On March 4, 2026, something unusual happened on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. A Republican congresswoman from South Carolina forced her own colleagues — all 422 of them — to go on the record about whether the American public deserves to know which members of Congress used taxpayer money to make sexual harassment allegations disappear.
The answer, from 357 of them, was no.
But what Nancy Mace did next — a procedural workaround that most people missed — may have set off a chain reaction that, six weeks later, forced two sitting members of Congress to resign within hours of each other, with two more now facing expulsion. And at the center of it all is a fund most Americans have never heard of, overseen by an office most congressional staffers didn't even know existed.
The Fund Congress Built for Itself
To understand what's happening now, you have to go back to 1995.
Before that year, Congress had exempted itself from virtually every workplace protection law it imposed on the rest of the country. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act? Didn't apply to Congress. The Americans with Disabilities Act? Not on Capitol Hill. The Fair Labor Standards Act, the Family and Medical Leave Act, OSHA — none of it. Members of Congress could harass, discriminate, underpay, and endanger their own employees with no legal accountability whatsoever.
That changed — on paper — with the Congressional Accountability Act of 1995, the very first bill signed into law by the 104th Congress. It was the flagship promise of Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America," and it passed with near-unanimity: 98-1 in the Senate, 390-0 in the House. The law applied eleven federal workplace protection statutes to the legislative branch for the first time and created a new office to enforce them: the Office of Compliance, later renamed the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights (OCWR).
The OCWR is run by a five-member, non-partisan Board of Directors — currently chaired by Barbara L. Camens — appointed jointly by the Speaker of the House, the Senate Majority Leader, and the minority leaders of both chambers. It has an Executive Director, deputy directors for both the House and Senate sides, and a General Counsel with independent investigatory and enforcement authority. It covers roughly 30,000 legislative branch employees, including staff of the House, Senate, Capitol Police, the Congressional Budget Office, the Architect of the Capitol, and other legislative agencies.
The law also established a dispute resolution process. And this is where it gets ugly.
A System Designed to Protect the Powerful
On paper, the Congressional Accountability Act gave congressional employees a path to file complaints. In practice, the system was designed to exhaust them into silence. Every single obstacle in the process favored the accused — and every single cost fell on the accuser. Former Congresswoman Jackie Speier, who was herself sexually assaulted on Capitol Hill as a young staffer and later spent years trying to reform the system, described the original law bluntly: it was "a sham because it protected the member of Congress."
Here's what a congressional staffer actually faced if they wanted to report sexual harassment before the 2018 reforms — step by agonizing step.
There was no central HR office on Capitol Hill. There was no mandatory anti-harassment training for members or their staff. The Office of Compliance existed, but as a 2017 open letter from former staffers revealed, many employees had never even heard of it. The office's own education and outreach efforts were passive — a poster on a wall, a quarterly e-newsletter. If you were a 23-year-old legislative aide being groped by your boss at a late-night reception, the odds that you knew there was an obscure independent office in the legislative branch where you could file a claim were slim.
Assuming you found the Office of Compliance and filed a complaint within the 180-day window, you didn't get to speak to an investigator. You didn't get to file a formal charge. You were required to enter a 30-day counseling period administered by the Office of Compliance. This wasn't therapy — it was a bureaucratic intake phase where the office explained your options and the process ahead. You could not skip it. You could not accelerate it. You had to sit in it for a full month while your harasser continued working down the hall. And critically, the law did not require any investigation into the allegations at all. The office simply processed your complaint through its administrative pipeline. No one was obligated to determine whether what you described actually happened.
After counseling, you were required to enter a mandatory 30-day mediation period with your harasser's office. Not optional. Required. Picture it: you're a junior staffer, and you've just been forced to sit through a month of counseling. Now you're sitting across from the legal representatives of the person who harassed you — a sitting member of Congress — trying to "mediate" a resolution. You are two months into this process. You have filed no formal complaint. You have seen no courtroom. You have had no hearing.
If mediation failed — or produced a result you couldn't accept — you still couldn't go to court. You had to wait through an additional mandatory 30-day "cooling off" period before you could file an administrative complaint with the Office of Compliance or pursue a civil action in federal court. Three months. Ninety days minimum from the moment you walked in the door before you could even begin to seek a legal remedy.
"Can you imagine a victim who's been sexually harassed who attempts to file a complaint and then is told they've got to go through three months of biting their tongue?"
