On a Monday night in mid-September, a dozen chiefs of staff for members of the U.S. House of Representatives gather at a swanky hotel bar in Washington, D.C.’s Navy Yard neighborhood to catch up and unwind before Congress opens session in the morning. You might be conjuring a dark, stuffy room full of whiskey, cigars, and men in bad suits rubbing elbows, but these are not your parents’ chiefs of staff. Instead, a group of young, diverse, stylish women fills the room, ordering Chardonnay, martinis, and girl-dinner bites. One wears a denim set and faux-cowhide mules, her platinum blonde hair perfectly blown out. Another is in silver vegan leather capris, a black silk button-down, and oversize teardrop earrings. There is not one shift dress, pearl necklace, or even a hint of khaki in sight.
Congress is about halfway through its final session before the election, and the vibes are weird. With their futures unknown, a palpable sense of uncertainty hangs in the air. Will they all still have jobs after the votes have been tallied?
The chiefs seem happy to have the gang back together after summer break. Over the course of three hours, they vent about their nonexistent dating lives and about bosses who drone on for hours (one woman tells me she sometimes mutes herself, puts her boss on speakerphone, and continues to watch her TV show). But their days here in DC are numbered. Soon, most of them will take leaves from their Hill jobs and fan out across the country to volunteer on campaigns to help secure a victory for their representative, or if they are in a safe district, for vulnerable members elsewhere.
“Homegirl is tired,” says Hannah Spengler, 34, chief of staff to Rep. Don Davis (D-NC). “It’s nonstop, especially right now. It’s just the constant pressure of knowing that we have, if not the toughest race in the country, one of the very toughest.” Heavy is the head of a chief: “If we don’t win, all of my staff will lose their jobs. It adds a new layer of responsibility,” says Chloe Hunt, 31, chief of staff to Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL). “Of course, I want him to win because I think he has great policies and is the right person to represent our district, but I also have been managing all of these people who will physically be out of a job if we don’t do our part to make sure that he wins.”
The women were invited to drinks by a text sent to their Signal group, “Lady Dem Chiefs,” which started off as a small crew of just a handful of members in December 2021, but now includes more than 60 women. The growth of their group chat is emblematic of a bipartisan increase in women under 40 serving as chief of staff on Capitol Hill, a position that, until recently, tended to be held by men who had worked their way up for years to the pinnacle position, and stayed there. “There was sort of this idea that your chief is your person—you can tell anything to them, they’ll get it handled, sensitive issues, whatever,” says Marie Baldassarre, 29, chief of staff to Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA). “And I think there was a feeling that, because members of Congress tended to be male, maybe the people they’re comfortable with are male, too.”
For the past two decades, women have made up 50 percent of staffers in Congress, but when the Washington Post looked deeper into those numbers in 2017, they found just 33 percent of chiefs of staff were women. New America found that, in 2019, the percentage of women serving in senior levels had increased to 22 percent from 17 percent in 2017. There’s no hard data demonstrating that figure has increased further in the years since, but anecdotally, all 10 women chiefs I interviewed, from both sides of the aisle, said they had witnessed their ranks grow. “I remember being at this gathering for women chiefs, and we were all there because it was hosted by the leader,” Spengler says of an event hosted by Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, whose chief is a woman, earlier this year. “And I was looking around like, holy shit, because there are so many of us now.”
They started seeing it after the pink wave election of 2018, and again in 2020 and 2022. “It’s been a very rapid shift, and the Hill is starting to feel much different,” says Katherine Sears, 32, chief of staff to Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-VA). “The culture surrounding the chief role changed during the pandemic, because people could prove you didn’t need to be having drinks with everybody at 10 P.M., which obviously isn’t conducive if you are a mom. There was just kind of an awakening about how the role can be filled, which allowed more women to fill it.” Congress has also raised pay for staffers and now offers things like an on-site day care that permits early drop-offs and late pickups. “Things like that actually retain and keep folks here,” says Claudia Urrabazo-Beckelman, 37, a chief of staff who has worked on the Hill for 16 years and is the mother of a six-month-old with her husband, a fellow chief.
In the 118th Congress, there are 151 women, an all-time high; the 118th is also the most diverse in history, with 133 members, or a quarter of the body, identifying as a race other than white. The median age of House members has gone down, too. And as Congress itself has gotten younger, more diverse, and more female, so have its high-level staffers. “There’s been a new wave of energy,” says Haley Scott, 32, chief of staff to Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY). “It’s changed how people approach hiring and how people think about and see a chief—it doesn’t have to be an old white dude anymore.”
