Top aides of most senators are overwhelmingly white
WASHINGTON» As senators chart a response to a deadly pandemic and an economic crisis that have disproportionately hurt Black Americans and other people of color, the top aides leading their offices are overwhelmingly white — far more so than the country as a whole.
Just 11% of top staff members in senators’ Washington offices — the key aides who draft legislation, coordinate public communications and vet nominees for executive branch posts and lifetime judgeships — are people of color, according to a new study by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a nonpartisan think tank that pushes for greater racial diversity in government. By comparison, close to 40% of Americans are people of color, and 9% of senators.
Of the 100 members of the Senate, 72 — including Republicans and Democrats representing states with large minority populations, such as Texas, Maryland, Georgia, Florida and Arizona — did not employ a single person of color as one of their top personal aides when researchers made their initial tallies in January 2020. Only four, all Democrats, employed more than one such top aide, defined by the study as chiefs of staff, legislative directors and communications directors in senators’ personal offices in Washington.
“People of color are underrepresented in various occupations, but a lack of diversity among top Senate staff warrants special attention because Senate decisions affect everyone in the nation,” LaShonda Brenson, the lead researcher, wrote in an introduction to the coming study, which was shared with The New York Times in advance of its release.
“The lack of racial diversity among top staff is not a partisan issue but a challenge that the Senate — as an institution — must address,” she added.
The report showed that the chamber’s top aides have grown slightly more diverse since 2015, the last time the group conducted a similar study in the Senate and found that 7.1% of top staff members in personal offices were people of color. The percentage of top aides who are Black increased most rapidly, to 3.1% this year from less than 1% in 2015, although that figure is still far below the 13.4% of Americans who are Black.
Other groups saw more modest gains or even declines since 2015. Researchers found that 3.8% of top Senate staff members were Latino, compared with 18.5% of the total population and 2.4% in 2015; 2.7% were Asian-American or Pacific Islander, compared with 6.1% of the total population and 3.7% of top staff members in 2015. Smaller numbers were identified as biracial or Middle Eastern and North African.
As of January, researchers did not find a single American Indian who filled one of the top positions in any senator’s personal office.