— Former Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA)Here's a detail that captures the asymmetry of the entire system better than anything else: if a staffer needed legal advice or representation at any point in this process, they had to hire an attorney at their own expense. Congressional staffers — who are famously underpaid, many of them earning in the $30,000–$40,000 range while living in one of the most expensive cities in the country — had to find and fund their own legal counsel. Meanwhile, the member of Congress who harassed them was represented by internal counsel, paid for by the institution. The accuser bore the costs. The accused bore nothing.
If a complaint somehow survived the 90-day obstacle course and reached mediation or a hearing, and a settlement was reached, the money didn't come from the member of Congress. It came from a special account within the U.S. Treasury — established by Section 415 of the Congressional Accountability Act and funded by taxpayer dollars. The member faced no personal financial consequence whatsoever. They didn't write a check. They didn't have their pay docked. Their office budget wasn't touched. The American public paid for the settlement, and the American public was never told it happened.
The settlement was confidential. All counseling, mediation, hearings, and deliberations were confidential under the Congressional Accountability Act. Nondisclosure agreements were standard. The staffer was effectively silenced — legally bound not to discuss what happened to them. The member's name never appeared in any public record. The OCWR's annual reports would note that a settlement had been paid, but wouldn't say who was involved, what the allegation was, or which office was responsible. The entire process — from the moment a young woman walked into the Office of Compliance to the moment she signed a confidentiality agreement — was engineered to ensure that the public would never know, the member would never be named, and the victim would never speak again.
And then the member went right back to work.
This wasn't a bug in the system. This was the system. It functioned exactly as designed — not to protect the 30,000 employees of the legislative branch, but to protect the approximately 535 people who employed them. Former Congresswoman Speier described the culture it created: members who "feel entitled, feel untouchable," who can "engage in conduct that is illegal and reprehensible" because they know the institution will absorb the consequences for them. Other members, she said, simply "turn their eyes away" because "it's convenient to mind your own business."
Kevin Mulshine, a senior adviser and counsel who was at the Office of Compliance on its very first day in 1996, left after about two years, feeling disillusioned. The office, he said, "was really not the proactive place that I had hoped it would become." Everyone on staff was "just waiting for someone to walk in the door to file a claim as opposed to reaching out and really becoming advocates for the office and the law." That passive attitude, he said, continued for decades.
Between 1997 and 2017, the Office of Compliance recorded more than 260 settlements and awards totaling over $17 million from this Treasury account.
Now, an important caveat about that $17 million figure, because it gets cited frequently without context: those settlements covered all types of workplace disputes handled by the OCWR — discrimination claims unrelated to sex, retaliation complaints, overtime disagreements, family leave violations — not just sexual harassment. And they covered all 30,000-plus legislative branch employees, not just complaints against members of Congress. According to one detailed analysis, only 13 of those settlements actually involved sexual harassment or sex discrimination, totaling approximately $292,652. But here's the thing: because the system was designed for secrecy, nobody knows for certain how many of those settlements involved members personally, or what the actual conduct was. The secrecy is the problem. And that's precisely the point Mace has been making.
The 2018 Reforms — and What They Didn't Fix
The #MeToo movement hit Capitol Hill hard in late 2017. Multiple members resigned. The archaic complaint process was exposed publicly for the first time. Former staffers wrote open letters. Reporters documented case after case.
Congress responded with the Congressional Accountability Act Reform Act, signed into law on December 21, 2018. The reforms were significant: mediation and counseling became optional, not mandatory, and the 30-day cooling off period was eliminated. Members became personally liable for harassment and retaliation settlements — taxpayers would no longer foot the bill. Confidential advisors were created within the OCWR to help employees understand their rights. Transparency requirements were added — settlements and awards involving members would be made public going forward, and annual reports would be released. And the office was renamed from the Office of Compliance to the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights.
But the reforms only applied going forward. Everything that happened before December 2018 — every settlement, every NDA, every name — stayed buried. The old confidentiality agreements remained in force. The identities of members who used taxpayer funds to silence their accusers were still sealed. And the OCWR had no mandate to revisit or disclose any of it.
That's the gap Nancy Mace drove a truck through.
The Gonzales Case Lights the Fuse
In February 2026, NBC News and the San Antonio Express-News reported that Rep. Tony Gonzales, a Republican from Texas, had sent sexually explicit text messages to a former staffer, Regina Ann Santos-Aviles. The two had allegedly had an affair. Santos-Aviles later died by suicide.
