The topic of this episode is, “What does a member of the House of Representatives do all day?”
It is not easy for the average voter to imagine how a member of Congress spends each day. We see images of them standing in the ornate chamber, talking with voters, and there’s no shortage of videos of them delivering speeches or denunciations of presidents or the other party. Some polling data indicates that many voters think legislators have cushy, part-time jobs and have legion staff doting upon them.
But is life in Congress really like that?
My guest is Derek Kilmer, who has written a chapter on this subject for Casey Burgat’s new edited volume, We Hold These “Truths”: How to Spot the Myths that are Holding America Back (Authors Equity, 2025).
And who better to talk about this topic than Derek Kilmer. He is a former member of Congress. He represented Washington state’s 6th district from 2013 to 2025. Mr. Kilmer served on the House of Representatives’ Appropriations Committee, which helps decide where federal spending goes. Listeners may also remember that Mr. Kilmer also co-led the House’s Modernization Committee, and he previously was on this podcast to explain the various things that were being done to make Congress work better.
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it. But Congress is essential to our republic. It is a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be.
Welcome to the program.
Derek Kilmer:
Great to be here, Kevin.
Kevin Kosar:
Voters often imagine that life in the House of Representatives is easy. It’s not ditch digging. You are your own boss. You hang out in the fancy Capitol, you have lots of staff who dote on you, and your job is casting votes and writing bills. Easy-peasy, right?
Derek Kilmer:
As a starting point, I’m always conscious to not complain about the stuff I signed up for. So given all of the challenges the American people face, the last thing they care to hear about is members of Congress bemoaning their workday. Nevertheless, it is more than voting on bills.
The day of a member of Congress is different 1) depending upon the member of Congress and 2) depending upon whether they’re in session in Washington DC or in the midst of a district work period. And I say district work period, which often gets described as recess and makes folks harken back to being in elementary school and recess was getting to play on the playground. The district work period generally involves getting up really early in the morning, going all over your congressional district, meeting with your constituents, doing all sorts of stuff, and usually events in the evening as well. So my experience was often averaging about a 16 hour workday when I was in DC and about a 16 hour workday when I was back home in the district as well.
Again, this is stuff I signed up for, and stuff I was entirely excited and willing to do. But maybe a little bit different than the general public views when they think about their member of Congress.
Kevin Kosar:
You spent time in the private sector working as a business consultant. Was being in Congress easier or harder than that?
Derek Kilmer:
There’s a few differences. When I worked in private industry, I had one boss. When I worked for the consulting firm, when I worked for a nonprofit focused on economic development, now I work in philanthropy for a foundation, and I had/have one boss.
When you are in Congress, you kind of have several hundred thousand bosses. Again, I don’t complain about that; I was happy to sign up for that. But it’s a unique work situation where you have to respond to the folks you work for. What does that look like?
For me there was a great breadth of perspectives from my constituents; you could go to one part of my district where people were super progressive and you could go to another part of my district where people were very, very conservative. And so the approach I took was, I just voted what I thought was right and did my best to be transparent about it.
But it shows a little bit the complexity of working for that many bosses on top of that. I looked at just one year of my office. In one year—in 2022 alone—we got 130,000 emails, calls, and letters from the people for whom I worked. I attended more than 800 meetings and local events. In one year, we had 1,800 different people reach out to my office with specific concerns about specific federal agencies or issues where they needed help: a veteran who needed help getting their veterans benefits, a senior who reached out because they didn’t get their social security payment, a local business that was grappling with the SBA or with the IRS, etc. That’s part of the job, too.
I share that mostly because that is perhaps the most profound difference for folks who serve in Congress, which is that you’ve got a lot of bosses with a lot of different needs. That’s not only a challenge of the job, but it’s a feature. It’s one of the cool things that you get to do in the role.
As a West Coast member, the other thing that was very different for me was just how much time I spent commuting. On a Monday, I would leave my house at 5:30 in the morning, go catch the Alaska Airlines flight at SeaTac Airport—which is a little more than an hour from my house—fly to Washington, DC that Monday, we would have votes beginning at 6:30 am on that Monday. I’d be in DC on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Votes are usually over by about noon on Thursday, but because I was a West Coast member, there weren’t any flights until 6:00 PM on Thursday, and so I’d roll back into my house at usually about, you know, 1:00 AM Eastern time on Thursday night. That was about 30 weeks out of the year.
