Steny Hoyer Yields the Floor

SIPPING A BEER at a Capitol Hill soirée in 1988, John Berry ’80 overheard a congressional staffer mention that a Virginia university was lobbying the National Archives to build a huge facility on its campus to house millions of its documents. The next morning Berry tipped off his boss, U.S. Rep. Steny H. Hoyer ’63, that the prized repository was in play. 

Within days, Hoyer and University System of Maryland Chancellor John S. Toll were leading the archivist of the United States on a tour of UMD’s campus; a couple of weeks later, Hoyer added an earmark to an appropriations bill establishing UMD as the site of the eventual 1.8 million-square-foot building. A befuddled Virginia staffer who later ran into Berry said, “I’ve never been so thoroughly sideswiped. Hoyer outsmarted us.”

Hoyer recalls the coup jubilantly: “Now it’s probably the premier archival institution in the world,” he says. “We brought some fantastic researchers to the campus.” 

Still popular—he won 72% of the vote in his district in the 2024 primary—Hoyer walks away as the only Marylander to serve as majority leader. A throwback to an era when members of both major parties respected each other, he helped steer the passage of bipartisan landmark legislation including the 1990 American with Disabilities Act and the 2002 Help Americas Vote Act in response to the contested 2000 presidential election, the most sweeping election reform since the Voting Rights Act.

“He is one of the most underrated giants of U.S. legislative history,” says Berry, who after working for Hoyer ran President Obama’s Office of Personnel Management and served as ambassador to Australia. 

Following retirement, Hoyer will donate his official papers to UMD Libraries, a collection that contains everything from personal notes, speeches, photos, campaign materials and correspondences with constituents and colleagues. 

“From the very beginning, the University of Maryland has been a big part of my life, and I’m very proud of it,” he says.

BORN IN NEW YORK, Hoyer moved to District Heights, Md., as a child and enrolled in UMD in 1957 (tuition: $178). After posting 1.7 and 1.0 GPAs his freshman year, he took a semester off, then reenrolled, still without direction. 

One day that spring, he was set to leave campus when a Pontiac convertible cruised by, carrying the guest speaker to the annual convocation ceremony. Hoyer thought the car looked cool and decided to follow it.

The teenager sat in awe as the handsome young U.S. senator talked passionately about politics and implored graduates to serve their communities and country. Immediately drawn to public service, Hoyer now calls his walk to the field house to hear John F. Kennedy “my road to Damascus.” 

He changed his major from business to government and politics and was elected student government vice president. After marrying his high school sweetheart and graduating with high honors, Hoyer enrolled in Georgetown law school and joined the campaign team of U.S. Rep. Daniel Brewster of Maryland; there, he met a young staffer from Baltimore named Nancy D’Alesandro, who the following year became Nancy Pelosi. After he was elected president of the Maryland Young Democrats, anointed by The Washington Post as “a man to watch” and remained on staff when Brewster became a U.S. senator, he made his first run for elected office, distinguishing himself in a crowded field vying for a state Senate seat with a platform on fair housing. 

The newly drawn district had backed segregationist candidate George Wallace in the 1964 presidential election, but Hoyer focused on a concentration of Black constituents, knocking on doors till his knuckles hurt. “People saw a skinny white kid looking younger than my 26 years, and said, ‘What are you doing here?’” he recalls. He won Black voters’ support nearly 7-to-1 and claimed the seat by 300 votes. In Annapolis, he cast one of his first votes to end the ban on interracial marriage. 

At 35, he became Maryland’s youngest-ever Senate president, championing a district growing increasingly Black, educated, affluent and attractive to federal government workers. In 1981 he won a special election to represent the U.S. House’s 5th District, earning the nickname Boy Wonder. “There was a certain way Steny Hoyer’s heels click-clicked along the marble halls of the State House that set him apart from the others. He had the sharpest, most urgent click-click in Annapolis,” the Post wrote upon his departure from the legislature.

Among his new constituents was Yvette Lewis, a Prince George’s County music teacher who dreamed of singing professionally—if only she could get her foot in the door at the Kennedy Center. Her husband suggested she call her congressman; maybe she could speak with a staffer. With surprising ease, she secured a meeting with Hoyer. She left with a smile and no expectations, but two weeks later received a letter from the Kennedy Center offering an interview.

Lewis landed a Kennedy Center teaching job, then a Washington Opera audition, then a resident understudy position. Following the contentious 2000 presidential election, she became politically active and ultimately served as chair of the Maryland Democratic Party for eight years. “Steny Hoyer changed my life,” she says. 

Hoyer didn’t remember their original meeting when they first bumped into each other in political circles years later, but that didn’t surprise her. 

“I’m not unique,” says Lewis, now a close friend who sits on the University System of Maryland Board of Regents. “I’m one of a million Hoyer stories.” 

HOYER GRADUALLY BUILT HIS INFLUENCE in Congress, chairing the Helsinki Commission on U.S.-European security, earning a seat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee and traveling to Darfur and South Sudan to raise awareness of genocide. He became Pelosi’s chief lieutenant in 2003 and House majority leader in 2007, charged with scheduling floor business and mobilizing the party vote on important legislation. 

With increased clout, he directed millions of dollars into UMD programs through federal agency appropriations. A savvy analyst, he identified potential research partnerships, joint faculty appointments and student pipelines connecting UMD to the government, then brokered behind-the-scenes deals. 

“He might tell his colleagues in the House, ‘Hey, the engineering school’s developing a remote sensing program that would be great for NASA Goddard,’” says Brian Darmody, chief strategy officer for the Association of University Research Parks. Formerly UMD’s assistant vice president for research and economic development, he worked closely with Hoyer in the 2000s to establish M Square, a public-private research hub that has since grown into UMD’s Discovery District Maryland. 

Hoyer also secured funds from the Department of Defense for a UMD center now known as the Applied Research Lab for Intelligence and Security; from the Department of Agriculture for the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, where more than two dozen UMD faculty work; and from the Food and Drug Administration for its Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, which has a research partnership with UMD in College Park. On campus, Hoyer also helped net construction money for the Physical Sciences Complex and The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. 

Meanwhile, he continued preaching in support of civil rights. In 2010, when a bill to end the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy banning gay Americans from serving openly in the military died in committee, Hoyer sidestepped the blockade by orchestrating a second Senate vote at the eleventh hour of the session, a “political miracle,” says Berry, his former staffer. 

Hoyer was the first person whom Berry came out to as gay, after his parents. When Berry’s partner died of AIDS, Hoyer pulled over on Route 50 and listened to him weep on the phone for 30 minutes. 

“He’s not only the best boss I’ve ever had, but a mentor, a second father, a true saint,” says Berry.

HOYER LOOKS YOUNGER than his 87 years, and he knows it. “God’s been good,” he says, after practically bounding into his office on the top floor of the Longworth building in crisp shirtsleeves and a yellow tie. Mentally sharp, though unsure whether he could deliver at 89, he is retiring somewhat reluctantly. Pelosi, his longtime colleague, is also stepping down at age 86. 

One corner of Hoyer’s office is dedicated to the late Rep. John Lewis, one of his closest friends in Congress, with whom he marched 15 times across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., to make good trouble. In an opposite corner is the flag of Denmark (the self-described “proud Dane” in 2009 was honored as a Knight of the Order of the Dannebrog).