate” or “constituent liaison.” This is evident in the current distribution of Congressional staff salaries, in which “caseworker” positions are paid more highly, likely indicating a longer term of service.
As others have noted, a lack of clear staff career pathways has also contributed to some title inflation that we see in our list as well, with a broad range of titles ranging from “assistant” to “senior” casework titles, as well as named casework directors or managers.
Additionally, some offices have hired staff for specific casework specialties, and these are reflected in staff titles: for example, explicitly named veterans or immigration caseworkers, or geographic specialities (e.g., “Downstate Casework Manager”).
Finally, we also saw a lot of staff titles where “caseworker” or similar was clearly a part of their job responsibilities, but not the whole thing: for example, “caseworker and grants coordinator,” or “caseworker and district scheduler.”
What did we find?
One of our first questions was how many offices have named casework positions at all? This is important for a few reasons:
It helps us understand the overall proportion of casework staff to the Congressional workforce as a whole. From our snapshot, there were 9,788 personal office staff in total, and 1,459 identifiable casework staff — putting the percentage of Congressional staff with titular casework responsibilities at around 15%. As a proportion of Congressional workforce capacity, that’s pretty significant!
It starts to point to the frequency of different ways of organizing constituent service work. As we noted in our Casework Navigator manual chapter on structuring a casework operation, there are two big ways to divvy up casework: either hiring casework-specific staff, or hiring issue-specific generalists who handle some constituent service work in addition to other responsibilities (e.g., a Veterans Affairs Specialist who handles legislation, oversight, correspondence, and casework related to her issue area).
As the diversity of titles above makes clear, this is not a neat distinction: many offices have named caseworkers who also handle other responsibilities. However, it does point to the fact that in our snapshot of Congressional staff, 91% of Senate offices and 82.5% of House offices had at least one named casework position — meaning that 9% of Senate offices and 17.5% of House offices definitely split up casework responsibilities among other staff.
The sheer diversity of casework-related titles and the number of offices without titled caseworkers shows how difficult it is for even internal offices to build lists that can reliably reach all caseworkers. A quick filter for “caseworker” is likely to only capture a fraction of the full community of Congressional casework staff; staff without that clear distinction in their title will miss out on lists built by searching among general Congressional staff. This makes reaching caseworkers challenging for internal support offices like the Office of Employee Assistance Programs looking to flag resources for staff, but also agency liaisons that work with caseworkers looking to share relevant updates, and academic researchers looking to study casework.
Finally, the two last big questions we wanted to answer from this data were:
On average, for offices with named casework positions only, how many caseworkers did they employ?
For the House, three (to be more exact, 2.8).
And the Senate, five (5.1).
Of offices with named positions, how many had, in addition to caseworkers, a named specialist responsible for managing casework?
On the Senate side, 58.4%, and
on the House side, 48.3%.
This frankly doesn’t tell us much, but it does point in interesting directions: we can speculate that this means that House caseworkers are more likely to be generalists than Senate caseworkers, because with only three dedicated staff, caseworkers will definitely have multi-agency portfolios. But without more in-depth data on portfolio splits (there are definitely both expert generalists in the Senate and super-specialists in the House!), we can’t say for certain.
It also could point to the relatively greater professionalization of Senate casework staff: having a named casework manager may reflect the availability of a certain degree of on-team seniority and institutional knowledge — or just the slightly greater need for a dedicated management position for a larger team.
So there we have it: a back-of-the-envelope, unscientific set of data on who does casework for Congress.
What’s missing?
Like many researchers and champions for Congress, we have an ongoing wish list of data we wish we had on casework in Congress — and we know that caseworkers, institutional support offices, and researchers do as well.
Comments, questions about our work? Data points on your wishlist? Send them our way: casework@popvox.org.
Thanks to former POPVOX Foundation interns Maddie Pira and Logan Castellanos for their help with the research and analysis for this piece!
