The topic of this episode is, “What does the House Ways and Means Committee do? And how does it do it?”
The House Ways and Means Committee is the oldest committee of the United States Congress, first established in 1789 and became a standing committee in 1805. It has jurisdiction over raising revenue for the government to spend—taxes, tariffs, and the like. The term “Ways and Means” comes from English Parliamentary practice, wherein there was a committee with authority for finding the ways and means to pay for government actions and policies.
My guest is Tom Reed, a former member of the House of Representatives. He was in Congress from 2010 to 2022 and represented New York’s 29th and 23rd districts. Importantly for this podcast, Mr. Reed served on the House Ways and Means Committee and was deeply involved with its tax reform work.
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it. But Congress is essential to our republic. It is a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be.
And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I am your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington DC.
Welcome to the program.
Tom Reed:
Thank you, Kevin, for having me. It’s great to be here and look forward to our conversation about the institution. I love Congress and especially.
Kevin Kosar:
There are 435 members of the House and only 26 get to be on the Ways and Means Committee. How does someone get on Ways and Means?
Tom Reed:
What I found through my experience—this is inside DC and how the system works—is you have the structure where on the Republican side, we have the Steering Committee that is appointed by the Speaker. It is an internal group of members, and most of the time they represent different districts in areas of the country, and it changes each congressional session—there is a representative that represents each area of the country in the Republican Steering Committee.
The Steering Committee gets together and this leadership team has a heavy vote tally that they can bring. For example, when I went through, the Speaker had four votes, each of us as a representative member on the Steering Committee got one vote, and people like the Whip and others in leadership positions had two to three votes, depending on their title and position. And then there is a secret ballot that essentially gets weighed in by the Steering Committee, and if you pass the Steering Committee, you get appointed to a committee.
Now, there is a lot of internal politics and horse trading going on in the process. For example, to vote against what the Speaker recommends is something you have to be willing to do if you are that passionate about the issue. But you will not be on the Steering Committee that long because oftentimes that word gets out and because you did not follow the herd of the leadership office, there is a consequence to be paid.
Ultimately, it is all about demonstrating. I was blessed when I went through the process, we had [Former Speaker] John Boehner as Speaker. He was looking for leaders when it came to appointments to the Ways and Means Committee, because that committee has so much jurisdiction and power. What he was trying to cultivate was a group of members that showed leadership and showed they had the knowledge base, the willingness, and the honesty and integrity to carry the burden of that committee.
And the same thing with [Former Speaker] Paul [Ryan] when he was Speaker. He was more policy-focused—he was looking for the smartest and brightest people with initiative. You still had to play politics—he was not that naïve. And then you had other leaders of the steering committee for whom politics became the agenda.
Kevin Kosar:
That’s very important. Different speakers have different views on how the chamber should operate, and therefore different considerations for who to put on the coveted Ways and Means Committee. John Boehner is not Paul Ryan, Paul Ryan is not Nancy Pelosi, etc.
You had mentioned that the Ways and Means is a prestigious committee. It is an important committee. It is a powerful committee. What is its day-to-day work?
Tom Reed:
It is the only committee that I am aware of that is based in the Constitution. It has essentially been around from the founding of the institution, and it covers such a broad area of jurisdiction including tax, trade, healthcare, social security, etc. Because we touch so many different areas of policy, the day to day activity of Ways and Means is really meant to be not just tax, not just trade, but it is a little bit of everything.
Committee meetings are held in the alternative meeting site for Congress on January 6 because it can hold all the members—it is large enough for that. That room is meant to bring together those thought leaders and influencers—as well as the stakeholders that are impacted by this policy, both domestically and internationally—and be a forum where people know that this committee is going to have a great influence over a vast array of issues and policy.
So you are really trying to get input as to making the best informed decisions. Now, that is easier said than done, and it is a sacred responsibility in my humble opinion. Some people do not view it that way as much as others, so a they use it for whatever purposes they are choosing to do so. But it is a day to day conversation about high level issues and policy situations that touch every American’s lives. There is not an American life that the committee does not have the ability to change or impact.
Kevin Kosar:
It looks like Ways and Means has held hearings this year on trade and even antisemitism on U.S. college campuses. I take it the committee has a broad jurisdiction?
And when you report legislation, how does the division of labor work?
Tom Reed:
That’s the politics, right? I have seen committee chairs that try to jam down policy. I have seen speakers exert their authority because obviously the speakers control the rules committee. That is the process of how bills get to the floor.
So you have to have this delicate balance. You need a respected partner that recognizes that you are working together. You need to realize that you are not going to be able to get everything you want on the committee. But because you have such a big stick in the arsenal as the committee and the jurisdiction, any of the other committees that wants to report a bill that involves the tax power must go through our committee. That is something that only the Ways and Means Committee has jurisdiction and power over and that the Speaker’s Office technically cannot bypass. That being said, you need to respect the other committees of jurisdiction and their territory, because you may need them on that deal or in a future deal. The wises and smartest committee chairmen of Ways and Means respected that.
Kevin Kosar:
The House’s Budget Committee prepares the annual budget resolution. The Appropriations Committee prepares the spending bills. Where does Ways and Means fit into the congressional budget process?