So that’s a little different than a lot of jobs that I’ve had. Again, not something I complain about, and I find the fine folks of Alaska Airlines to be delightful. And oftentimes I’d have constituents come visit with me and they’d say, “Wow, that’s just a really long flight. How do you do that every week?” And I was like, yeah, you know, it’s just a really long flight and you get used to it and do the work.
Kevin Kosar:
In your chapter in Casey Burgat’s edited volume, We Hold These “Truths,” you focus on laying out for the reader what it’s really like to be a member of Congress. And I think one of the things that’s very helpful is that you lay out a schedule for what it’s like to be in session versus out of session.
So I cracked open the part of the book that has the beginning of an average day in Washington, DC, and it starts with 8:00 am, Walked to the Longworth House Office Building, and then a few pages later, the schedule concludes with 10:00 pm to midnight. According to my phone, I walked 22,323 steps briskly on this day.
You called your children back home, and then you get to bed and that this was in fact a pretty average day for you. Readers might hear that and think, 8:00 in the morning on the job, 10:00 pm, midnight, signing off. What kinds of things happen during that long stretch of time?
Derek Kilmer:
It is a combination of things. A lot of it is meeting with folks from your district who have come to our nation’s capital to engage their member of Congress. So on a given day, I would meet with—it could be a dozen or more groups of constituents in 15 to 30 minute meetings; sometimes as long as an hour if it was a speaking engagement. But it would be with the leaders of the local port or city council members from a community in my district. It could be a local employer who has an issue. It could be a nonprofit organization, it could be a school group, etc., so a lot of it would be constituent meetings.
The second category would be folks who are just working on stuff that you’re working on. So it could be meeting with colleagues, it could be meeting with a think tank, it could be meeting with a nonprofit that has an interest in something that you’ve been working on. And then on top of that, you throw in two things that are actually the like assigned parts of the job.
Meeting with the constituents isn’t assigned, and not everybody meets with as many constituents as I chose to. But I kind of had an ethic of, if you’re gonna fly 3,000 miles across the country to spend some time with your member of Congress in Washington, DC, I’m gonna make time for you—that’s how this is going to work.
One of the assigned things are committee. The average member of Congress—at least as of data from the Bipartisan Policy Center from a few years ago, I think sits on 5.3 committees and subcommittees. And all of those committees and subcommittees have meetings where you’ll have a witness come in and testify and you get to ask questions. That’s part of the job.
On top of that, there’s voting on the House floor, so you’ll have votes on a handful of bills each week, but there’s procedural votes and then there’s votes on the actual content of the bills. And all of that takes time too. One of the things that I think doesn’t get enough attention, and actually I think it’s one of the challenges in Congress right now is that members of Congress are there usually two full days a week and then two partial days per week. Most of the committee meetings happen on those full days, and if you serve on 5.4 committees and subcommittees, you’re expected to be in multiple places at the same time. So when you mentioned that I walked 22,000 steps briskly on a given day, it was usually because I was expected to be in the same place at the same time.
So I was hustling from one place to the other.
Kevin Kosar:
And I mentioned in my introduction of you that you chaired the House Committee on the Modernization of Congress. With that chairmanship position. Are there like additional managerial responsibilities that get piled on?
Derek Kilmer:
In a few different respects when you chair a committee, one, there’s just logistical stuff that you get to do: meeting with committee staff, planning your committee hearings, sometimes it’s actually member outreach and staff outreach, saying, “Hey, we’re gonna have this issue coming up. Want to get your perspectives on it.” That type of work.
And then when you’re in that position, you get a lot more outreach from folks who care about the stuff that your committee is doing—on the effort to reform Congress. Thankfully there was a really thoughtful—and you were among them—group of several dozen organizations that actually care about Congress. And they would reach out to me as the chair of the committee and say, “Hey, we hope you’re thinking about this,” or, “Hey, we’ve got some new research on this topic,” or, “We’ve got some perspectives about directions you could take things.” And so in a given week, I would often have a lot of time with what I lovingly refer to as the Congressional Reform Industrial Complex.
