On Friday, the Legislative Assistant Union protested a bill introduced by a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator that would decriminalize certain misconduct involving publicly funded assistant expenses. Ahead of the rally, 252 assistants from 75 offices and two legislative caucuses cosigned a joint statement, making it a rare cross-party action. In parallel, the Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statutes Committee promptly updated its agenda on Thursday to include amendments related to assistant expenses.
What makes this moment unusual is institutional self-protection: If legal boundaries around public staffing funds are loosened, suspicion will fall on everyone, oversight will weaken and the few who cut corners will end up defining the reputation of the whole legislature.
The legislator behind the bill argues that because some public figures were convicted in cases involving fraudulent assistant-expense claims, the law should be reviewed so the framework becomes “more progressive.”
Yet that logic gets reform backward. When misconduct occurs, we should close loopholes, clarify rules, and strengthen auditing and enforcement, not redraw the legal lines.
The recurring controversies over publicly funded staff are rooted in structural flaws in the legal framework.
First, the overall funding level has not been meaningfully updated. Second, offices often face the same budget ceiling even when their staffing needs differ significantly.
Meanwhile, the workload has not declined. Offices end up trapped between two facts: Staffing cannot be reduced and funding does not increase.
As a result, the system drifts toward poor incentives pushing out professionalism. When experienced assistants leave, legislative capacity suffers; when capacity drops, public trust erodes. Once trust is gone, even reasonable calls to improve pay and protections become politically harder to make.
The legislature does not lack serious ideas for reform and the direction of genuine reform is clear. In the previous legislative term and the current one, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators have proposed bills to establish a dedicated legal framework for publicly funded assistants. DPP Legislator Chen Kuan-ting (陳冠廷) eight years ago said that Taiwan can learn from Japan’s parliamentary staffing system, which treats assistants as professional positions.
If lawmakers truly want to improve the assistant system, the policy direction should aim at one standard: Good-faith offices should not be disadvantaged and bad actors should have no room to operate.
Assistant budgets should be linked to staffing levels. If an office employs 14 assistants, it should not have the same budget cap as an office employing eight. Funding should scale across reasonable tiers so offices are not compelled to suppress wages to maintain personnel levels.
Compensation benchmarks should reference the civil service system and comparable professional roles. A transparent framework would protect lawmakers who already treat assistants well, reduce suspicions about discretionary spending and make it harder to normalize unreasonably low pay.
Turning assistant expenses into a subsidy fully controlled at a legislator’s discretion would not solve these problems; it would reduce transparency and increase the risk that what is reviewable becomes opaque again. A professional legislature depends on capable lawmakers and dedicated assistants — and Taiwan will only get there by improving labor rights, not by weakening accountability in the name of reform.
Gahon Chiang is a congressional staff member, focusing on Taiwan’s national security policy, in the office of Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Chen Kuan-ting.
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