Susan Ross, the chief clerk for the highly effective Home Appropriations Committee, can nonetheless recall her response when Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) set a objective of passing all 12 of the get together’s funding payments out of committee by August recess.
“I was like, that’s going to be really tight,” stated Ross, who grew to become employees director when Cole assumed the highest spot on the panel in April.
“To their credit, all 12 of our cardinals and all 12 of the clerks, who are the people that work for each of those cardinals, really did put in just the great amount of effort to get that done and to make that schedule happen.”
Ross described her place as akin to that of a chief of employees, however “in a committee position.”
Her day-to-day schedule entails managing the committee’s skilled employees, together with the clerks for 12 subcommittees that craft the annual funding payments and their employees, in addition to a entrance workplace crew and press crew.
“So, I basically manage those folks on a day-to-day basis, and, of course, work very closely with Chairman Cole and try to implement his vision for the committee and his vision for the legislative products that we’re putting forward.”
Whereas Ross has solely served in her present put up for a number of months, she is not any stranger to the appropriations world. She beforehand served beneath Cole when he was chair of the subcommittee that assembles annual laws funding the departments of Labor and Well being and Human Providers.
Ross stated she arrived in Washington by the use of the Presidential Administration Intern Program, later generally known as the Presidential Administration Fellows Program. That allowed Ross to work on the Schooling Division straight out of graduate college and achieve expertise engaged on Capitol Hill, the place she “just loved the energy.”
“I loved the idea that every day when you came to work, you never exactly knew what issues or events might be happening. I loved the fast pace of it,” Ross stated.
Ross stated she subsequent took a job with the Home Schooling and the Workforce Committee, grew to become a finances analyst and started interacting with the Appropriations Committee and the Home Funds Committee.
The most important lesson she discovered working in Congress? The folks’s work is “never done.”
