The GovNavigators Show

Inside the House Floor: Max Spitzer on Rules, Power, and Congressional Chaos

• Season 4 • Episode 152

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This week on the GovNavigators Show, Robert and Adam sit down with Max Spitzer, former Assistant Parliamentarian in the U.S. House of Representatives, for a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most misunderstood offices in Congress. Max explains how the House Parliamentarian keeps the chamber running day to day, from advising the presiding officer in real time to shaping precedent that governs how legislation moves. He shares stories from the House floor, including high-pressure moments during the 2008 financial crisis!

The conversation also dives into the mechanics of power in the House: how rules actually work, why the Rules Committee can override almost anything, and what would happen if control of the House flipped mid-Congress. Max also offers a candid take on congressional dysfunction, and why fixing the rules, not just the Speaker, may be the key to reform.

Show Notes:

What's on the GovNavigators' Horizon:

SPEAKER_00

Welcome everyone to the Gov Navigator Show, a government-focused program that won't make you seasick. We're the Gov Navigators. I'm Robert Chad. And I'm Adam Hughes. We hope to enlighten and enliven your week with news and insightful entertaining guests, all on the topic of government management.

SPEAKER_01

Enjoy today's episode of Gov Navigators, brought to you by the creative geniuses behind the award-winning podcast FedEx. Folks, I got some bad news for you. I'm doing this solo while Adam is lying and relaxing on the beach somewhere. So Adam, if you're listening, we hope you're having a great time. Actually, he's probably back by the time you're hearing this. And he missed a big week here in Washington, D.C. It was Bungie Week. The FY27 budget was finally finally released. Usually should come out the first Monday in February. But it's been pretty much late ever since the Obama administration. I just like to put that out there. Anyway, let's get to it. I'd like to say this was the full set of volumes traditionally accompanying the release of the president's budget, but it was not a skinny budget, but skinnier than usual. Really, like many things in this administration, it is paired back to its essence. That doesn't mean the numbers aren't big. Defense got$1.5 trillion requested, a 42% increase over FY26's roughly$1 trillion baseline. But there's a little gimmickry here.$1.1 trillion is base discretionary. So that needs to be enacted through the regular appropriations process.$350 billion is expected to be appropriated through reconciliation. And it looks about roughly the size of what you would have expected in a supplemental to pay for the war in Iran and other costs. Non-defense discretionary, not so lucky, cut by$73 billion, a 10% reduction. The budget attempts to eliminate USAID, no surprise, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Minority Business Development Agency, and the Economic Development Administration, among others. One interesting editorial note, the budgets of the past have often included a separate volume that enumerates cuts and terminations. So where the big cuts are in the budget. This budget embeds those in each of the chapters. So you don't have to look at another volume. Everything they propose to cut is right there in black and white. The Department of Education, for instance, is put on a formal path to elimination. Its programs are being transferred to labor, treasury, others. Veterans Affairs got$483 billion requested. Fraud makes an appearance in a number of places. Housing and urban development and justice each got$30 million. The Department of Justice will use that to create a national fraud division. I scoured the volumes for mention of management matters. Not as robust as in the past, unfortunately. And really what was there amounted to a victory lab, which if you think about it is pretty impressive for just one year in office. 1,200 redundant federal websites eliminated. 3,500 plus AI use cases now reported being implemented across the government. The FAR federal acquisition regulation is being overhauled. 2,700 directives have been eliminated, a 25% reduction in its regulatory text. OE calls it the most significant streamlining in 40 years. I particularly liked their mention of reduction in cost accounting requirements, which adds to the cost the government pays for contractors. The budget brags about major reduction in the number of employees in government. 300,000 federal employees exited government in 2025, the largest reduction, workforce reduction in American history. On civilian pay, there's a proposal of a 7% increase in military pay, but no mention of an increase in civilian pay. So Congress and the administration will have to work that out. My guess is what what gets done in calendar year 2026 for FY 2027 budget has to get done through reconciliation, and that the rest of this the rest of the budget will be uh picked up uh at least after the elections, probably well into uh 2027. So that's something to keep in mind. In other uh developments, GSA released this building utilization data. Notably, no federal agency hit its 60% occupancy benchmark. And you know, the budget mentions the major uh disposition of federal real estate. I think that's gonna continue given these numbers. A major DC federal building was sold, two large agency headquarters relocated, Forest Service announced it was going to Salt Lake City. The footprint of DC and the federal government overall is gonna change a lot. OMB was busier uh early in the week. Uh the director released a memo requiring CIOs to report monthly all approved IT contracts. For at least the next six months, that might be extended. Agencies have to uh require contractors to provide utilization and pricing data in machine readable formats, fake those disclosure requirements into future solicitations. I expect that data will be used to bring some focus on the disparate uh costs and and and purchases that are being made by agencies across the government. And GAO flag three emerging tech trends. Like we don't have enough to worry about. It's spending its time thinking about what we need to worry about in the future, brain implants, robots, and space debris. So luckily, Adam and I were able to tape an interesting conversation before he left. So let's move on to that.

