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Slack.com slash DHQ. When you think about who runs Washington, maybe you think about

the president and the vice president, maybe you think about Congress and the Senate. But

my king over at Politico, she wants you to think about all the people behind those people,

the press secretaries and legislative directors, the chiefs of staff, people who, much of

the time, are invisible. But their fingerprints are all over every U.S. law that passes.

And now that you're thinking about these people, what do you think they look like? If I asked

you to tally up how many chiefs of staff on Capitol Hill are people of color, like,

could you do it? Could you count them up? Yes, I could because it would take just two

hands. It would actually take just one hand. So it's under five. Well, staffing is still

occurring, and I'll say this, before November, it was definitely one hand. Now it might be

like one and a half. It might be like, it's, but it's still less than ten.

Here since Maya started paying more attention to who was pulling the levers behind the scenes,

she started wondering if the people staffing a legislator's office aren't representative,

how representative can their policies be? We're moving up, but there's still a small

handful of us in these very predominantly white spaces. Today on the show, what happens

when your office politics are actually national politics? Maya makes the case that when Congress

has a diversity problem, so do the rest of us. I'm Mary Harris. You're listening to

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