Two recent lawmaker resignations over sexual misconduct allegations have Congress wrestling with a familiar challenge: How can it encourage survivors of abuse to come forward in one of America’s most sensitive workplaces?

Former Reps. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) were both accused of sexual misconduct with staff, putting a fresh spotlight on Capitol Hill’s apparent culture of exploitation — nearly a decade after the #MeToo movement sparked a bipartisan push to improve the reporting process.

Now current and former members are reckoning with the shortcomings of those efforts.

“What we know is that the process is not working, because women staffers are not coming forward with the allegations, the accusations,” Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.) said in an interview. “They’re not telling us what happened to them.”

In Swalwell’s case, four women did come forward — to the media. They spoke to the San Francisco Chronicle and BLN to accuse the then-congressman and California gubernatorial candidate of misconduct ranging from sending unsolicited explicit photos to rape.

Within days of the reports publishing, Swalwell withdrew his campaign for governor and resigned from the House. He has denied any wrongdoing, saying he stepped away from public life to fight the allegations, which have sparked a criminal investigation in New York.

The swift results Swalwell’s accusers saw from the court of public opinion stand in stark contrast to what Capitol Hill denizens have come to expect from the congressional ethics process.

There is no traditional human resources department on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers run their offices as fiefdoms with total control. And employees of the legislative branch are not covered by federal whistleblower protection laws like federal workers in the executive branch.

The House Ethics Committee can take months to issue any formal decisions or disciplinary recommendations, sowing doubt among lawmakers that it is the best means for survivors of misconduct to seek justice.

The Gonzales case helped fuel that skepticism. A wave of media reports alleged misconduct with a female staffer who later committed suicide. Facing rising social media pressure and flagging polling numbers, Gonzales publicly confessed in March to a sexual relationship with the woman and withdrew his reelection bid. He resigned in April.

Before he left, the independent Office of Congressional Conduct concluded in a confidential report there was “substantial reason to believe” Gonzales violated House rules, and the Ethics Committee opened an investigation. That probe was closed with Gonzales’ resignation and did not result in punishment.

Some lawmakers want to offer survivors a similar path to shaming their alleged abusers out of office.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), for instance, has asked any congressional staffers experiencing mistreatment or misconduct to bring their allegations directly to her office. Boebert has pledged to keep accusers anonymous as she uses her media platforms to publicize any credible allegations.

While Boebert said in an interview that she hasn’t written off the official channels completely, other options have to be open.

“Whatever actually holds people accountable,” she said. “I mean, that’s what it’s all about — holding creeps accountable.”

Currently, workers on Capitol Hill have multiple official avenues for reporting sexual misconduct, including filing civil claims through the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights. House employees can use the “file a complaint” portal on the House Ethics Committee website and seek support from the chamber’s Office of Employee Advocacy. Senate employees can similarly file with the Senate Ethics Committee, though the guidance is complex and the panel is notorious for its inaction.

The tension between the formal ethics process, with its emphasis on due process, and Boebert’s push to simply throw back the curtains on allegations of sexual malfeasance is not new. The dynamic was central to the 2018 #MeToo debates, which resulted in an overhaul of Congress’ largely opaque workplace-harassment reporting process.

Under those changes, victims are no longer required to go through mediation for their complaints and are permitted to work remotely while the investigation process plays out. The Office of Employee Advocacy was created in the 2018 revamp to offer legal support to complainants.

But with sexual misconduct back in the headlines — and rumors of more bad behavior running rampant — some lawmakers including Reps. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) and Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) are seeing new wisdom in Boebert’s name-and-shame strategy.

The clash of philosophies about how Congress should police itself presents a challenge for reform-minded lawmakers. Some want to simply better enforce existing law, and there are bipartisan concerns about preserving some semblance of due process without letting it become a perpetual shield for workplace predators.

“We cannot let allegations and rumors and Twitter posts lead to expulsions,” said Leger Fernández.

Other changes made in 2018 under the ME TOO Congress Act included ending the longstanding practice of using taxpayer dollars to pay out harassment settlements against lawmakers, instead requiring members to pay out of pocket.

Even with those changes, survivors still fear retaliation and being “blackballed” out of a career in politics or public service if they report their bosses. And victim advocates say the official processes remain lengthy and burdensome — all of which has weighed on a key architect of the 2018 law.

“Why, after we … provided so many more protections to the victims, that these women didn’t feel they could come forward?” former Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), who was victim of sexual assault during her own time as a staffer, said in an interview.

In the eight years since the last update to Capitol Hill’s sexual misconduct laws, few lawmakers have been subjected to a full Ethics inquiry regarding sexual misconduct. Multiple members who faced public allegations, however, opted to leave Congress before the panel could release a report, including Rep. Katie Hill (D-Calif.) in 2019 and Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.) in 2021.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said he has empowered Leger Fernández, who chairs the Democratic Women’s Caucus, to lead Democrats on “ensuring that we have the type of accountability and system in place that treats victims and staffers with the dignity and respect that they deserve.”