SPEAKER_00

Robert, I'm you know I'm usually excited for the guests we get on the podcast, but I'm a little maybe too excited.

SPEAKER_01

That's not totally true. That's not totally true. Oh, wait, are you saying there's duds? Come on, there might have been might have been some that you weren't totally excited about. So this is this is exceptional.

SPEAKER_00

This is what we're supposed to talk about before we click record, not after. Okay, anyway, Max Spitzer is joining us today. Max recently left the House Parliamentarian's office, where he was an assistant parliamentarian and then the manager of their publication. Is that what you said, Max? That's right. Yeah. So I got to know Max a little bit by reading some of the things you've been writing since you left the parliamentarian about House rules and what it's like to work in the parliamentarian's office. So we're really excited to talk to you. Really excited to be here. Thanks for the opportunity. All right, let's start. Just tell us a little bit about yourself, your career, maybe how you ended up working in the House Parliamentarian's office. So even for our very wonky, nerdy audience, it's possible that they don't necessarily really know the role of that office. So talk about how you ended up there in your career a little bit to start. Sure. So I graduated from law school in 2006, and the parliamentarian's office was basically my first job out of law school. I interviewed initially with the House Legislative Council, which are the bill drafters. And some of the House parliamentarians were sitting in on those interviews because they had a position open. And after one of the interviews, they took me aside and said, you know, are you interested in the House parliamentarians, perhaps? And of course I said, you know, who the heck are the parliamentarians? So they took me over to the Capitol where the parliamentarians have a beautiful office just off of the House floor. And, you know, just walking to that office, I was sold. So I started as an assistant parliamentarian in our main office, which, you know, the primary goal of that office is to keep the house running on a day-to-day basis. If you ever watch C-SPAN, there's usually someone, you know, whispering into the presiding officer's ear, you know, the magic words to say, and those are the parliamentarians. And then the other part of the office is back in the office fielding the phone calls from members, from committees, anything to do with a house procedure on sort of any level. And then in the later part of my career, I moved over to our even tinier publications office where we put out various procedural guides for members and staff and collect up the parliamentary precedence of the House, the procedural rulings that the House presiding officers make over the course of their tenure. And so that's what I did up until I left last summer.

SPEAKER_01

It's wild to hear you tell that story because I remember in law school telling my professor that I wanted to learn legislative drafting. And he's sort of like, why the hell would you want to do that? Explaining to me that there are people, there's there are a small number of people that actually do the drafting. It's the the committee that tells them what to draft. Uh what's the difference between the different functions that support the house floor, including the fledge council?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so there are a number of basically nonpartisan offices, clerks of various kinds that sort of keep the house running. The parliamentarians are kind of in the center of that mix of people, sort of keeping track of the day-to-day requirements under the rules of what the house needs to do each day. But we are coordinating with many, many members of the clerk's office on that big rostrum that you see on C-SPAN. There are people running the voting machines, there are journal clerks, there are bill clerks, there are reading clerks, there are the stenographers that are taking everything down for the record. And so the parliamentarians are part of that mix, just sort of civil servants who assist Congress in the functioning, assist members fulfilling their duties. So tell us, tell us maybe your favorite story about your time working there. I think they're what a seat to have to the functionings of our democracy. And we'd love to just hear some remembrances from you or your favorite, the favorite time that you were called on to engage on something that was being debated in the House. Give us a little color about the job that you had. Sure. I can tell you one sort of it's more of an embarrassing story more than anything else. But I mean, as parliamentarians get trained up, we eventually get more responsibilities on the floor. And towards the end of my assistant parliamentarian career, I was slowly being brought up to that. And so I was assisting as first chair, as we say, like the primary parliamentarian, whispering those things into the presiding officer's ears. And I got a bit of procedure wrong. And one of the things that I needed to keep track of was who had the right to close debate on this particular amendment. And I mistook, I thought that it was the Republican member who had the right to close debate. And so I told the presiding officer, you know, this member has the right to close, and so he should be recognized next. Later, you know, staff comes up and says, you know, I think maybe our guy, the Democrat, should really have the right to close. And, you know, I, you know, confirmed that and was just like unbelievably uh embarrassed by that mistake. And it needed, you know, a unanimous consent request to kind of reallocate the time a little bit. I was really fortunate that it happened to be like two members who were on the committee together. They had a good rapport, and so they there was no particular, you know, political uh shenanigans that happened as a result of my mistake. But it's it sort of points to the kind of high pressure, high-stakes atmosphere that you find yourself in with the parliamentarians. So I was somewhat relieved that I got to move to the publications office where it was a lot quieter, and those the stakes are a lot lower.