Tom Reed:
I don’t mean to offend, but for all intents and purposes—to be perfectly honest with you—the Budget Committee is irrelevant. The Budget Committee sets the policy discussion points. Depending on who is the chair of the Budget Committee, it can be powerful in a sense. For example, as chair of the Budget Committee, Paul Ryan used the committee to advance policy initiatives that were then normalized throughout the entire institution. So the Budget Committee was powerful because it would put out ideas that would be adopted by the institution.
From a function perspective, the Budget Committee itself does not do much. That is unless you are dealing with reconciliation, because with the Budget Control Act of 1974, you can get some things done at the 51 vote threshold in the Senate. It is a very rare situation. I do not like that. I fought against it significantly in 2017 with tax reform when we passed these policy positions on a temporary basis in a partisan way because now you see the fight that coming to a head in 2025.
Kevin Kosar:
When Ways and Means is doing its different buckets of work, does it coordinate with the Senate to try to get on the same page?
Tom Reed:
Very limited coordination, unless you are willing to like what we did in the Problem Solvers Caucus.
When I burned my boats and started that bipartisan caucus, we started relationships with members of the Senate who were willing to have that conversation with us. That was why we were brought into the policy conversation under the Trump administration and the Biden administration; we were becoming a very powerful coalition with both Senators and House members because you had to get to 60 in the Senate and 218 in the House, and so you had to find partners in the Senate that were willing to do that.
Now, the Senate is a whole different beast, and so finding a willing partner in the Senate—especially at the staff level—is very difficult. Each Senator has tremendous authority and can do things that we cannot do in the House. Part of this comes from the design of the founders—the House is where things get heated up and the job of the Senate is to cool it down because it is presented to be signed into law.
But you would think there is more coordination between the House and Senate, but there is not because the nature of the institutions are so different, both in how they operate and their purpose.
Kevin Kosar:
I have time for two more questions. First, what was it like being on Ways and Means? Was it an intensely partisan environment, or was an environment where you interacted with each other over issues that are more distributional.
Tom Reed:
That is a great question, Kevin. I would answer with yes and yes—if that makes any sense—because of who you are impacting and the magnitude of the pulpit that they carry, both sides recognized that they needed to work together to be effective.
In my experience—I spent two years on Judiciary and Transportation before I spent 10 of my 12 years in Congress on the Ways and Means Committee. Operationally, Ways and Means is the only committee room that I am aware of where the cloakroom—where we have coffee and go off-camera—is the only one that has a single cloakroom where Democrats and Republicans sit together. On the Transportation and Judiciary Committees, Democrats and Republicans had separate cloakrooms, so you did not interact with members of the other party.
Because there was one cloakroom in Ways and Means, you are back there having coffee together and eating together. And there is something to be said about that because then you get to know these people. One guy I loved as a human being was Billy Pascrell, who recently passed on us. He was a partisan Democrat through and through, but his life story was so amazing. And he looked at me and he was like, “I trust you,” because I got to know him as a human being and he knew my story. Another is John Larson, who I worked with on Social Security.
But we spent time in that room in the beginning to actually get to know these people, and so if you are willing to do that, the committee room itself can create these bonds of friendship where you could actually get to know people on the other side. That is what you needed in order to deal with these issues.
Now, over time, sometimes the committee will become more political. And the institution itself today is dangerously going down that path. You can play partisan politics, but when you bring that into the Ways and Means Committee room, it gets bad and members are less likely to spend that time getting to know each other. The ones that do, I think, have a better career and have a better enjoyment of career, because when you are just chasing political donations and political talking points as you deal with it day to day, it’s not a way to live. It becomes very unfulfilling, at least to this former member.
Kevin Kosar:
One last question: a lot of my listeners are congressional staffers and college students who aspire to a position on the Hill. Would you advise them to consider trying to work for the Ways and Means Committee?
Tom Reed:
It depends on what you want to do as a staffer. If you want to go to DC and actually be involved in how the sausage is made, how you can impact lives on a day to day basis, the Ways and Means Committee allows you to do that if that is what drives you.
If you want to go to DC and be a political rock star and you want to potentially get a career on cable TV as a talking point or get paid to be a media advisor, Ways and Means may open the door for you, but you may want to spend your time on other committees that are more political circus and show so that you hone your skills there. I don’t think that’s a way to live a life, but that is for each individual to decide.
If you want to just punch a clock and put something on your resume, I would encourage you not to go to Ways and Means because you could do some really bad things in that room if that is what you aspire. I always warn committee members and staff to be careful of who let in the room on your staff, and make sure you understand what their agenda is because you are giving them something that they could use for good and evil.
If you are a staffer out there listening to this and are eager and doing this because you love our country, I can’t think of a better committee to be on and learn from and be around people who are institutions in and of themselves. You will learn so much, if you are willing to listen.
Kevin Kosar:
The honorable Tom Reed, thank you very much for telling us about the house ways and means committee, what it does, and how it does it.
Tom Reed:
I’m so grateful to be with you.
Kevin Kosar:
Thank you for listening to Understanding Congress, a podcast of the American Enterprise Institute. This program was produced by Jaehun Lee and hosted by Kevin Kosar. You can subscribe to Understanding Congress via Stitcher, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn. We hope you will share this podcast with others and tell us what you think about it by posting your thoughts and questions on Twitter and tagging at AEI. Once again, thank you for listening, and have a great day.
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