Why New Members of Congress Still Draw Lots for Their Office
No seniority, no vote, just a numbered chip pulled from a wooden box. That's how the House has decided which freshmen get a good office since 1908, and this November's class draws again.
Rep.-elect Laura Gillen didn't even look at the numbered chip before handing it to the staffer running the drawing. When House Office Buildings Superintendent Joe Yates called out "No. 1," the New York Democrat threw her arms up like she'd hit a real jackpot. Down the row, Texas Republican Craig Goldman fished a chip out of the same polished wooden box, looked at it, and said, "Oh, no." He'd drawn 48th out of roughly 70 spots. Neither of them had done anything to deserve their fortune. That's the entire point.
Every two years, the U.S. House settles a real question — which of its newest members get a decent office and which get exiled to a windowless corner three tunnels from the Capitol — with a lottery, not a vote, not seniority, not a merit review. No new member outranks another, so drawing numbers from a box is treated as the fairest available fix. Congress, an institution that argues procedurally over almost everything — down to how it schedules sessions it barely holds — has never seriously tried to replace it.
The practice is older than the century. Before the first purpose-built House Office Building opened in 1908, representatives worked from desks on the House floor itself and had drawn lots for those since the 1840s. When the Cannon Building's offices came up for grabs, the House ran the same lottery logic on real estate: every member, not just freshmen, drew a number that set the order for picking rooms off floor plans pinned to a blackboard. One observer, writing in the House's own historical archive, said it looked like "a racetrack with Members crowded around the boards" placing bets.
Seniority eventually took over for returning members — incumbents now claim any office vacated by a retirement or a lost race before freshmen get a look, which is exactly why new arrivals tend to land in the oldest, smallest corners of the Cannon and Longworth buildings. Only the lottery survives for them, unchanged in shape since the Rayburn Building opened in 1965 and gave the whole event its modern, made-for-TV format: numbered chips or disks pulled from a wooden box, a randomized speaking order, and a strict five-minute window per member once the actual office-picking begins. The 2020 drawing, run over Microsoft Teams during the pandemic, is the one exception in a century of in-person theater.
What hasn't changed is the Rayburn Building's status as the prize nobody in a freshman class actually gets. It's the only House office building with its own stop on the Capitol subway, which matters more to a member sprinting between votes and fundraising calls than any square footage or view — and because senior members rarely give it up, incoming freshmen have been shut out of it in recent cycles entirely, left to fight over what's left in Cannon and Longworth.
The ritual has produced its own small folklore. Steve Knight, drawing first in the 114th Congress, credited his luck to "a Jedi mind trick." Hervey Machen, who drew dead last in a much earlier Congress, grumbled, "I've always been against lotteries, and now I'm even more against them." John Sweeney, stuck with a bottom pick one year, hung a banner outside his new door reading "Welcome to the worst best office on the Hill." In 2024, Michigan Republican Tom Barrett got the rare sentimental win: colleagues let him take a Longworth suite once held by his great-grandfather, former Rep. Louis C. Rabaut, and he posted his thanks to "my Freshman colleagues, Republicans AND Democrats" on the way out.
None of it is required to work this way. The Senate assigns incoming members' offices by seniority — prior government service first, tiebreaker to whoever represents the bigger state — and nobody there is drawing chips from a box. The House could adopt the same system tomorrow. It hasn't, mostly because a lottery photographs well and a seniority formula doesn't: the drawing gives reporters a scene, gives freshmen a shared, faintly absurd initiation, and gives an institution that runs on hierarchy exactly one moment where hierarchy doesn't apply.
That moment comes around again this cycle. Voters decide the next House class on Nov. 3, and within weeks the winners — potentially more than 70 of them, depending on how many seats change hands — will be standing in a cramped room under the Capitol, waiting for a name to be called and a number to come out of a wooden box. Somebody will get Gillen's reaction. Somebody will get Goldman's.
