The issue: Underutilized program could no longer justify its $5 million budget

The U.S. Congress is an institution steeped, for better or worse, mostly for the better, in tradition — the elaborate courtesy the members show each other on the floor, the daily printed and bound copies of the preceding day’s proceedings in the Congressional Record, the inkwells still kept freshly filled on the senators’ desks.

A VENERABLE House tradition — technically older than the House itself since it dates to 1774 and the Continental Congress — is ending this summer for the most utilitarian of reasons. The House pages are being disbanded because myriad electronic devices can transmit messages across the Capitol complex faster than a speeding teenager.

Visitors to the House gallery could see youngsters in blue jackets dispersed about the floor, alertly scanning the members for the slightest signal that their presence was needed. The pages at the foot of the speaker’s rostrum looked almost like sprinters in their starting blocks.

Their duties were to deliver or pick up messages and reports, locate staffers, fetch snacks and soft drinks and, occasionally, it was said, deliver a cocktail to a member in need of a pick-me-up. Basically, they did whatever a House member needed, and two members were censured in 1983 for requiring more than what was deemed appropriate.

ABOUT 70 PAGES are selected each year, high school juniors chosen by an arcane process of merit and influence. They get free room and board in a dorm not far from the Capitol, attend their own school in the morning and then work whatever irregular hours the House keeps that day.

As late as 2008, a study found that the pages were overworked ferrying materials around Capitol Hill’s endless marble hallways. But House Speaker John Boehner and Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi conclude that technology had left the pages “severely underutilized” and the program could no longer justify its $5 million annual cost.

Whatever the cost savings to government, the program was invaluable in the exposure it gave young people to politics and government. The senior member of Congress, Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., is a former page.

THE SENATE, which in any case is loath to seem to copy the House, is keeping its pages. But if someone invents an electronic inkwell, their days, too, are probably numbered.

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