The morning after the happy hour, inside the Cannon House Office Building, Yardena Wolf, 30, chief of staff to Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), walks on her treadmill desk as she reviews the schedule for the day. “I just want fewer people to reach out to me,” she sighs as yet another email pings in her inbox.
Three years ago, when Wolf was named chief at age 27, she was the youngest woman to hold the position at the time. She had been inspired to pursue a career in politics by a high school government class and declared herself a political science major on day one of her studies at the University of Alabama. Upon graduating, she landed a job at a political consulting firm in New York City. A year in, Swalwell became a client of the firm and Wolf began serving as his primary fundraiser, traveling around the country to build his donor network outside of his district and Washington, D.C. Wolf says she and Swalwell “just clicked”; their work styles aligned well, and she enjoyed the results-based focus of the work. “You can watch campaign fundraising happen in real time,” she explains. “It’s not subjective. It is black and white. Win or lose.”
When Swalwell’s then chief of staff, who had held the position for a decade and who, yes, was male and 10 years older than Wolf, decided to take a job in the Speaker’s office in 2021, Swalwell called Wolf down to Washington and offered her the job. “I had never worked on the Hill before and it felt like he was taking a chance on me,” Wolf says. “I felt like I would be crazy to say no.”
Swalwell tells me he knew Wolf was up to the task in part because of an experience he had had with her back in 2018. They were out campaigning for Democrats to win the House, and Swalwell says he kept having conversations with donors who said if the party was successful, they did not want to see Nancy Pelosi as Speaker again. “I would let them say it and then I would move on to what my goal of the meeting was,” Swalwell says. “And after one meeting, Yardena said, ‘Why don’t you push back? It’s kind of bullshit that they’d say all of this stuff about someone who has been so effective.’ And she was right—I didn’t agree with the donors; I was certainly a Pelosi supporter; and I immediately started pushing back.” The experience left a lasting impression. “You can’t just say because someone is a certain age that they don’t have wisdom,” Swalwell says. “It takes a lot of confidence, at age 23, to tell your boss who is a three-term member of Congress that he needs to be more assertive. But she was right.”
The transition to Congress wasn’t easy. “I thought things like, If we’re introducing a bill this week, it will be passed next week,” Wolf says. “It’s laughable now, but I don’t know—on Schoolhouse Rock, it happened very quickly.” It was jarring for the staff she managed, many of whom were older than she was and had worked on the Hill for many years. She credits her adjustment to SSRIs, a career coach, and a lot of beverages. “Everybody knew each other and I didn’t, so I would do two coffees a day, and four different drink meetings per night, just to build relationships,” she explains. And in the three years she’s been in the role, Swalwell tells me the chatter around them has gone from “Why would you hire this person?” to “How do I hire this person?”
The first thing the chiefs want you to know about their job is that it’s not like what you’ve seen on TV. “My dad calls me a fixer. He’s like, ‘You’re Olivia Pope,’” says Nicole Varner, 38, chief of staff to Marc Veasey (D-TX). “And I say, ‘Sure Dad, if Olivia was broke and tired and had bags under her eyes.’” She has to remind friends that even accepting a cup of coffee from a lobbyist is prohibited. “People think we are out here spending all this money and getting all these gifts—that it’s all sinister,” Varner adds. “When actually, we are just regular people.”
Armita Pedramrazi, 32, chief to Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA) has heard that, too. “I think when the average person thinks of Congress, they imagine men in their seventies making decisions. Obviously we have that, but I think they’re missing the dynamism that we have on the Hill. It is really a place where young people come to serve their country. It is not this House of Cards-esque place with corruption, turmoil, and scandal.” She says it’s more like college, and, walking around the basement level of the House office buildings where there is a cafeteria, gym, Dunkin’ Donuts, barber, post office, dry cleaner, and more, it certainly feels like a campus. “I think often women might look at the Hill and think, ‘Oh, I could never do that,’ because we often discount ourselves,” Sears says. “I want to dispel the aura around the role. Yes, it’s hard work, it’s long hours, but you can do it. I had never been chief before and here I am almost a year later, still kicking. You don’t have to be afraid of the role.”
That’s not to say the Hill can’t be harder on young women, powerful or not. “People do not expect for your face to be the one that they see,” Pedramrazi says. “People often assume I’m the intern.” Scott says she has been confused for both Rep. Goldman’s wife and his scheduler. “I had an experience with a Republican member of Congress who came up to me and Dan at an event and said, ‘Dan, is this your wife?’ And Dan said ‘No, this is my chief.’ And the man turned to me and said, ‘Are you also his wife?’”
