If you are interested in meeting with Congressman Frank or inviting him to attend an event in Washington, DC or in the Washington metropolitan area, please make your request in writing to Ms. Maria Giesta at 202-225-0182 (fax).
This is an apology for the fact that I am able to accept far fewer requests for meetings and speeches than I have done throughout most of my career, and an explanation of why this is the case.
I became Chairman of the Committee on Financial Services in January, 2007. The committee has a very wide jurisdiction, and it is the second largest committee in the Congress – there are seventy members. This means that as Chairman, I am involved in a broad range of subject matters that come before the committee, and my time for non-committee business has become shorter. This is true because of the need for me to be available to the sixty-nine other members of the committee, to the regulators and other public officials whose work we supervise, and to people with particular interest in and knowledge about the subjects we cover. Formal committee meetings alone have become very time consuming – sessions when the committee votes on bills and hearings take far more time in a committee of seventy than they do in a committee of twenty-five or thirty-five.
I am also much more involved in conversations with members of the House leadership, involving scheduling, legislative matters, etc. Taken together, the need for me to do all of these things well – at least as well as I can – substantially diminishes the time I have for many other types of meetings. I apologize for the fact that I am not able to be as available as I used to be.
Within Massachusetts, I have had to focus more nearly exclusively on my own Congressional district, because the people who live in that district have a primary claim on my time and attention. It also means that because of the time I must spend in Washington meeting with colleagues of various sorts, I am not as free as I used to be to make appointments in Washington. I have worked with my schedulers so that there are days on a fairly regular basis when I am available for meetings in Massachusetts. I will be asking most people who work or live in the state, and who have business with me, to meet with me in Massachusetts rather than in Washington. In Washington, I am at the beck and call House floor votes, my legislative colleagues, the Democratic leadership, etc. In Massachusetts, on the other hand, I am generally answerable to no one other than my constituents – which is why I prefer to maximize meeting time there.
I have a very able staff of legislative assistants both on my personal office staff and on the committee who are available to meet with people in Washington to discuss substance, and in many cases the best way to proceed is for people to talk to staff members in Washington and then with me in Massachusetts – and of course the sequence could be me first and then the staff.
I am of course very pleased to be chairman of the Financial Services Committee, and I think if offers important opportunities for me to affect public policy in ways that I have long cared about. But an opportunity cost of my being able to do this – and to do it as well as I hope – is a diminution of the time I have available for other things. I regret this, and I did want at the very least to fully explain it to people with whom I may not be able to meet, or whom I will have to meet with in circumstances other than those they would most prefer.
BARNEY FRANK