Finding politicians's staffs.

March 21, 2005 2:59 PM

I am trying to find a list of staffers and the issues they focus on for specific U.S. Senators and Representatives.

Some of the info I am looking for includes Chiefs of Staff, State Directors, Issue Advisors, and Schedulers including phone, email, fax, and mailing addresses for their respective offices. I am trying to get on the radar in regards to specific issues and want to narrow my approach.

posted by ..ooOOoo....ooOOoo.. to law & government (5 comments total)

If you're in the US:

(1) Go to your nearest university library, armed with money for photocopying.
(2) Ask at the reference desk. They'll point you at a book, or database you can use at a university machine, that will have some of what you want. There are several sources around, all of them are expensive (few hundred to few thousand $). The Congressional Yellow Book is one. CQ puts out another directory. I don't know that either would have all the info you want.

If you don't mind it being a little bit out of date, you can get copies of the Yellow Book from 2003/04 (ie, the previous Congress) for cheap (<$25).
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 3:53 PM on March 21, 2005

Thanks ROU_Xenophobe, the Congressional Yellow Book is exactly what I was looking for. It looks like a library trip for me.
posted by ..ooOOoo....ooOOoo.. at 4:08 PM on March 21, 2005

I just googled the name of one of my friends who is a junior level staffer for a senator and her name came up on a CYB page as well as a search result from this site. The entire staff for the senator is listed, and her office title is correct (it changed 6 or 7 months ago, I think). Though there's no email addresses listed, they aren't difficult to guess since they follow a pretty standard convention.
posted by milkrate at 4:46 PM on March 21, 2005

I worked on the hill not long ago, and am on the cusp of going back to it, and I wanted to offer a word of warning: that is, unless you know them and have had prior dealings with them, you will get close to nowhere by emailing or phoning up the Legislative Assistants (which is what they call on the hill what you described as an "Issue Advisor") directly. You'll have even less luck by doing that to a Chief of Staff

You're better off calling the front desk and asking to speak to the person in question. You will more than likely be given their voicemail and if you leave a message and don't sound like a total psycho you'll probably get a call back eventually.

If you have any other specific questions on how a hill office operates, feel free to email me. It's rschulman at our friendly gmail.com
posted by Inkoate at 10:51 PM on March 21, 2005

You might already be familiar with it, but I find this site to be an excellent resource. It doesn't provide specific contact info for staff members, but it does provide a list of staff members' names and who is working on what issue.
posted by grubstake at 6:04 AM on March 22, 2005