Kevin Kosar:
And how about appropriations? Is that a seasonal push of work or—because of a regular law making—is that just another thing that’s kind of on your schedule at almost all parts of the year?
Derek Kilmer:
A little bit of Column A and a little bit of Column B. It’s hard to describe how things generally work in Washington DC because the only thing that’s predictable in Congress is that it’s unpredictable.
That said, more often than not, the busy season in Congress is around appropriations—around the turn of the year and early in the spring. You have a lot of outreach from constituents, for example, the Head Start teachers will come to the office and say, “Here’s the federal spending that really affects us and the work we do and the kiddos that we teach.”
Or you’ll have local environmental groups come and meet with you and say, “Hey, here’s the stuff that the Environmental Protection Agency funds that that matters to our organization. So you’ll get a lot of that outreach. And then there is very much a season in which the subcommittees on appropriations are very busy, so you’ll have hearings on the president’s budget whenever that comes out.
In recent years, it’s mostly been kind of the early spring, and then you’ll have have subcommittee hearings on that budget on those budget proposals, you’ll hear from the various agency heads about how their agency is affected by the budget. And that’s a bit of an oversight opportunity for members to ask the given agency director, “You lead the Forest Service. What’s going on with this? What’s going on with that? If we provided more funding for this. Would it help you solve this other problem?” Those sorts of things. And then there’s markups, which is like when you actually vote on the bills. And that is usually maybe three weeks or so where it’s just a ton of time where it takes up your entire day, often long into the evening, and you’re voting on dozens of amendments and trying to pass the bills out of committee. So that’s what the appropriations committee looks like.
And then, by and large, once those bills are out of committee, the work of appropriation slows down, at least a bit.
Kevin Kosar:
When you’re in DC, is part of your day gobbled up by having to meet with your political party, having to raise money for reelection or are those really not—for you at least—a big time suck?
Derek Kilmer:
Yeah, so your party has meetings—the Democratic caucus will have a weekly meeting, the Democratic whip would have a weekly meeting and they were optional and there were weeks that I would go if the topic was something that I cared about. And there were some weeks where I was like, “You know what? I’ve got other stuff I’ve got do,” so those sort of party-oriented meetings are kind of the equivalent of the football huddle where your team goes into the huddle and they say here’s the play, or here’s the situation that we’re in and talks about a topic.
Fundraising really varies by the circumstances in which a member finds themselves. People who follow Congress closely know that fewer and fewer congressional districts are competitive and the consequence of that is that, you know, the, the burden of spending a bunch of time fundraising really falls mostly on the folks who are on the endangered species list whose districts are among the few that are super competitive. Members in safer districts do some fundraising, but it’s not the massive time suck that it is if you’re on the endangered species list.
There were days where I’d go to a lunch that was oriented toward raising money for my campaign. Sometimes I would have to do a little bit of making phone calls to invite people to that lunch, but if I aggregated that over the course of the week, it might be in a given week, two or three hours total. If you’re in a purple district or a marginal district from either side of the office of the aisle, it can be substantially more.
And not a lot of members of Congress say, “I came to Congress because I wanted to become a professional fundraiser,” or “I wanted to be a telemarketer.” Most members find that to be their least favorite part of the job.
Kevin Kosar:
What about campaigning? Is that something that takes up a significant portion of your time in DC or back in the district? And again, is that something where the workload is relatively stable and then you get close to primary season and it goes through the ceiling? How does it work?
Derek Kilmer:
I can only speak to my experience, and the reality for me was it didn’t look all that different. Maybe a little bit like right before an election, more time was spent with things that were kind of “traditional campaigning”—going out and knocking on doors, charging up volunteers, manning a phone bank, that type of thing. But what I found was, the best way to keep the job was just to do, do the job well. If you think about what is campaigning, it’s by and large being available, accessible, and accountable to your constituents, which I tried to do throughout my entire term, not just around campaign season.
So if you were to look at my calendar on a given day, right after the election and right after I got sworn in would not look profoundly different than my calendar a month before the primary or a month before the general election.