SPEAKER_01

The I remember my boss on the government Senate Government Affairs Committee when I got a date wrong in the Senator statement, she's like, This is not like we let you resubmit for extra credit or anything. So that can't be your favorite moment, though it might have been a molding moment. You were there for some momentous developments, right? Yes. And give us an idea of what some of those most momentous moments are and what the environment is like, what the atmosphere is like on the house floor. Yeah. Because it's mostly pretty dull. It's mostly like 90%, very dull.

SPEAKER_00

90%. Well, um, I only worked in the Senate, so on the Senate side, I think that's 92%. It's 95. Yeah. Yes, the House floor can be a very sort of quiet place where it's, you know, the 10 members who are interested in this particular bill, but it's rarely kind of a full chamber. So some of my favorite moments was well, you know, being able to sneak into State of the Union addresses. You know, I think I got to see a President Obama's first State of the Union address, which is obviously a historical moment. Uh so uh being in the chamber at that moment was definitely uh kind of one of the highlights there. So hold on a second. How does that work? Do you I mean you're already badged to go on the floor essentially whenever you want, probably, right? In a parliamentarian's office. So you just kind of have to like open the door and like duck your head in. Like what do you have to put chloroform on one of your colleagues' like faces and put them out for a little while to get in?

SPEAKER_01

It's it was I know we're not I know we're not on video, but you do have kind of a waldo thing going on.

