Who pays the salary of congressional staff?

Answer 1

Each Congressional office is allotted a specific budget per FY, which all comes from appropriated dollars. This comes from the President's annual budget proposal, which is then ratified by Congress.

Like all government entities, they are non-profit and are funded based upon federal tax dollars. However, I know many of those staffers and they are grossly underpaid and overworked. The average House office has 4-5 people working in legislature to serve about a 500,000 people in very stressful conditions. It's often not unusual for the line servers and janitors that work in Congress to be paid more than the actual staffers.

Keep that in mind next time you feel like calling in and yelling at the poor intern answering phones.