LegiStorm

Two years after the National Indian Health Board gave Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) its lifetime achievement award, the advocacy group has hired another of his staffers.

Joshua Jackson joined the advocacy group this month as congressional-relations manager. The NIHB has hired former Cole staffers in the past, including its former congressional-relations director Caitrin Shuy (now at Hobbs, Straus, Dean & Walker).

Jackson, a Cherokee Nation member, had been with Cole's office since 2016 and was most recently a legislative assistant. Cole, who is Chickasaw, received the NIHB's Jake Whitecrow Award in 2018.

Senate Budget Committee Republicans have rehired one of their old staffers, who most recently worked for the Trump Asministration's Department of Labor.

Becky Cole has rejoined the minority committee as budget policy director. She had spent the last couple of years as a DOL senior policy adviser.

Cole previously spent 13 years with congressional Republicans, including working as deputy staff director to the Senate Finance Committee and chief economist to the Senate Budget Committee.

Former Georgia legislator Matt Gurtler (R) may have lost his House bid, but he's running a congressional office anyway.

Gurtler is now chief of staff to Rep. Tom Massie (R-Ky.). Massie both endorsed and contributed to Gurtler's 2020 campaign for U.S. Congress, which ended in a loss to freshman Rep. Andrew Clyde (R).

Gurtler, who served in the Georgia House from 2017 until last month, made waves during his congressional run when a photo surfaced of him with Chester Doles, a klansman turned neo-Nazi National Alliance member. The photo reportedly shows Gurtler at a meeting of American Patriots USA, a conservative group that Doles founded. Gurtler has said he was invited by a voter and that the "context" of the photo "is straightforward."

Doles has also appeared in photos with other Georgia Republicans, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and ex-Sen. Kelly Loeffler. The latter has since claimed she had "no idea" who Doles was when the photo was taken.

A GOP Senate staffer has taken years of committee experience to a fintech advisory firm.

Maggie Moore is now at FS Vector, whose lobbying clients include Facebook and Fidelity. She's joined as an associate with the firm's public-policy and government-relations team.

Moore comes from the Senate Small Business Committee, where she was most recently a senior professional staff member under Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who chaired the committee last session. Moore has also worked for the House Small Business Committee and the House Administration Committee.

The freshman class has some of the worst-educated offices on the Hill, according to LegiStorm data.

Freshman Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Michelle Fischbach (R-Minn.) and Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.) each have one of the 10 least-educated staffs in Congress. 

Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), whose staff is heavy on master's degrees, is the only freshman to crack the top 10 and is second only to Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.). In the 116th Congress, half of the top 10 list belonged to the freshman class.

On average, Democratic lawmakers surround themselves with staff with more formal education, while Republicans tend to instead emphasize military service and other career experiences and training.

LegiStorm gives a score to each office based on educational level attained and quality of the school attended. For educational level, PhDs count more than master's degrees, which in turn count more than bachelor's degrees, for example. For school quality, LegiStorm used the U.S. News and World Report rankings, with various bonus points going to students who attended a top 100, top 50 or top 10 school.

LegiStorm's education-analysis tool compares only publicly available formal education records and may be skewed by a number of factors, including the proportion of entry-level versus senior-level staff, geographic distribution of high-ranked schools, and whether staffers choose to make their up-to-date education information publicly available.