Gonzales eventually acknowledged the relationship on a podcast, saying he "made a mistake, had a lapse in judgment and a lack of faith." The House Ethics Committee opened an investigation. But Mace wanted more than an investigation into one member. She wanted the whole system exposed.
On February 24, she introduced a resolution directing the House Ethics Committee to preserve and publicly release all records related to investigations into members of Congress for sexual harassment. On March 3, she gave formal notice she would force a floor vote.
March 4: The Day Congress Chose Itself
The vote came on March 4, 2026. Mace's resolution would have required the Ethics Committee to release every record of sexual misconduct investigations involving members — with all victim and witness identifying information fully redacted.
The Ethics Committee fought it. Chair Michael Guest and ranking member Mark DeSaulnier argued the resolution "could chill victim cooperation and witness participation in ongoing and future investigations." They encouraged members to vote to refer it to committee — the procedural equivalent of a burial.
It worked. In a 357-65 vote, the House killed the resolution. Nearly all Republicans — 175 — and nearly all Democrats — 182 — voted together to keep the records sealed. Only 65 members voted for transparency.
Rep. Lauren Boebert called it "disgusting." Rep. Tim Burchett said, "We just voted to cover up sexual harassment of employees." Mace was furious: "Both parties colluded to protect predators."
Critics, including Ethics Committee leaders from both parties, warned that a broad release of records could "chill victim cooperation" by exposing sensitive details — even with redactions — and could retraumatize people who came forward under promises of confidentiality. It's a legitimate concern. But Mace countered that the real chill comes from the culture of impunity — that the system's secrecy doesn't protect victims so much as it protects the people who victimized them. The subpoena compromise she pushed minutes later attempted to thread that needle: member-specific, pre-2018 settlements only, with full victim and witness protections intact.
But Mace wasn't done.
The Workaround
Minutes after the floor vote failed, Mace went to the House Oversight Committee — where she sits — and deployed a different tactic. She offered a motion to subpoena the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights directly for all settlement records paid from the Treasury fund under the Congressional Accountability Act prior to December 2018.
The motion passed by bipartisan voice vote.
The subpoena targets a specific, narrow set of records: awards and settlements paid on behalf of members of Congress — not staff — for misconduct. An amendment from ranking member Robert Garcia excluded staff-related settlements from disclosure, though it would require a report on the total amount paid for non-member cases.
Mace announced she planned to publicly release every lawmaker name from those pre-2019 sexual misconduct settlements.
As of April 15, 2026, the Oversight Committee has not yet fully executed the subpoena or publicly released any names. Mace has framed the delay as institutional foot-dragging — the kind of slow-walk that Congress has perfected over decades when it comes to policing itself. But the motion passed. The precedent is set. And the message it sent was unmistakable.
This is the moment that, I believe, changed everything.
The Signal Heard by Every Silenced Accuser
Think about what the subpoena signaled to every woman who had signed an NDA as part of a congressional harassment settlement before 2018. It said: your silence agreement is about to be exposed. The names are coming out. The records are being demanded by a committee of Congress itself. The wall of secrecy is cracking.
For accusers who had been bound by confidentiality — women who had been told their stories would never see the light of day — this was a seismic shift. Not because Congress directly contacted them. But because the environment had fundamentally changed.
And then, five weeks later, Eric Swalwell's world collapsed.
The Swalwell Domino
On April 7, CNN and the San Francisco Chronicle published reports in which multiple women accused Rep. Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat and top contender in the governor's race, of sexual misconduct. A former staffer accused him of sexual assault — twice raping her, according to the report. Three other women alleged he sent unsolicited explicit messages and nude photos via Snapchat, with one former Capitol Hill intern saying his correspondence shifted from professional to sexual, including an invitation to his hotel. The accusations had come to light organically — one accuser, Annika Albrecht, reached out to an influencer asking her to share a video of her story because she felt "physically sick" at the idea of Swalwell becoming governor. After the video posted, other women flooded in with their own accounts.
By the weekend, Swalwell had dropped out of the governor's race. The Manhattan DA and LA County DA both opened criminal investigations. By Monday, April 13, he announced his resignation from Congress, saying it was "wrong for my constituents to have me distracted from my duties." He denied the assault allegations but admitted to "mistakes in judgment." On April 14, a fifth woman — Lonna Drewes — gave a press conference accusing him of violent sexual assault in 2018, with her attorney announcing plans to file a police report with the LA County Sheriff's Department.
