As one lengthy renovation on the Capitol campus comes to an end, another one is about to begin — and lawmakers are hoping it won’t come with the same blown deadlines and cost overruns.

Members pressed Architect of the Capitol Thomas Austin on how to use lessons from the Cannon House Office Building renewal project to inform future renovations to the Rayburn Building at a House Administration Committee hearing Wednesday.

The hearing comes amid ongoing warnings from Austin about the aging infrastructure of the Capitol complex and the risk of “catastrophic system failure.” He stressed the need to act sooner rather than later to address Rayburn’s issues — warning that the costs will only pile up the longer they wait. 

Over the last 12 months alone, 16 major leaks affected six member suites, four committee office spaces, five member storage areas and two hallways, Austin said. These required “millions of dollars” of remediation and repairs. 

“As these facilities age and kind of reach this tipping point, we start having an increasing number of failures,” Austin said. 

Meanwhile, scaffolding from the exterior of the renovated Cannon Building has been removed and the long-awaited Cannon courtyard has opened up, marking the end of an era for many lawmakers and staff. Disruptions from the Cannon project have been a thorny subject on the campus for more than a decade. Originally estimated at $750 million in 2009, the project will come in at $971 million when completed, Austin said.  

House Administration Chair Bryan Steil, R-Wis., said the cost of Cannon will have some “tough lessons” that can be applied to Rayburn. 

“As Congress debates future large-scale projects like this, my primary goal is to ensure that we are good stewards of taxpayer resources,” he said. 

Austin said he anticipates renovations could begin on Rayburn in around eight years, with construction on swing space happening before then.  

Rayburn houses “nearly 200 member offices, committee hearing rooms, suites, SCIFs, three levels of parking and even a Capitol Police firing range,” according to Steil — the largest of the congressional office buildings. 

“It certainly will be the largest renovation program this agency has ever taken on,” Austin said. 

In Austin’s eyes, the three biggest lessons learned from Cannon are that doing renovations in small phases is “inefficient,” construction needs to be separated from congressional operations as much as possible and there should be a higher bar for changing plans along the way. 

House appropriators approved a draft fiscal 2027 Legislative Branch appropriations bill last month with $689 million for the Architect of the Capitol, not including funding for office buildings on the Senate side, coming in $720 million below Austin’s more than $1 billion request. 

Congress should fully invest in the Rayburn project and heed the pleas from Austin, who has held the job since 2024, said House Administration ranking member Joseph D. Morelle, D-N.Y.

“Allowing the buildings we work in to deteriorate around us is a fitting illustration of the broader failure to strengthen and sustain” Congress’ Article 1 powers under the Constitution, he said. “Even before the current architect’s appointment, the agency had been sounding the alarm.” 

Aside from Morelle, no Democrats were present at Wednesday’s hearing. While lawmakers at the hearing expressed support for the agency’s work, Senate appropriators last month criticized Austin, saying the agency needs to improve its outreach to lawmakers. 

Temporary office locations, referred to as “swing space,” have been a source of contention between the AOC and lawmakers. After a swing space study initiated in 2024, Austin said his top recommendation is to construct a new facility for it, which could then be used as Congress sees fit, including as swing space for a future renovation of the aging Longworth House Office Building.   

When Steil asked why the nearby Library of Congress’ Madison Building should not be used instead, Austin replied it “was never built for high occupancy office space” and would require extensive reconstruction to fit the needs of a congressional office building.

Austin has warned of the “catastrophic system failure” that could occur the longer Rayburn renovations are delayed, which he defined as any failure of one building system that causes part of all of the building to become unusable. He pointed to the failure of an air handling unit in October, which he said led to 22 House office suites to be without air conditioning. 

“Had that happened in June or July or say January, when conditions were extreme, those offices … would have been unusable for that period of time, and we would have either had to mitigate it with expensive temporary fixes or we’d have to relocate staff,” Austin said. 

Austin said Rayburn will have some different challenges than Cannon, including asbestos, lead and differences in how the buildings are used. Rayburn has more hearing rooms and specialized facilities, he said. 

Austin stressed that the longer Congress waits to take action, the worse the issues will get and the more expensive they will be to fix. 

“As these system failures start increasing frequency and severity, that’s going to start impacting members of Congress more and more,” he said.