Capitol Architect Asked Who'd Serve In His Role If 'You No Longer Held This Position'

Gentlemen yields back. The chair now recognizes Mr. Kilmer for five minutes for the purposes of asking questions. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thanks for being with us.

Last Congress, the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress was able to look at a lot of the role of the architect of the Capitol, including looking at issues related to the Continued of Congress. If God forbid there's a crisis, some of the role that your office would play. By statute, the deputy architect of the Capitol serves as acting architect of the Capitol in the event that there's a vacancy. But that deputy position has been open since 2019. I know that was one of the things flagged in the IG report. I think this leaves some question as to who would serve as acting architect if you no longer held this position. So I guess a couple questions.

Why haven't you filled the deputy position? And if you can at least give us some sense of what efforts have been undertaking to hire a deputy architect. Well, thank you for that question. And I think it's a very insightful one. What I have, we have had late proposals since my first budget that I submitted that unlinks the deputy's salary to mine. I have no problem with the fact that my senior executives make more than me, and that's fine. I'm here to serve the country. I'm not here to get rich.

However, if you want to attract and retain top talent, there needs to be a commiserate pay scale. And the fact that the deputy, and the fact that I'm one of the lowest paid executives in AOC, and the deputy would be paid lower than me, I've been trying to decouple that for several positions, including the CEO of the visitor center from my salary, so we can actually get the top talent we need in the agency. And that's the reason why. It's hard to, at the salary that the deputy would get, it's hard to get somebody at that level that we need to want to be attracted to the job. Has there been any effort to hire a deputy? No, we've been, we're trying to get the ledge props through. We are hiring the chops, though. So who would serve as acting architect of the capital if there is a vacancy? Currently, it would be the chief of operations.

Chief of operations. Okay. I have a couple minutes left. I actually wanted to ask something not related to IG report. This black committee on the modernization of Congress actually made a number of recommendations that are kind of in the purview of the AOC. Primarily about space, how space is used within the institution. There are three open recommendations that sort of fall under your jurisdiction.

One of them is about actually creating some bipartisan members only space within the capital so that there can be some space for collaboration that's not necessarily, actually during the pandemic, there was opportunity off the House floor in the speakers lobby because it was close to the media that's no longer the case. So one of the recommendations was to actually provide some space for members to actually engage one another outside of the, outside of the C-SPAN cameras. There's a similar recommendation focused on providing space for staff, bipartisan staff collaboration. And then a third, trying to ensure that there's space within the capital for hearings that might use a different kind of format. The select committee looked at round table types of hearings. I'm just eager to hear about any progress that's been made on these recommendations and if there's, if the answer is too long, I'm happy to just follow up offline. Real quick answer and I appreciate everything that the modernization committee did and I support those recommendations.

In our 24 budget, we have money to study this. As you know very well, space is a combination of the House Office Building Commission, AOC and CAO. And so what we want to be able to do is produce good recommendations but the assignment of the space, as you know very well, is the House Office Building Commission. However, one of the things we're doing in our current space in the Ford Building is doing a demonstration of what the future office should look like or could look like. So people can come in and see, oh, I see this is wonderful. We would like this in this underutilized space. Gotcha.

Thank you, Chairman. I yield back.

Rep. Derek Kilmer, Brett Blanton, House