When you land a job in most parts of the federal government or the private sector, you can expect a fairly standard step — a criminal background check. 

Want to work for your member of Congress? No background check necessary. Rep. Kat Cammack, R-Fla., hopes to change that. 

A resolution introduced by Cammack would amend House rules to force employees to undergo criminal background checks conducted by Capitol Police. It also would require them to disclose any payments they may have received from foreign governments in the three years leading up to their hiring. 

“This is the least the House should be doing,” Cammack said in an interview, describing it as a basic step to ensure public servants are “acting in the best interests of the taxpayers” who fund their paychecks. 

“People are absolutely gobsmacked when they find out that that is not a standard practice in the House,” she said. 

Right now, members of Congress can opt to run checks on the staff they hire in their offices, but it isn’t mandatory. Capitol Police declined to provide numbers on how many they conducted in 2025 across the legislative branch. 

“We’ve had members say that they have found things like domestic abuse, harassment, battery, things like that,” Cammack said. 

With more than 400 member offices spread across the House, the Capitol can sometimes feel like a collection of fiefdoms, each with its own hiring practices and internal norms. While the House already has a separate standardized process for issuing security clearances to staffers who handle secret information, it’s capped at two staffers per office.

Adding criminal background checks for everyone could help identify red flags, Cammack argues, especially at a time when Congress is grappling with how it handles sexual harassment and foreign influence.

“There are things in people’s records, in their backgrounds, that maybe would have indicated that this person has a problem or could potentially have a problem,” said Cammack, who once worked as a congressional staffer herself for former Rep. Ted Yoho, R-Fla.

Her resolution, which would need just a majority vote in the House for adoption because it applies only to that chamber, has seen no action since she introduced it last summer. But as she helps lead a different effort to overhaul sexual harassment rules and training on the Hill, she views the two topics as connected.

“It’s an interesting dynamic now as we are really seeing the sexual misconduct culture get a very bright light shone on it,” she said.

A clean slate?

Background checks are “desperately needed” for certain situations, particularly when it comes to jobs that handle sensitive information, agrees Reginald Darby, who works as federal legislative director at the Clean Slate Initiative. 

He’s not against Cammack’s proposal — but his group wants to see broader legislative action that could help some of the estimated 1 in 3 adults around the country who have an arrest or conviction record. Congress should pass a law that would automatically seal records for certain offenders who have finished their sentences, he said, pointing to a bipartisan “clean slate” bill led by Reps. Lucy McBath, D-Ga., and Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas.

“We do believe that there should be background checks,” Darby said. “We just want to make sure people are aware of the impact and the barriers that are in place for key populations who have remained crime-free.”

Darby has first-hand experience. He once worked on Capitol Hill, staffing various congressional Republicans, including Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla. Before that, what he describes as a teenage prank landed him before a judge. Without a second chance, he believes he wouldn’t have gotten into college, let alone a job on the Hill.

“I received a fine, I had to do community service, and I had to go through anger management classes. And then ultimately my record was expunged,” he said. 

Across the rest of the federal government, most jobs already require a background check, though the process has drawn scrutiny in recent years. In 2019, amid a larger nationwide push to “ban the box” on job applications, Congress passed a law barring federal agencies and contractors from asking about an applicant’s criminal history before issuing a conditional employment offer. The aim is to give candidates a “fair chance” to prove themselves instead of weeding them out early.

Cammack acknowledged that any new rule on the Hill would have to abide by that timeline, even if she’d like to see the checks earlier in the hiring process, given how time-intensive it can be “to onboard and go through the vetting process and interview” in the House, where staff turnover is a constant feature, driven in part by the churn of elections every other year.

“You’re getting into federal employment law at that point, and I think that’s an area that can get pretty dicey,” she said. 

‘Your responsibility’

Beyond background checks, Cammack also wants to see greater awareness of the risks staffers face in Washington, which she describes as rife with foreign influence and money.

“The majority of people on Capitol Hill aren’t thinking that they’re going to be engaged in some spying activity,” but they may be “unwittingly sharing information about what’s happening in their office with foreign governments,” she said.

She pointed to how a suspected Chinese spy targeted former Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., and reportedly helped place interns in his office. 

Her resolution would require staffers to file a report if they had entered into contracts with a foreign government over a three-year period before landing their House jobs, which would then be posted on a public website.

Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, director of advocacy at the Project on Government Oversight, said disclosure requirements in general can help boost government transparency. But staff aren’t the only ones who work on Capitol Hill.  

“A staffer is being hired into a workplace, whereas a member is being elected into a position of public trust,” Hedtler-Gaudette said. 

Constitutionally, there are minimum requirements for who can run for office — and a background check isn’t one of them. Neither is a security clearance.

Members across the political spectrum argue that Congress needs to do a better job handling classified information and setting expectations not just for staff, but for lawmakers themselves. 

“That was one of the first questions I asked … Where do I do my background check, when do I get the briefing?” said Rep. Jen Kiggans, R-Va., at a recent Rules Committee hearing as she called on the House to better train its members on how to deal with classified information. 

A Navy veteran, Kiggans said she was used to more rigorous standards in the military and was “shocked” to see how few were in place on the Hill.

For Cammack, she concedes her proposal wouldn’t fix everything and would pose logistical challenges, but she hopes it could start a conversation and hold members accountable for their hiring decisions.

“If you want to hire somebody who has grand theft and larceny charges in their background, that’s your responsibility as a member to say, ‘Yep, I hired that person, and here’s why,’” she said.