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 Maya 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, but it's still less than 10.

Ever 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 What Next? Stick around.

When I think about what diversity can look like in Congress,

I think about this photo I came across of Shirley Chisholm, the Congresswoman, back in 1970,

smiling, leaning over a desk, surrounded by seven congressional staffers. All of them are women, five black women, two white. When I mentioned this

photo to Maya King, she said, even though it's 50 years old, it reinforces this thing you notice on the hill.

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