Pay them well. Take the money out.

The whole programme runs about $1.0 billion a year, which is 0.0143% of federal spending. Against what Congress already costs, the increase comes to $2.61 per American per year.

A Member is paid $174,000 today, unchanged since January 2009. The bill indexes the salary to the median household income the Census Bureau publishes each September — $83,730 for 2024 — so it moves when American households move, and only then.

Run it against your own household income.

Title I — Indexed salary

Compensation is set at ten times median household income and moves with it. The pension formula goes down, not up: Members currently accrue at 1.7% a year against the 1.0% every other federal employee receives. This bill deletes that premium.

Sec. 201 — No outside money in office

No outside earned income, no honoraria or speaking fees, no book advances. No individual stocks for a Member, spouse, or dependent child — index funds and Treasuries only. No gifts and no privately financed travel, at any value.

Sec. 301 — Ten years paid, ten years closed

A former Member is paid the same salary for ten years after leaving, and for those ten years may accept no other income: no lobbying registered or otherwise, no strategic advising, no board seats, no media contracts. Existing cooling-off periods run one to two years. This is the provision that does the work, because the money that moves a vote is mostly paid after the vote.

Tying pay to the median is not a convenient way to pick a number. It is the only provision that makes a Member’s own income depend on how the country is actually doing, and it leaves them exactly one way to increase it.

There is one lever, and it is your income

A Member cannot vote themselves a raise, negotiate one, or wait for one. The only path to being paid more is legislation that raises what a typical American household earns. Their financial self-interest and their constituents’ material conditions stop being separate things.

The median cannot be gamed from the top

It is the median, not the average. Growth concentrated among the wealthiest households moves the average and leaves the median where it was. A policy that enriches the top and does nothing for the middle produces no raise at all — so the usual way of claiming an economy is working stops paying.

It cuts both ways

If households lose ground, so does Congress. Since 2009 the median fell in real terms in 8 separate years — most recently 2022. Under this bill each of those years would have cut congressional pay too.

Compare that to now. Congressional pay has been fixed at $174,000 since 2009. Over the same years the median household went from $49,780 to $83,730, which once inflation is accounted for is a real gain of 19.5%. Congressional pay did not move by a dollar, because nothing connects the two.

Had the bill been law then, a Member would have been paid $497,800 in 2009 and $837,300 today — and every dollar of that increase would have required American households to earn more first.

This is also what makes the ten-year post-service pay in Sec. 301 more than a severance. A former Member’s income keeps tracking the median for a decade after they leave, so the consequences of what they passed follow them out of office.

The obvious prediction is that Congress takes the money and the restrictions get struck down or quietly repealed. Section 603 forecloses it. Title I and Titles II and III are declared a single integrated exchange and are non-severable from one another: if the restrictions are held invalid in substantial part, the pay raise is of no force or effect and compensation reverts to the prior rate.

The Members voting on it are also not the Members paid by it. Sec. 601 defers the compensation provisions past two general elections, which the Twenty-Seventh Amendment requires and which removes the self-dealing objection at the same time.

A phone call to a district office is worth more than an email, and far more than a signature on a petition. The staff who answer log the subject and the position, and those tallies reach the Member.

Find your representative and what to say.

The Act is accompanied by a joint resolution proposing a constitutional amendment on recall of Members and on money in elections. Where the drafting is legally vulnerable, the questions page says so plainly rather than waiting for you to find it.