She plans to pursue bipartisan legislation this Congress that refines the 2018 reforms and identified Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wis.), chair of the House Administration Committee, as a likely partner.

But Steil has his own ideas for how to address sexual misconduct in Congress, telling Blue Light News in a statement his panel is “always looking at ways we can improve compliance with existing laws.” He referenced the Congressional Accountability Act, a 1995 law which applied some federal labor laws to Congress and was the underlying statute updated in 2018.

Speaker Mike Johnson has also signaled he wants to focus on enforcement, though he said he is eager to hear proposals to encourage more reporting. He cited his desire to protect his two daughters who work on Capitol Hill as committee aides.

“I’m a father, not just the speaker of the House,” he told reporters last month. “If there are ways to tighten the rules, if there are suggestions, we’re seeking that from all members. We’re open to that.”He also suggested party operatives need to be more discerning in whom they recruit for office: “We don’t need people running for Congress because they see this as some opportunity for their own individual endeavors. I’ll leave it at that.”

Speier offered one jesting suggestion for dealing with predatory men.

“Maybe we need to put padlocks on their zippers when they first get to Congress,” she said. “I don’t know, but it’s got to be fixed, and we’ve got to do something bold.”

Speaker Mike Johnson faced down a bruising “hell week” and ultimately pulled several key GOP bills across the line. But it came at a cost.

Republicans say Johnson’s habit of making last-minute, often contradictory promises to keep his tiny majority functioning is starting to catch up with him. Frustrations over his leadership, they say, are at an all-time high.

“I think this guy has divided us with a smile,” said Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio), a longtime Johnson skeptic who has grown more vocal with his criticism and now says “without question” he will vote against keeping Johnson as top GOP leader in the next Congress.

This week’s chaos came to a head late Wednesday, with multiple members of key Republican factions yelling and swearing at Johnson on the House floor and in closed-door meetings.

Johnson tried to quell a rebellion among conservative hard-liners by privately reneging on an agreement with a group of midwestern Republicans that would have tied legislation allowing year-round sales of an ethanol fuel blend to the must-pass farm bill.

When some of the ethanol provision’s backers ran back to the floor to try to figure out what happened, they were too late. Some later confronted Johnson, who is now promising a future vote on the matter.

“Bullshit,” Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) yelled at the speaker as he tried to explain what happened later in the day, according to three people who participated in the huddle and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

This week’s floor chaos was just the latest example of Johnson leading crisis by crisis, ultimately pulling off GOP priorities but leaving a trail of disgruntled members and staffers in his wake, according to more than a dozen Republicans interviewed for this story.

It all comes as rank-and-file lawmakers grow increasingly worried about their ability to govern over the coming months and retain their majority in November — and amid quiet conversations about who else might be capable of leading the House GOP. While Johnson successfully managed this week to end the record shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security and fend off the lapse of a key surveillance program, more challenges loom.

A long-term deal to maintain those spy powers remains elusive, the Senate is expected to reject the farm bill House Republicans approved Thursday and members are agitating for yet another party-line reconciliation bill that stands to continue surfacing the GOP’s internal divides.

Johnson told reporters Thursday that complaints about his leadership style amounted to “fake news.”

“No one in this conference can say that I went against my word on anything,” he said. “You had requests and demands on opposite sides of the conference that were literally irreconcilable. If you meet one group’s demands, you can’t meet the other. And so it takes a lot of time to get people to a consensus and an agreement on that.”

“Everybody’s very happy with their work,” Johnson said. “It’s all smiles.”

Wagner hardly appeared thrilled as she recounted Wednesday’s events in an interview Thursday.

“We were promised a vote on this,” she said of the ethanol measure. “We went back to do our work in our offices, and then a deal was cut on the floor. … And once we became aware of it, we needed to extend those discussions.”

The ethanol measure, allowing year-round sales of a fuel blend high in corn-derived alcohol, vexed a coalition of Republicans who saw the measure as harming petroleum and refiner industry interests in their districts as well as ultraconservatives who had ideological objections.

The result of the infighting was that a Wednesday vote on the budget blueprint for a planned immigration enforcement funding bill stayed open for more than five hours as dozens of Republicans withheld their votes until they got a satisfactory response.

To placate them, Johnson ultimately agreed to delay consideration of the farm bill for a time — only to reverse himself again after livid ag-state members demanded a vote on the farm bill before the scheduled weeklong recess, leaving the ethanol issue for later.

That in turn enraged hard-liners like Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who accused Johnson of going back on his word from only a few hours earlier.