How the chiefs appear in the rooms they are in is often top of mind. “It’s genuinely hard to tell, Is it in my head or is it real?” Baldassarre says. “So I work extra hard to make sure I’m being taken seriously and presenting correctly, and that means making sure my outfit looks serious. I want to make sure I’m not doing anything that makes it easy for someone to disregard me.” Sears remembers how when she was starting out on the Hill, someone advised her to buy a pantsuit. “They told me, ‘If you’re a young pretty girl, you don’t want to ever be thinking, Why was I invited to this meeting?’” Sears says. “And I just remember calling my mom, like, I know my credit card is for emergencies, but this is an emergency—I need a pantsuit.”
Wolf has also used her fashion to gain equal footing. “I wear heels every day when we’re in session, because I’m five feet tall,” she says. “I like to be more at eye level with the people I’m talking to.” She perhaps thinks about her sartorial selections more than her peers do, following an experience she had in the summer of 2023. It was a typically hot, humid July day, when Wolf put on a pale purple pair of slacks with a matching tank top. She texted a photo of her outfit to the Lady Dem Chiefs for approval, because about an inch of her stomach was showing, before stepping outside with blazer in hand.
Toward the end of the workday, after many staffers had gone home, Wolf was sitting in her office, having removed her blazer, when she heard commotion at the front desk. She came out and found Chaya Raichik, who runs the far-right Libs of TikTok account, aggressively questioning her staff about Swalwell’s whereabouts. Wolf was eventually able to get Raichik and her crew to leave, but after they posted a video the encounter online, Raichik’s followers came for Wolf’s outfit, calling her the “crop top chief” and speculating about what else “she does with that outfit.” (Wolf posted cheeky retorts on her private IG, like, “Wears a cute outfit to Congress ONE time…”). “It was so dumb, you have to laugh,” Wolf says now. “But I do think about that now in the workplace. If somebody comes in and takes a video, am I going to be sexually harassed on the internet that day?” Still, she’s tried not to let it dim her personal style. “I like getting dressed in the morning. It’s an enjoyable, creative part of my day,” she says. “I’m not going to wear the same J.Crew Factory shift dress every day—shoot me.”
As one of around a dozen Black women chiefs, Varner has thought about the unintended ramifications of her bold style. “There are some rooms I’m in where I am the only Black person. So I’m always thinking, Don’t breathe too loud, don’t move too much. But also I’m a fashion girly,” she says. “It can be daunting to go into a room full of faces that don’t look like yours and still try to be yourself.”
These days, being one of few can also make chiefs of color think more about their personal safety. In the months following January 6, Varner says she saw many people of color on the Hill quit. “We lost a lot of talented staffers, especially staffers of color, because unfortunately the majority that participated were not friendly to people of color,” she says. “Nobody wants to go to a workplace and not know one day if this rabid mob of crazy people are going to come and attack you.” Pedramrazi, whose family emigrated to California from Iran when she was seven, remembers “distinctly looking at everyone’s email addresses to see if anyone had a Middle Eastern-sounding name, so I could make friends,” she says of arriving on the Hill. “The diversity of my background—a Latina Mexican American from the border—and my voice really drive me to stay here,” says Urrabazo-Beckelman, one of less than 10 Latina chiefs on the Hill. “It’s really important to me that we have Latinas as chiefs and in senior positions so that our communities are represented.”
Being a chief can be a lonely life. “The only one who understands the chief is the chief,” Spengler says. They manage up, they manage down, they oversee the district office, they liaise with the campaign (from outside their Hill offices, literally crossing the street to exit the congressional campus many times a day for campaign calls), and, of course, first and foremost, they are always there to serve the constituents. Chiefs are smack in the middle of all of it, and deeply isolated—the middle of the Venn diagram, the cheese standing alone. “It’s this dichotomy of working on very, very important things that could impact many people in this country, and then also you have moments where, like in every other office in America, you’re like, ‘I cannot get this printer to work. It has ruined my day and possibly my life,’” Pedramrazi says.
