Carly Rush: Chief counsel, Senate Appropriations Committee Democrats

Carly Rush is, literally, an expert on the letter of the law.

While working through a dual degree in public policy and law at Harvard University in 2013, Rush spent a summer as a law clerk for the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), which then-Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) chaired.

That’s where she found her Hill spark. After a stint at the Virginia attorney general’s office, Rush returned to the committee, now under Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), and began working on oversight investigations, amicus briefs, reports, drafts of bills and vetting of nominees, among other things.

Rush stayed passionate about using her legal training to support policy that would help children, especially when it came to healthcare.

She said one of her proudest accomplishments working for the HELP Committee was a report Murray released in 2016. Rush had helped lead an investigation into medical devices that were sickening clusters of hospital patients, spending a year going through records from manufacturers, hospitals and the Food and Drug Administration to find out what went wrong.

When Murray transitioned to leading the Democrats on the powerful Appropriations Committee in 2023, Rush went with her.

Leading the counsel team for that committee has been a very different role, Rush said, as the appropriations work is broader and touches every part of the federal government, while HELP staff goes deeper into specific issues and a smaller range of policy areas. She also employs her legal training to help finesse language in legislation and support court cases with amicus briefs explaining the intent of legislation to a court.

“There’s been in the last few years a complete rethinking of the power of Congress versus the president when it comes to spending, and President Trump and others have one view. There are other views out there, and depending on how you think about this, you might want to write language down differently, right?” Rush said. “And so the lawyers on both sides of the aisle help people sort of translate, this is our agreement, this is our boss’s intent, how do we make sure that’s captured effectively in the law?”