We Need a Much Bigger House, but Not a Bigger Capitol Building.

A larger House of Representatives only requires a bigger IT solution!

As explained by Thirty-Thousand.org, substantially increasing the number of Representatives would produce numerous benefits for our republic, such as ensuring that each Representative serves a smaller, more manageable group of constituents, thereby making Congress far more representative of America’s growing population. But how would all those additional Representatives be accommodated? The House chamber, which was last remodeled in 1951 to accommodate 435 Representatives, is already cramped.  The conventional thinking is that the Capitol Building would have to be extensively modified by enlarging the House chamber to accommodate additional members, along with the construction of additional offices, parking, and support facilities.

As it turns out, careful consideration was recently given to how the Capitol Building could be renovated for this purpose. In order to envision how a relatively modest increase of 150 Representatives could be accommodated, the POPVOX Foundation gamely worked with a design firm to envision a larger Capitol Campus which would meet the logistical challenge of fitting all 585 Representatives into the Capitol Building. Their laudable effort includes many beautiful architectural renderings, earning it coverage in the Roll Call article “Bigger House? First of all, where would everyone sit?”.

Of course, such a renovation would be a complex undertaking that would take years to complete, cost taxpayers billions, and likely disrupt Congress’s work unless they could relocate to alternate facilities during the renovation. There is, however, a different way to approach this question if we consider Winston Churchill’s observation that “we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” To enable a far more representative House of Representatives, we should think outside of the box, or actually, outside of the chamber.

Architect a bigger IT solution, not a bigger Capitol Building

Thirty-Thousand.org has a different vision for how to accommodate a much larger House. How large? To bring the House into compliance with the Constitution’s one-person-one-vote equality requirement, we would need over 6,000 Representatives. Understandably, a common reaction to that proposal is to imagine that they would all have to assemble in a colossal chamber resembling the Galactic Republic Senate (from the Star Wars movies).

Fortunately, there is a far more sensible solution: Use modern technology to enable most of the Representatives to work and vote from their home districts, thereby saving money while keeping them closer to the people they serve. That arrangement is possible because a vast majority of the work of legislating is done in the House’s committee system, while the House itself exists largely to pass the legislation proposed out of its committees. We know that having Representatives work remotely is both feasible and constitutional: In 2020, during the COVID epidemic, the House of Representatives approved proxy voting for the duration of the public health emergency. (However, we recommend that remote virtual voting be used instead of proxies.)

Modern technology such as secure video conferencing, virtual collaboration tools, and encrypted voting systems can enable Representatives to work remotely from their home districts. Only a few hundred Representatives would need to be physically present in DC, on a rotating basis,¹To avoid creating a two-tier system, Congress should establish relatively short time limits with respect to how long any Representative can serve in DC, thereby forcing a rotation with Representatives who have been serving from their home districts. Analogous to term limits, this would avoid creating a powerful “inside” class of DC-based members versus a far less influential “outside” class of remote members. for committee meetings and key leadership duties. The DC based members could help facilitate the type of legislative activities that normally occur outside of the House’s committee system, where informal negotiations, relationship-building, and spontaneous coalitions are formed in the hallways and backrooms of the Capitol. In addition, in order to enable such engagement with the Representatives working remotely, the House would need to develop structured virtual forums such as virtual digital lobbies for caucus-building, or other technologies designed to replicate the creative and collaborative energy of working in the Capitol complex.

Other than enlarging Congress’s IT facility, this approach eliminates the need to modify the Capitol Building. In addition to preserving a magnificent historical structure and avoiding renovation costs, keeping Representatives in their home districts would save money in various ways. Lawmakers working locally could be paid based on regional cost-of-living standards, rather than a one-size-fits-all salary suited to Washington, DC’s high prices. For example, a Representative in rural Kansas or Mississippi, where living costs are lower, wouldn’t receive the same salary as one based in the expensive D.C. metro area. This tailored pay structure could significantly reduce the overall cost of congressional salaries.

Additionally, having a vast majority of the Representatives remain in their home districts would avoid a huge amount of travel and lodging expenses in DC. Currently, each Representative typically spends thousands of dollars annually on flights, hotels, and other travel costs to shuttle between their districts and DC.

Not only does having the Representatives working from their home districts save money, but it would also keep the Representatives grounded in their local communities, where they can better understand local needs and concerns. This local focus has another advantage: Accountability. Representatives working from their districts are more visible to their constituents who can attend town halls, visit local offices, or even run into their lawmaker at the grocery store. This proximity makes it easier for voters to monitor their Representative’s actions and hold them accountable. A distributed House could strengthen democracy by making lawmakers more responsive to the people they serve, rather than being cloistered in the distant DC bubble.

Of course, this tech-driven model requires a very robust IT infrastructure: Secure, reliable systems for voting, debating, and collaborating are essential. And state-of-the-art cybersecurity would be critical to protect against hacking or fraud. These challenges are manageable with current technology, when remote work technologies are already widespread, from corporate boardrooms to state legislatures. For additional information on how such a technology implementation could work, see the proposals drafted by Grok and Gemini Pro (advanced AI models). Grok estimates that the upfront cost of this implementation would be in the range of $150 to $250 million, plus an annual cost of $40 to $70 million. All that is substantially less than the several billion dollars it would cost to expand the facilities.  As a point of reference, consider that the recent renovation of the Cannon House Office Building, which is primarily used by the House of Representatives, cost $890 million and took over ten years to complete.

Conclusion

It is time to change the paradigm: Though our House was well configured for the Early Republic, it needs to be modernized for the Digital Age.

Expanding the House over a period of years should not mean expanding the Capitol, nor even increasing the budget in the long run. By leveraging technology to enable most of the Representatives to remain in their districts, Congress could save on salaries, travel, and infrastructure while fostering closer ties between lawmakers and their constituents. A bigger House would be a smarter, cheaper, and more democratic House—one that works for the people who are supposed to be represented in Congress. Moreover, while many assume that a substantially larger House would become too unwieldy, it would actually be less unwieldy than our current House of 435. And finally, the additional cost of a substantially larger House is expected to be more than offset by the resulting reduction in federal spending, and possibly by billions of dollars.

In order to facilitate its transition to remote working, Thirty-Thousand.org recommends that Congress establish a pilot program to enable at least fifty members to work from their home districts.  This would be especially beneficial for any members dealing with a pressing medical need (such as pregnancy) or are unable to travel due to some emergency.  This would enable Congress to test and refine this capability while gathering empirical data regarding its use.

For more information about how a substantial expansion of our representation could be implemented, read how a much larger House will operate more effectively.

© Thirty-Thousand.org [published 10/01/25]