WASHINGTON — (CNN) House Speaker Paul Ryan has a stately new office at the Capitol, oversight of 434 other lawmakers and a roughly $50,000 pay raise when he took the speaker’s gavel last week. But he’s still planning to lay his head each night on a cot in his Longworth House office.
“It actually makes me more efficient,” Ryan told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” Sunday. “I can actually get more work done by sleeping on a cot in my office. I have been doing it for at least a decade, and I’m going to keep doing it.”
Ryan explained that he wouldn’t be sleeping over in the speaker’s office in the Capitol, but across the street in his longtime office in the Longworth House Office Building.
His Longworth office is closer to the gym where he works out every morning, but there may also be another reason: the smell of cigarette smoke.
Ryan joked Sunday about looking for ways to get the smoke smell out of his new digs in the Capitol — former Speaker John Boehner, a smoker, held that office for five years.
“They have these ozone machines apparently that you can detoxify the environment, but I’m going to have to work on the carpeting in here,” Ryan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Ryan may have just ascended to one of the most powerful offices in the nation, but he’s not the only top Republican sleeping in his office: House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who was in line to become speaker just a few weeks ago, also sleeps in his office. But McCarthy stays over in his Capitol office.
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