The round-the-clock schedule and constant travel make dating nearly impossible. “Dating almost happens on the campaign cycle,” says Scott, who adds that couples even wait to get married in an off year. “Maybe I’ll start dating again after the election, because there’s no point in dating now. It’s very hard to maintain momentum. You’ll go on a great first date, and they’re like, When can I see you again? And you’re like, Well, I’ll be back in DC in four weeks.” She said her friends offer conflicting advice: Some say absolutely don’t date someone in politics, while others say she must date someone in politics because no one else will understand the demands.
Working at all hours in such an insular world, if chiefs do date, they often end up dating fellow senior staffers. Over the course of my week in DC, I heard about chiefs who are married or engaged to other chiefs, both current and former, and many rumors of chiefs who had casual hookups with other chiefs. I even heard about a male chief who has dated at least six women chiefs, some at the same time. (I also saw one of the jilted female chiefs stop another woman in the halls to warn her about him after she heard they were talking—“He’s a fucking asshole and that’s on the record,” the jilted chief told me after.)
“The weirdest thing that I couldn’t quite get a handle on is that anybody gave a shit,” Wolf says. “People know who you’re dating; people care who you’re dating; people are telling your boss who you are out on a date with. It’s all commingled, the personal and the professional. And yes, I could be on Hinge meeting defense contractors from McLean, Virginia, but I didn’t do that, I was dating people in the same industry.” (After her last breakup, Swalwell told her she should “date outside of the cesspool”; she’s considering it.)
All the chiefs agreed that the long, chaotic days; the isolation; the breakups and drama wouldn’t be survivable without one another. “The women chiefs are really the only people I can call when I have a problem that I really can’t talk to anyone else about,” Scott says. “This is an intel business. If you are in the know, you have power. Most people hoard information, but the Lady Dem Chiefs are like, ‘I have news, I have information that you can plan around.’ We all just have each others’ backs.” She adds that when her scheduler can’t figure something out, he’ll ask, “Can you text the ladies?” In a single day, their chat spans everything from, “How are your bosses voting tonight?” to “Has anyone tried the Dyson Airwrap—is it worth the investment?” “It’s everything under the sun, and the group unequivocally delivers the fastest and most correct answers,” Wolf says. “Somebody will have an answer to you right away, and it’s going to be the most accurate out of any of the other group chats that I’m in.” And it’s vital to their continued success: “I don’t think I would have been here as long without such a good support system behind me,” Hunt says. “We talk every day, and having that has made me want to stay on the Hill longer and gets me through the tough times.”
On the GOP side, several years ago women in leadership put together an informal mentorship program with the goal of creating a network for, and increasing the number of, Republican women in senior positions. They meet once a month for lunch and often invite guest speakers. “I would not be in this position that I’m in right now if it wasn’t for other female chiefs,” says Chrissi Lee, chief of staff for Rep. Morgan Luttrell (R-TX). And she means that literally; when she was last out of a job on the Hill and planning to move to the private sector, other women chiefs passed her résumé around and connected her to people for interviews—“they would not let me leave,” Lee says. “This is a very competitive place, but I don’t feel like there’s a lot of competition among female chiefs. We’re trying to elevate each other.”
And that includes working across the aisle—another thing the chiefs say people incorrectly assume never happens on the Hill. “I would say 70 percent of what happens in Congress is not remarkable or controversial; it’s bipartisan,” Wolf says. So that means chiefs are constantly calling other chiefs across the aisle, asking them to cosponsor a piece of legislation commemorating this or that. Chiefs from opposing parties often get to know each other through congressional delegations to foreign countries. Sears remembers one trip to France where Republicans and Democrats alike sat in a room and thought, ‘Oh my god, the French are nuts.’ I walked out of there feeling like we had never been more united,” she says, laughing. Bipartisan relationships, Sears says, can be the lifeblood of the place. “It’s like, right, okay, your bosses went on TV and spewed their talking points and got to fight and make a point, but then afterward, the chiefs get together for a drink and say, How do we make this work? How do we get to yes?” She and Wolf became friends after meeting on a bipartisan trip: “I’d never met her before, and when I saw her I was like, ‘Hi, can we be friends?’ because her fashion sense was amazing. We just started chatting, and then I don’t think I even asked her who she worked for the first day or two because I was just enjoying getting to know her.”
When she looks around the halls of Congress now, Pedramrazi sees friendly faces, women she’s come up with through the ranks, the girls she once hopped from event to event with because they couldn’t afford dinner; now, they’re all bosses, too, and there’s an appreciation that comes with that: “We feel very lucky,” she says, “to be a part of this generation of women on the Hill.”
Lead photos courtesy of the chiefs; Raphael Liy; TLIC Media; House Creative Services.
