Bob Lang was relatively new to his Wisconsin Statehouse job when he learned of a new national organization that was formed to provide research and professional development to legislators and staff. He went to the group’s first national meeting in Philadelphia in 1975.
Lang
Fifty years later, that organization and Bob Lang are still going strong. Lang, 81 years old and 54 years into his legislative career, is director of Wisconsin’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau. And the organization—NCSL—is celebrating its 50th anniversary.
NCSL certainly intended to be around this long. But Lang thought he’d just work a few years in the Statehouse, which he had visited when he was a student at Beloit College in southern Wisconsin. “I took a government class, and the professor took us to the Capitol, where we met with a number of state officials,” Lang says. “And I was inspired by the building, inspired by the people we met. I just thought, if you’re going to be in government, this would not be a bad place to be.”
Aiming to Teach
But Lang was set on a teaching career. He grew up in the small town of Menasha, Wis., about 100 miles northeast of the capital, Madison. His mother taught vocational education, and his father worked for a publishing company.
After graduation, he took a job teaching and coaching football at Muskego High School, near Milwaukee. He loved it, but military service changed his plans. He was drafted into the Army in 1968 and deployed to Vietnam. After his time in the service, he earned a master’s in political science and education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was later offered a job with the fiscal bureau by Dale Cattanach, the department’s founder and director.
Profiles in Service: Legislative Staff
In celebration of its 50th anniversary, NCSL is running a special series of profiles highlighting the invaluable contributions of legislative staffers across the nation. Each of NCSL’s nine professional staff associations chose staffers who have demonstrated exceptional dedication, creativity and impact in their legislative roles. We’re publishing the profiles throughout NCSL’s 50th anniversary year. To read more profiles, visit Profiles in Service: Legislative Staff.
“I thought this would be a good opportunity, but I fully intended I’d go back to teach,” Lang says.
He was assigned to be an analyst for the Department of Public Instruction.
“At least I had somewhat of a background in that,” Lang says. “The assignment was appealing, and I found it to be really interesting.”
He adds: “I obviously had to learn a lot about the statutes and how they pertain to K12 and the technical college system.” He liked what he was learning, “and I liked the politics of the place.”
Not that he took part.
“I never lined up to be a partisan, and one of the things that attracted me to [the bureau] was that it was nonpartisan,” Lang says. “Even though we were nonpartisan, we had close relationships with legislators.”
‘Hard Shoes to Fill’
After just six years on the job, his boss and mentor became the secretary of the Transportation Department and recommended Lang to the Legislature to step in as fiscal bureau director. Lang had to think about it.
“I was concerned because Dale was such a wonderful person who had done so much, that it was one of those ‘hard shoes to fill’ sort of things,” Lang says. “But I did it with his blessing and his encouragement. I thought if I didn’t take it, I’d regret it down the line.”
He organized the bureau into teams focused on seven big budget areas such as education, health and family services, and tax policy. They track billions of dollars in spending and revenue and determine the fiscal impact of proposed laws. Lang initially thought he should basically be able to do everyone’s job in a pinch.
“I thought my job was to know more about every program in Wisconsin government than anybody else, and especially anybody else on the staff,” he says. “Then I realized after a couple of months that I didn’t have the physical or mental ability to do that. But you know, once an analyst, always an analyst.”
He quickly learned to focus on “directing, supervising, helping people in their roles and hiring good people.”
Trust Across the Aisle
Lang has been steadfast about maintaining a nonpartisan staff, and every potential new staffer gets a thorough explanation of what they can and cannot do in the role so that “no one is surprised when they get here.” That commitment to nonpartisanship has earned him and the office trust from both sides of the aisle, as has his commitment to thorough and accurate budget accounting.
“He is literally an institution in Wisconsin,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos says. “He has seen it all, done it all, known everybody who has been a force in Wisconsin politics for literally the last half century.”
“He has seen it all, done it all, known everybody who has been a force in Wisconsin politics for literally the last half century.”
—Robin Vos, Wisconsin Assembly speaker
Vos adds: “I think it’s also a testament that in other states, you have conflict between the executive branch and the legislative branch as to what revenue numbers are and how we’re going to deal with it all. But [in Wisconsin] it’s just become such a trusted institution that the governor accepts the fiscal bureau numbers, as does everyone else, because they have that sterling reputation. And Bob Lang is the guy who’s made all that happen.”
Lang is the “epitome” of a public servant, Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein says. “He’s honest, hardworking and trusted and respected by both Democrats and Republicans. I appreciate his ability to make hard things understandable. All of us in the Legislature, and in fact, all Wisconsin residents, have benefited enormously from his decades of service to our state.”
While Lang didn’t stay in that teaching career as he had expected, he has taught courses at UW-Madison, where he also serves on the Board of Visitors of the university’s La Follette School of Public Affairs. Among his other community roles, he volunteered with Big Brothers Big Sisters and now serves on the board of the group’s Madison-area chapter and coordinates a graduation ceremony for the participants at the Statehouse every year.
Engaging With NCSL
Besides attending the Legislative Summit and NCSL webinars over the years, Lang works with Wisconsin staff and legislators who are active in the organization, including Vos, a former NCSL president, and Ann Sappenfield, a former NCSL staff chair who served on several committees. Lang says he always sends new staffers to NCSL training sessions and others to the Summit. And he says particularly now, with changes and uncertainty regarding federal funding, he regularly draws on the expertise of NCSL staff who monitor the developments.
As an octogenarian, Lang jokes that when people ask him if he’s going to retire, he wonders if it’s a question or a suggestion. He’s grateful that a job he expected to last just a few years has consistently kept him challenged and engaged. He likes to say his office has “132 bosses”—the total number of Wisconsin representatives and senators—and that he and his staff are working for the people their bosses represent.
“I think one way that we look at this job, each member of the Assembly represents 60,000 people, each member of the Senate represents 180,000,” he once told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “We want to do whatever we can for that individual who is elected to represent those people to do the best job they can for those folks.”
Kelley Griffin is a senior editor and the host and producer of NCSL’s “Across the Aisle” podcast.