For a snapshot glimpse at Carrie Apostolou's 25-year career on the Senate Appropriations Committee, peek into her office in Capitol Hill's Dirksen Senate Office Building.

Hanging there are framed pictures of the current minority clerk for the Energy and Water Development Subcommittee with several lawmakers, including the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Sens. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) -- just three of the 14 members she's called boss through the years. The pictures point to a quirk in her résumé, unique in an era of hyper-partisanship. She's worked for Democrats, for Republicans and -- during a brief span a few years ago -- for both sides simultaneously.

Although she started her career on Capitol Hill working for Democrats, Apostolou has spent the majority of her time in the Senate working for Republicans. Since 2009, she's worked in her current position on the Energy and Water Development Subcommittee, which oversees spending at the Department of Energy, the Army Corps of Engineers and Interior Department water agencies.

While she prides herself on her loyalty to whomever she works for, Apostolou said she has an eye toward bipartisanship when it's possible.

"My personal approach has been one that focused on trying to make government to work as well as possible," Apostolou said. "And I don't think that's a Democrat or Republican issue."

Another unique aspect of her career in the Senate is its longevity. When she started working there in 1987, it was more common for staffers to spend their entire careers there. Now, she said, fewer young people are devoting their whole careers to the Hill.

"It's been hard seeing really good, talented people leave," she said. "It used to be that people really would make a career here."

During the quarter-century that Apostolou has worked for both sides of the aisle, she has also raised two daughters, one of whom is starting college this year. The other is starting high school.

"When you have real small kids, you think there's no way I can do this," she said. "And then here I am, all these years later, and it's like, 'I guess I did it.'"

When Apostolou was her daughters' ages, she certainly didn't see herself in politics. A business major with a minor in art history at Wake Forest University, she once hoped to work for an auction house like Sotheby's or Christie's.

But after what seemed to be a dream-come-true interview with Christie's in New York during her senior year of college, the offer she received wasn't what she had hoped for. The auction house wanted to hire her in an area she had little interest in -- the arms and armor department -- at about $13,000 a year.

"That's when I thought, 'I've gotta get real. This isn't going to work out for me,'" Apostolou said.

So she returned to Montgomery County, Md., where she had spent most of her childhood, and eventually landed in a job on the Senate Appropriations Committee -- even though she had no particular interest in politics at the time.

"So it really has been an evolution -- something I really hadn't intended to do, but I happened to be in the right place at the right time," she said.

Hired to the Democratic staff, Apostolou first worked for the subcommittee that covered appropriations for the Department of Housing and Urban Development and independent agencies, which at the time included U.S. EPA.

Jumping into an account "was sort of trial by fire," she said.

She worked on the subcommittee for several years, first under former Wisconsin Sen. William Proxmire (D) and then for Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D).

After a maternity leave in 1994, Apostolou returned to a Senate that had switched Republican, so she -- like several other Appropriations staff members -- switched to work for the new majority.

The switch wasn't something she would call "natural," Apostolou said. But "it certainly wasn't traumatic," she added. While legislative riders in appropriations bills can get divisive, most of the appropriations process comes down to things that aren't necessarily partisan, she said.

As time went by, Apostolou added more issues to her portfolio. Bruce Evans, staff director for the committee's minority office and currently Apostolou's boss, said that when he met her in the mid-to-late 1990s, one of his first impressions of her was that she was diligent.

"I often saw her dragging agencies into her offices for a lot of meetings," he said. "She was holding folks' feet to the fire."

He added, "She's just enormously pleasant and balanced in her approach to things. She can be aggressive when she needs to be, but she doesn't overreact."

Switching subcommittees

While she enjoyed her subcommittee portfolio -- which had grown to include EPA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Veterans Affairs -- Apostolou in 2001 became clerk for the Legislative Branch Subcommittee.

She spent just two weeks working as the subcommittee's Republican clerk before another regime change in the Senate. Former Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords, then a Republican, announced he was leaving the party to become an independent, which allowed Democrats to take back control of the Senate. It was then that Apostolou took on a unique role.

Then-Appropriations Chairman Byrd "asked if I would be the clerk for both the Republicans and the Democrats at the same time, which was unprecedented," she said.

Her time on the subcommittee was busy. The Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center had just occurred, and Congress faced a multitude of new safety issues. But she said she didn't have trouble working for both Democratic and Republican lawmakers at the same time. For 18 months, she briefed both Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and former Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah), then the chairman and ranking member of the Legislative Branch Subcommittee, respectively.

"I remember trying to figure out where I was supposed to sit when the bill was on the Senate floor -- which side I was supposed to sit on. Which of course you sit with the majority," she said.

In 2003, when the GOP took control of the Senate, she switched back to the Republican side.

Her Democratic counterpart on the subcommittee was friend and colleague Nancy Olkewicz, now a legislative liaison for the Senate sergeant at arms. When Olkewicz came aboard the subcommittee, she knew Apostolou had a reputation for being smart and professional.

"She was very gracious to work with," Olkewicz said. "I remember being intimidated by her because she was very bright."

But Olkewicz said Apostolou helped orient her to the subcommittee, including her in meetings and explaining budgetary priorities.

Olkewicz describes Apostolou as "bipartisan," a trait fostered by her time working on both sides of the aisle. When the Democrats took back the Senate in 2007, Olkewicz said Democratic members on the subcommittee took an interest in greening the Capitol. It wasn't a Republican issue, Olkewicz said, but Apostolou was "patient in understanding it."

"She was very open to what my bosses had to say," Olkewicz added.

Move to energy and water

Apostolou moved to her current job on the Energy and Water Development Subcommittee in 2009. Apostolou said learning some of the new issues the subcommittee dealt with was the biggest challenge. "Nuclear weapons was something I knew nothing about three years ago," she said.

"It's complicated. It's controversial. It's expensive," Evans said of the portfolio the subcommittee handles. Hot-button topics like nuclear weapons, nuclear waste disposal, flood control, civil works issues and loan guarantee programs all fall within the subcommittee's purview, he said.

Apostolou said the subcommittee faces many challenges with the Department of Energy. The Government Accountability Office lists DOE as a high-risk agency for contracts, she said. Because almost all DOE work is done through contracts, she added, the subcommittee spends a great deal of time looking into management-improvement issues with GAO's help.

Apostolou's day-to-day schedule is tied to the appropriations cycle, she said. At the beginning of the year, she's deciphering the president's budget. Later on, there are hearings and markups. If she's working for the majority, she would be working to write the bill and report language and would work with the Congressional Budget Office on figures.

Facing a CR

She said that in her 25 years on the committee, there have been many changes.

"There's a lot of talk about how things have become more partisan," she said. "We just don't do much through regular order anymore. And that's been really frustrating."

In her first decade on the committee, appropriations bills would regularly pass every year. But things have changed.

"We just skip that floor part a couple times in the past few years," she said. "And, really, we're not going to the floor this year with an individual energy and water bill, even though my bosses hoped that would happen. But that unfortunately did not take place."

This year, the subcommittee's bill passed out of the full committee (E&ENews PM, April 26). But it hasn't made it to the Senate floor. This summer, congressional leaders agreed to keep the government funded through the end of March, apparently conceding that failing to pass a budget could harm re-election prospects (E&ENews PM, July 31).

"A couple weeks ago, if someone had told me that we were going to have a six-month [continuing resolution], I would have said, 'You are crazy. That's not going to happen.' But that's now what we're going to be working on in September," Apostolou said.