Kevin Kosar:
Let’s return to the district work period. Your day on average—according to the book—could start very early, 6:00 am, driving to Bainbridge Island for a gathering. And the day doesn’t conclude until around 10:00 pm, where you might start thinking about going to bed because you’re gonna be up early again.
What’s happening during all those hours? Is it just meeting with groups of people who’ve called upon you to meet with them. Is it running outreach through the district offices where you just hang out in the office and people show up? What does this look like, and why are you doing it?
Derek Kilmer:
Let me start with the “Why you’re doing it.” I was very conscious of the fact that the American people feel disconnected from their government. They see or hear about what’s happening in Washington, DC, and it just feels like something far away, not always particularly relevant to their lives.
So when I got elected, I made a conscious choice that we were going to organize our work during district work periods around being available, accessible, and accountable to the people I represent. And so if you were to look at the schedule, it was really in the service of that. In a given day, some of it would be either reactively or proactively meeting with people who invited us or where we invited ourselves to their gathering.
For example, I started my day with about an hour and a half drive away from my house at a breakfast meeting of something called the Bainbridge Island Oatmeal Club, which is a group of people on Bainbridge Island who meet every week and eat oatmeal, but they also usually have a guest speaker and they ask me to come and talk about what is going on in Congress. At lunchtime that day I spoke to a Chamber of Commerce. And then in the midst of the day I would meet with constituent groups, go visit the local food bank, be in my office and meet with a group of constituents, or go to the largest employer in my district—the Naval Shipyard—or visit one of the 12 federally recognized Native American tribes in the district for the purposes of solving a problem: have a meeting with a group that was grappling with a federal agency on one issue or another.
I represented more military veterans than almost anyone in Congress. We did a lot of events with our local veterans communities. We would do Vietnam veteran pinning ceremonies. We were active with the Veterans History Project. I would go meet with the veterans’ service organizations. Someone may say that this is a photo op, but what I tried to do was not make it a photo op. I tried to 1) make sure that everybody with whom we met knew how to use our office as a resource and 2) I used it as a way to lift up some of the cool things that were happening in our community—I mean, it’s truly one of the features of the job that you just get to see so much that you get to see like the amazing work that one of the tribes is doing to provide new educational opportunities to kiddos, to meet with a local employer who’s come up with like a stunning innovation, to celebrate a local teacher who’s doing something neat, etc. I could literally spend all day talking about amazing things I saw in my district.
And so some of it was to go visit with folks and say thank you for doing cool stuff in our community. Some of it was to be able to amplify that in my weekly newsletter or on social media to say, “You may not know this, but there’s some really amazing work that’s happening right here in your neighborhood.” Some of it was to identify problems, so that we could go to work solving them. I had an amazing team that was really great at solving problems, less great at solving problems we didn’t know about. So some of that outreach was trying to understand what was going on in the district and who might need a hand.
And some of that, again, was just to be available, accessible, and accountable so that people could say, “I know my congressional office and my member of Congress well enough so that if something comes up, I feel like I know them well enough that I can call.” That was really a priority for me.
Kevin Kosar:
That makes perfect sense. One of the things that shouldn’t surprise me but still continues to stun me is, I often ask people, when’s the last time you contacted your member of Congress? And even for people who were deeply involved in public affairs, frequently, they can’t name a time.
There’s this disconnection there, which is a whole other problem that we have to tackle, but not one we can dive deeply in today because alas, we are out of time. Again, Derek Kilmer is the author of a great book chapter on the busy life of a legislators that appears in the book, We Hold These “Truths”: How to Spot the Myths that are Holding America Back. Derek, thanks for coming on the program and for your fine service in Congress.
Derek Kilmer:
You bet. Thanks Kevin.
Kevin Kosar:
Thank you for listening to Understanding Congress, a podcast of the American Enterprise Institute. This program was produced by Jaehun Lee and hosted by Kevin Kosar. You can subscribe to Understanding Congress via Stitcher, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn. We hope you will share this podcast with others and tell us what you think about it by posting your thoughts and questions on Twitter and tagging at AEI. Once again, thank you for listening, and have a great day.
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