Tony Gonzales announced his resignation the same day, effective at 11:59 p.m. Both men faced imminent expulsion votes that neither was likely to survive. Mace had been demanding Gonzales' exit since the February texts emerged and extended the call to Swalwell amid the fresh wave of accusations. Her reaction was blunt: "Two down, more to go. Swalwell and Gonzales made the right call, but walking out the door does not erase the disgusting acts they are being accused of and the women they hurt."
The connection between Mace's March crusade and the Swalwell revelations isn't a straight line — it's a climate shift. Mace's very public fight over the settlement fund, broadcast nationally for weeks, created an environment where women felt the political winds had changed. The Gonzales case had already demonstrated that these stories could force consequences. The subpoena signaled that the institutional protections — the NDAs, the sealed records, the culture of silence — were under direct threat.
Women didn't come forward because Congress called them. They came forward because, for the first time, it looked like Congress might not be able to protect the men who hurt them.
Who's Next
With Swalwell and Gonzales gone, the pressure has shifted immediately to two Florida members — one from each party.
Under Ethics Committee investigation on six fronts: failure to disclose financial information, campaign finance violations, improperly receiving gifts, receiving special favors as a congressman, sexual misconduct and dating violence, and misuse of congressional resources. A former girlfriend accused him of assault in their shared Washington apartment — she initially told a 911 operator and police she had been assaulted, and officers noted what appeared to be visible injuries, though she later recanted. An ex-girlfriend obtained a restraining order after he allegedly threatened to share intimate photos following their breakup. He's also accused of profiting from nearly $1 million in federal defense contracts through companies he owns — PACEM Solutions International and PACEM Defense — while serving on the Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees, and of fabricating or misrepresenting facts about his military service to obtain a Bronze Star. Five people who served with him, including two men cited in the award recommendation as having been personally saved by Mills, have disputed his account. Mills denies all allegations. Speaker Johnson said on April 14 that he was "looking into" the probe's status but declined to call for Mills' ouster.
Found guilty by an Ethics adjudicatory panel of 25 violations, primarily related to stealing approximately $5 million in FEMA COVID relief overpayments through her family health care company and funneling the funds to her 2021 congressional campaign. Federally indicted in late 2025 and faces up to 53 years in prison if convicted. A public hearing on sanctions — potentially including expulsion — is scheduled for April 21, just days from now. Speaker Johnson has said the facts are "indisputable" and supports expulsion. She has refused to resign, calling the "lumping" of her financial case with the sexual misconduct allegations against Swalwell and Gonzales "inaccurate and irresponsible."
Mace has named all four — Swalwell, Gonzales, Mills, and Cherfilus-McCormick — in her "clean house" demands. That two are Republicans and two are Democrats underscores her argument that this isn't partisan. "We don't care what party you're in," she said. "Stealing millions in taxpayer dollars, sexually assaulting your staff, lying about your service record — none of it is acceptable."
Meanwhile, Rep. Mike Collins is also under Ethics investigation for using congressional resources for unauthorized purposes, including employing an intern who had a preexisting romantic relationship with his office's chief of staff. And a bipartisan group of swing-district House Democrats sent leadership a letter urging the Ethics Committee to "expedite" its investigations across the board. The patience for the usual glacial pace appears to be running out.
The Bigger Picture
What we're witnessing is not just a series of individual scandals. It's the unraveling of a system that was architected — literally written into law — to protect members of Congress from the consequences of their own behavior. A system where taxpayers funded the settlements, victims were forced through months of mandatory process before they could even complain, and confidentiality agreements ensured that the public would never know which of their elected representatives had used their money to buy silence.
The 2018 reforms fixed the process going forward. But they left three decades of secrets intact. Nancy Mace is trying to crack that vault open. 357 of her colleagues voted to keep it shut. And the women who lived through it are deciding, one by one, that they're done waiting for permission to speak.
"Whatever we are doing when it comes to misconduct on Capitol Hill, it's not working."
— Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ), April 14, 2026When lawmakers exempt themselves from the rules they impose on everyone else — when they build systems that let them harass with impunity and pay for silence with public money — it doesn't just harm the women who were silenced. It erodes the foundation of democratic governance itself. True accountability means the powerful pay the price, not the taxpayers and not the silenced.
The fund bought their silence for decades. Whether the subpoena finally cracks open the vault — or more accusers simply refuse to stay quiet — Congress is learning that self-protection has limits when the public is watching. Silence, it turns out, has an expiration date.