Office Dislocation
WASHINGTON – On a typical Tuesday morning, Reps. Christopher Shays (R-4th) and James Maloney (D-5th) would be fielding telephone calls in their offices, rushing to committee hearings and holding meetings with their staffs. But this Tuesday was anything but typical, as members of Congress remained dislocated from their offices for the sixth consecutive day after House and Senate office buildings were closed for an environment sweep for anthrax.
Every House member and three of their aides have been given office space in the General Accounting Office building, located about a mile away from the Capitol. The offices were equipped with temporary phone lines, computers and television sets, and shuttle transportation connected the GAO building with the Capitol. Senate leaders are being housed in the former central post office on Massachusetts Avenue.
Maloney and his staff decided to work out of their homes because they found utilities in the GAO offices to be insufficient to suit their needs. Maloney, in an interview, said he sent his legislative director, Tom Santos, to the GAO building, and Santos found that too many people were using each phone and each computer. So, Maloney said, he and his staff decided to work out of their homes. Moreover, according to Betsy Arnold, his press secretary, phone calls from their office in the Longworth House Office Building could not be forwarded to the new office.
“It’s been a substantial disruption for me,” Maloney said. “It’s impossible to work effectively without staff having access to computer databases and physical files they were working with before the buildings were closed.” For Congress as a whole, he added, “it’s a logistical nightmare to relocate thousands of people.”
Shays is also unhappy about the situation. “It stinks!” he said. “I don’t like this. I don’t like being sent out of my office. You take as much as you could, but how much can you really take? Some of the stuff in my office may be contaminated.”
He said he was also concerned that “we’re not getting any mail. Our mail is our life to our constituents. I haven’t got any mail in two weeks.
Three of his employees, he said, are in the district offices and shuttle back and forth between Bridgeport and Stamford. Others work from home.
Shays said he was on a CNN broadcast in the morning and then in a hearing from 10 A.M. to 3:30 P.M. After that, “I went home and I did something I haven’t done in three years: I took a nap from 3:30 p.m. to about 5:15 p.m.”, Shays said.
Maloney remained in his apartment 5-10 minutes from the Capitol for most of the day, Arnold said, but was ready to vote in the House on measures that came up for consideration. He was in close contact with his staff, she added, and was being updated by his legislative director and chief of staff through the day.
“However, we are ready to go back,” Arnold said. “We knew last week that this would be temporary and that we’d be out of our office for only a few days. The staff tried to take as much with them [as they could], but there’s always something that you forget.” Arnold said that nobody was allowed into the House office buildings, even to retrieve files or pick something up.
At the moment, Maloney said, the Capitol is the most secure building in Washington. “The chances of anything happening to the Capitol are remote,” he said. Nevertheless, Maloney said, the House Administration Committee was making contingency plans if the Capitol ever became inaccessible. On the other hand, he added, for the thousands of House employees who work in the House office buildings, “no contingency plan is in place to relocate [them] effectively on a temporary basis.”
Senators Joseph Lieberman and Christopher Dodd spent Tuesday with some of their aides in their so-called hideaway offices in the Capitol itself. Most of their staffs, according to Lieberman’s communications director, Dan Gerstein, and Dodd’s press secretary, Tom Leonard, worked from their homes.
Dodd’s legislative aides have been meeting, in one case at a coffee shop, to discuss legislative matters, including terrorism insurance, and to work on a hearing that Dodd will chair on bio-terrorism and children,” Gerstein said in an e-mail response to a reporter’s questions. “I also know our scheduler has been quite busy working from home. Obviously these are difficult times, but the senator is committed to ensuring that we can continue to work for the people of Connecticut.”
The hearing on bio-terrorism that Shays attended was conducted by the Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Veterans Affairs and International Relations in the Health and Human Services Office Building instead of the Rayburn House Office Building, where the committee usually holds its hearings.
Larry Holden, Shays’s chief of staff, and another aide set up a temporary office in the General Accounting Office building. Eight other members of Shays’s staff, according to Katie Levinson, his press secretary, worked out of the district office in Bridgeport and from their homes in the Washington area.