SPEAKER_00

So maybe you can just kind of disappear into the background, spot me in one of those photos. Yeah, it was very much like you can go out there at any time, but they do lock down the floor in some significant way. So I I remember being able to like sneak into one little corner and basically had to kind of stand there for the next two hours until everyone was ready and the speech actually took place. So that was a little bit uncomfortable, but it was obviously a moment that I wanted to be there for. Yeah, very cool. All right, sorry, I cut you off. You were gonna share, you were gonna share some other moments. Yeah. So so another I was gonna bring up the financial crisis of 2008. I think it was August or September when I don't know if it was Lehman Brothers or one of those other big firms went down and the and Congress needed to pass an emergency rescue bill. And there was some negotiation between the parties because I think some of the kind of more left-wing members in Pelosi's caucus didn't want to vote for it, and some of the right-wing members of Boehner's caucus didn't want to vote for it, but they had gotten together, the two of them, and said, okay, I think we have a majority based on what we can bring. And they ended up not having that majority. They, I think Boehner had undercounted or overcounted the people that he had. And so the bill went down and the markets start tanking. And I just remember that sort of crisis moment where, you know, you're in sort of like the thick of it in terms of the political decision makers at that moment, and their primary plan has gone down, and now they're scrambling for a backup plan. And so that was just, yeah, just one of those moments of being in the thick of it. They eventually did renegotiate something and brought it back to the floor a couple days later and passed it. But in that moment, you thought, you know, the sky is falling kind of thing. What are these people going to do? So I feel like you're reminding me too that I I there's a refrain that I often hear and have heard previously, but I think from a lot of people, mostly maybe when they're younger, you know, I what is it doesn't matter what Congress does, that doesn't impact my life, right? That's sort of you that's backed up by some of the data about voting and how old you are and how often how likely you are to vote. But I think moments like that really hammer home that like a large majority of this stuff is actually really important. Yes. And if to be there and like have things be ri happening real time based on the actions of what folks in the house are doing, that's kind of incredible. Yeah, absolutely. I think yeah, people should be kind of more aware of how how Congress impacts them and then they would, you know, pay more attention to the people that they elect and and the rules that that Congress follows. Okay. So I want to go to what the first time I was exposed to you and met you online on LinkedIn, I think you you posted this on Dan Shulman's Substack, but you wrote an article about what would happen in the House if vacancies led to the point where the major control of the house would switch from one party to another. And I thought of it literally today because I'm I was like looking at my New York Times alerts on my phone and it's like James Clyburn. And I was like, oh no, he didn't die, did he? No, he didn't. He's just decided to run for another term. But I was like, I thought of that, I was like, oh man. So to just give us a high level about what you wrote and those procedures that exist in the House about what would happen. And we're real close to this right now, but what would happen if enough Republican seats either were vacated through a death or a resignation or anything like that? What are the procedures and how do they work? Yeah, so the procedures would be very similar that you would see at the beginning of a Congress where they first convene, you know, every two years, it's an entirely new house, right? Theoretically, and it's a new Congress. All the members are elected to a new term. And so there are certain procedural steps that you do at the beginning of the Congress. You elect a speaker, you adopt rules, you fill out your committees. And so if the partisan alignments in the Congress shifted mid-Congress, where you had a new majority, you would basically see those same steps being taken again. The new majority would elect one of its one of its members as the new speaker. They would probably do some rearranging of the committees. The committees are already populated now, but they would probably adjust those committees, obviously, to give the new majority of the seats on each of the committees. They would elect new officers of the house. So like the clerk, the sergeant at arms, the CAO of the house are all affiliated with the majority party. So they may want to swap out some of those officers. Is that gonna be is that gonna be a situation where like they lose their job? Like, I'm just I I know how a little more about the Senate, not as much about the house, but like, and then what if it, what if you know the vacancy gets filled by a governor and then you gotta switch it back? Like, what a pain. Yeah, yeah. It yeah, theoretically they could lose their job. I find that these people usually like transition to another role in in what is now the minority party, you know. They um they would have some sort of position there that they could probably switch to. And then the last piece would be potentially adopting new rules or changes to rules. That's something that each new majority tends to do. They would take the rules of the previous Congress and make whatever tweaks they feel would benefit them in some significant way. So in the middle of a Congress, you already have rules adopted, whether that new majority would find it necessary to make any adjustments to those rules, I don't know, but that that would be a possibility. You talked about rules.

SPEAKER_01

Can you shed some light on the relationship between the parliamentarians and the rules committee? You I mean, there are rules set at the beginning of the Congress, but they write new rules every day.

SPEAKER_00

That's correct. That's absolutely correct. So unlike the Senate, where there's a lot of kind of certainty. Yeah, there's I was gonna say like sort of deference to the parliamentarian in terms of their rulings. When House leaders come to the parliamentarian's office and get our advice on what is or is not allowed under the rules, they always have the backup of going to the rules committee and getting waivers of those rules or some kind of suspension of those rules. So the House being this very majoritarian body where majority party leadership really has control over, you know, most of the procedural levers. If the parliamentarians were ever in a position of saying, you know, you can't do, you know, whatever policy you're trying to do, you can't do it because of rules, X, Y, and Z, they could always go to the rules committee and say, okay, X, Y, and Z are no longer applicable to this bill. So we can proceed with what we want to do. That must make you feel great when you're in the parliamentarian's office. The rules of the House are allow a lot of flexibility and we recognize that. And so it's really what the majority wants to do, and the majority party delegates a lot of that authority to their party leaders, the speaker in particular. All right. So this is maybe a less serious question, but I took the advanced legislative process CRS class when I was in when I was in the Senate. So it was like two or three days or whatever. Do you guys, are you the ones that tell them when they make mistakes in that class? Like who who keeps them honest about what's actually the way that it works? Yes, CRS and the parliamentarians have a good relationship. They have the time to kind of research things in depth, whereas the parliamentarians are, you know, very focused in the main office on the day-to-day kind of thing. And when I worked in our publications office, that was one of the benefits is that I had that kind of time to kind of look back at the procedures, what was done, analyze them more thoroughly. CRS can do that kind of every day. And so there are a lot of things that they come to us and just get clarification on. But for the most part, they're advising members independently of us. And from what I've seen, they basically get it right every time. So a lot of confidence in what CRS puts out. Is that office? We haven't really talked a lot about that. Are you like the marketing arm of the parliamentarians' office? Is that what it you write the and then it's distributed to all the members? Yeah. So we have certain statutory requirements to produce an annotated version of the rules every Congress. That's the House Rules Manual. Every three or four Congresses, we put together this book called House Practice, which is the kind of just basic. More user-friendly kind of guide to the house rules that's divided by topics. And then our long-term publication goals is to collect up these procedural rulings of the chair. So anytime that the chair, you know, says that this amendment is not germane to this bill, we write that up, we analyze it, we give all the reasons. And then the next time a similar amendment to a similar bill comes up, we can point to that thing in the book that we've published and say, okay, this is the reason why it's not germane. This is why the presiding officers should rule the way that they do. And so that's how we we sort of fortify our advice to the presiding officers. It's like Supreme Court precedent almost in a way. It's interesting.