In a closed-door meeting just off the House floor Wednesday night, Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) complained about how farm-state members always vote in line with GOP leadership only to get jilted on their own priorities.

During a separate “family meeting” in Johnson’s office, Rep. Michelle Fischbach (R-Minn.), who sits in a Johnson-appointed slot on the Rules Committee, asked why they should believe the speaker when he promised a future vote on the ethanol issue. Johnson had already promised the group a vote in late February that did not materialize.

Miller, a former White House aide to President Donald Trump, said he ultimately agreed to vote for the budget measure out of his support for Trump and after Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin personally asked him to. But he said the episode demonstrated why he thinks Johnson is unfit to lead Republicans beyond this Congress.

“It’s pretty debilitating when you’re supposed to follow a guy into battle, and I wouldn’t trust him to get out of a wet paper bag with an M4,” he said.

Johnson was happy to put the 76-day DHS shutdown behind him Thursday, telling reporters that “sometimes it’s an ugly process” but that he has “never broken my word to a single person in this building.”

But the instances of disarray on the floor have piled up in recent months, and not all of them can be attributed solely to the GOP’s tiny majority. Last week, Johnson and other leaders appeared unaware of serious concerns in his conference’s ranks about legislation curbing Endangered Species Act protections. They were forced to postpone consideration of the bill.

The week before that, the House cleared an extension of temporary immigration protections for people from Haiti — the latest instance where a Democratic-led discharge petition had succeeded in commandeering the GOP agenda.

Many Democrats have been happy to watch the internal drama and gloat, mocking the GOP’s disarray and papering over the pains their own caucus experienced when they were in power. But they have insisted the drama of the past few months stands alone.

“First reaction is: ‘Oh, my God, this would never happen under Nancy Pelosi,’” Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said in an interview, harking back to speakers of the past. “In fact, it probably wouldn’t have happened under John Boehner or Paul Ryan or even Kevin McCarthy.”

Johnson has defenders inside the GOP ranks, such as Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), who said “he’s doing fine” and “the bills are moving.” He also continued to enjoy the support of the most important Republican — Trump — who has shown no outward sign of dismay with Johnson’s leadership.

“These are complex issues, and sometimes they take more than five minutes to work through,” Lawler said.

Johnson will be tested as soon as lawmakers return from recess. The pro-ethanol Republicans say Johnson pledged to orchestrate a standalone vote on their measure the week of May 12, according to six people involved in the talks. Many Republicans expect it to fail since it will no longer be attached to a must-pass bill.

“Do I believe him? Probably not,” one of the House Republicans involved said about that timeline.

Wagner, when asked whether she had confidence in Johnson and GOP leaders, singled out House Majority Leader Steve Scalise for having “really stood up in the pack” and “gave his word in terms of how we would move forward.”

Even the members who weren’t part of the back-and-forths over ethanol blends or surveillance safeguards or budget priorities this week were dismayed by how it all went down.

Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.), a veteran House member who announced his retirement earlier this week, parked himself on the House floor during part of the meltdown. Asked later what he thought of the interactions, he said, “I just thought we got to get it together.”

“We probably didn’t have it together when we started voting,” he said. “Probably should have waited until we were sure. It’s a lot of wasted time.”

A bipartisan Senate bill that would create a federal framework to track how artificial intelligence is reshaping the U.S. workforce has won backing from Silicon Valley tech giants including Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI.

Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Ted Budd (R-N.C.) introduced the Workforce Transparency Act on Thursday, which intends to give Washington the real-time information needed to develop policy solutions for economic disruption and job losses associated with the technology.

The legislation would direct the Labor Department to collect and publish anonymized data on AI adoption across the public and private sectors. Data collected would include how workers use the technology and how that usage evolves over time.

The proposal comes as anxiety rises in Washington about the long-term effects of AI on the labor market and as both political parties craft messaging to respond to public concerns about the technology.

It would also establish a voluntary reporting system where companies and agencies can submit AI adoption data, and would then make anonymized versions of the data available to businesses, researchers and agencies.

Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of U.S. Government Affairs Fred Humphries said the framework is helpful for “understanding AI deployment, productivity gains, and the creation of new jobs.”

“We know AI is beginning to transform work, but we don’t have enough data to understand how,” said Joshua New, director of policy at SeedAI, a nonprofit focused on American AI readiness that’s backing the bill.

The proposal is also supported by Alliance for Secure AI, Business Software Alliance, SCSP Action Program and Erik Brynjolfsson, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI.

Warner has made this issue a cornerstone of his reelection campaign, launching an ad in December highlighting how the rise in AI adoption is coinciding with steep job losses and an affordability crisis in the U.S.

CLARIFICATION: Updates to clarify Fred Humphries’ job title.