SPEAKER_01

I think one of the most things I've watched on the House floor in the last couple of decades is Kevin McCarthy's dethroning. Well, the first of all, the process it took to get him elected. And then when he was removed, getting that spot filled. Do you have any observations on how that went down?

SPEAKER_00

Nothing specific because I wasn't in the main office for that, so I don't know all the details. I will say that it's somewhat symptomatic of House members thinking of the problem with the House being that we just have the wrong speaker rather than we have the wrong rules. I think members should really be focused not so much on what the speaker is able to do as a political leader, but how the institution should function on a day-to-day basis. And so I think what was really like a frustration with how the institution is operating got sort of shifted into I'm frustrated with how this particular person is running the house. And if I had to like convince members of anything, it would be, you know, don't focus your attention on who's running the house. Just make it so that there isn't one person, quote unquote, running the house. If it's an institution that runs along fixed and predictable rules. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. I love that. Okay, Max, we're about out of time. Although I have like literally like six more questions I want to ask you. But tell us a little bit. You've you've left. So and you've written, at least that I've read, two or three things that I think are incredibly interesting and insightful that you've been posting. Tell us about what you're doing now and maybe what your plans are now that you're now that you're out of the day-to-day grind of working in the House of Representatives. Yeah, so I am I'm now just an independent consultant. I'm I've I was always sort of in contact with this kind of reform space of different nonprofit groups and other people, you know, Brookings, AEI, places like that, do some interesting work on congressional reform in different ways. And that's one thing that I experienced as my time in the parliamentarian is just getting a better sense of what precisely is causing the dysfunctions in Congress. And so I wanted to take that to an audience where I would, you know, be free to kind of explain things based on my experience. And so right now I'm consulting for a group called Protect Democracy on different possibilities for rules reforms. And you know, I think a lot of different groups are coming around to the idea that these very tight margins in the House gives individual members a lot of leverage to you know change up how things are done. And so I think a lot of people are looking to the next Congress as a possible turning point where we might see some reforms to how the House operates that go beyond what little tweaks that people have been doing here and there. So yeah, looking forward to sort of continue those efforts and lend my expertise to to whoever out there who's who's doing that kind of work. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_01

Thanks for coming on and best of luck to you. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on. Hope you found that as fascinating as I did. What do we got this week? So April 7th, the Federal Cybersecurity Executive Summit is being hosted by GovExec Optive and ClearShark. But it's relatively quiet in town. And the week after, April 13th, 14th, AGA's DC chapter spring meeting. Looks like a pretty nice agenda. April 15th, not only tax day, but there's also an AI-powered government solutions event hosted by Kerasoft and a host of other organizations. It looks like it'll be a good insight into what tools are being offered across the landscape. Have a good week, everybody.

SPEAKER_00

Thanks for listening to another episode of the Gov Navigator Show, brought to you by GovNavigators. We sure hope you enjoyed it and learned something in the process and didn't get detected. Right, of course. If you want to know more about us and what we're up to, please follow us on social media or visit govnavigators.com. Ahoy!