The Library of Congress's Salaried Cats — The True History of America's Official Federal Government Cat Program, 1898–1952
2026-06-12
19th Century Federal Cat Pay Records | Government Cats of America | The Hidden Story of the World's Largest Library
Somewhere inside the United States National Archives, there are bundles of documents that most people will never open in their lifetimes.
The original Constitution. The Declaration of Independence. Executive orders from every president who ever held the office. And tucked somewhere among all of that — far less famous but arguably more entertaining than any of it — a piece of paper that has been quietly waiting for someone to notice it.
An official accounting record confirming that the United States federal government paid a salary to a cat.
The amount is specified. The purpose is stated. There are signatures. There are seals. A complete bureaucratic document exists — fully valid under the laws of the United States — proving that the federal government hired a cat as an official employee and compensated that employee through the standard payroll process.
It started with a library. Not an ordinary one. The largest book collection in the world.
How the Library of Congress Came to Have a Rat Problem
The Library of Congress did not have an easy beginning.
In 1800, when Congress relocated to Washington D.C., a small reference library was established to support the work of its members. It occupied a modest space inside the Capitol building and held a modest collection.
Then in 1814, British forces invaded Washington and burned the Capitol to the ground. The library burned with it. Approximately 3,000 volumes — everything the library had accumulated — were destroyed in a single night.
What saved the institution was Thomas Jefferson. The former president offered to sell his personal library of 6,487 volumes to Congress. Jefferson's collection was not a law library.
It was the library of a man who believed, deeply and without reservation, that knowledge had no legitimate boundaries — philosophy, science, literature, geography, architecture, natural history. Congress accepted. The collection became the foundation on which everything else was built, and Jefferson's guiding principle became the library's permanent philosophy.
The growth that followed was rapid. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the collection had swelled to hundreds of thousands of volumes. In 1897, the library moved into its own dedicated building — the Thomas Jefferson Building, an Italian Renaissance structure that was, at the time of its completion, among the largest and most magnificent library buildings anywhere in the world. It remains one of the most beautiful buildings in Washington D.C.
And this magnificent building had a serious problem.
Rats.
Hundreds of thousands of books. Maps. Manuscripts. Documents. All of it made from paper and leather and cloth — precisely the materials rats find most appealing. The larger the building, the more rats it attracted, and nineteenth-century construction offered no reliable way to keep them out. Poison was dangerous to the books and to the people who worked among them. Traps could only do so much.
The solution was the one humanity had been reaching for across thousands of years of civilization.
The First Official Record — A Pay Stub from 1898
The earliest well-documented evidence of the Library of Congress formally employing cats dates to 1898, during the tenure of Ainsworth Rand Spofford, one of the most consequential librarians in American history.
In the library's operating budget from this period, an unusual line item appears. Feed and maintenance costs for cats. And more directly — cat salary.
The exact figures vary slightly depending on which records you consult. The most frequently cited amount falls between $25 and $40 per year. Converted to present-day value, that works out to roughly $800 to $1,200 annually. It might sound modest, but in an era when an unskilled laborer earned approximately one dollar per day, it was a figure that carried real weight.
The salary was not, of course, handed to the cat. A staff member received the funds and used them to cover food, veterinary care, and general maintenance. But the critical detail is how the budget line was labeled. This was not recorded as "animal maintenance costs" or "pest control expenditure." The official document classified it in language that treated the cat as a recipient of compensation — as an employee, not equipment.
The precision of American federal accounting is what makes this story so remarkable. Every dollar spent by the federal government required a stated purpose and a stated beneficiary. Inside that system, a cat was entered as a beneficiary. This was not a joke. It was a straightforward administrative decision, handled with the same seriousness as any other line item in the budget.
The Man Who Hired Them — A Portrait of Spofford
Ainsworth Rand Spofford served as Librarian of Congress from 1864 to 1897, a tenure of thirty-three years that transformed the institution beyond recognition.
When he arrived, the library held approximately 82,000 volumes.
When he left, it held nearly one million. The mechanism behind this extraordinary expansion was a single legislative masterstroke: in 1870, Spofford engineered an amendment to the copyright law requiring that two copies of every work registered for copyright in the United States be deposited with the Library of Congress.
The elegance of this was absolute. Every book published in America flowed automatically into the library's collection, at no acquisition cost whatsoever. Spofford had found a way to make the entire American publishing industry work as an involuntary donor program. The library grew without spending a dollar on it.
More books meant more rats. Spofford was a pragmatist. He identified the most effective solution to the problem and implemented it without ceremony.
He hired cats.
Whether Spofford thought of the cats as tools or as something closer to colleagues, the records don't say. But the fact that their compensation appeared as a formal line item in the official budget suggests he understood them as genuine participants in the library's operation — not consumables, but contributors.
It Was Never Just the Library — The Wider World of Federal Cats
The Library of Congress story is actually one chapter in a considerably larger history.
Across the nineteenth century, multiple branches of the United States federal government were formally employing cats, and the practice at the library was not its origin but rather its continuation of an established pattern.
The State Department had been including cat-related costs in its official budget since the 1860s. The reasoning was straightforward and serious: the department was responsible for safeguarding original treaties and critical diplomatic documents. A rat destroying a treaty original was not merely a records management problem. It was a potential diplomatic incident with a foreign nation.
The Treasury Department faced an even more concrete form of the same threat. Printed currency and financial records were stored there. Rats had actually gotten into printed banknotes — this was documented, not hypothetical — and the resulting losses were quantifiable. The case for cats was easy to make on purely financial grounds.
In 1907, the federal government formalized what had been operating as informal practice by issuing official guidance recognizing the "government cat" program. Individual agencies were authorized to employ cats as needed and to fund that employment through standard operating budgets. For the first and presumably only time in American history, cats were formally incorporated into the federal civil service structure.
The program operated officially until 1952, when Congress removed it from the approved budget categories — citing advances in modern pest control technology, including more effective rodenticides and professional extermination services.
The cats, however, did not entirely disappear. They continued in various agencies through informal arrangements: staff members quietly bringing food from home, small allocations buried in general operating expenses. The tradition outlasted its official recognition.
The Famous Ones — Cats Who Left Their Mark
Among the many cats who served in federal buildings over the decades, a handful left enough of an impression to be remembered by name.
Tom is the most frequently cited of the Library of Congress cats, recorded as having served for at least a decade in the late nineteenth century. Staff accounts from the period describe him as exceptionally effective at his primary job, and also — this detail appears in multiple recollections — genuinely popular with visitors, particularly children who came to the library and discovered that its most approachable resident was a cat rather than a librarian.
Speaking of Tom — you might wonder whether this particular Tom had any connection to a certain famous animated cat. He did not. The cat and mouse characters created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera for MGM were originally named Jasper and Jinx when their first short, Puss Gets the Boot, was released in 1940.
When the film became a hit and the studio decided to continue the series, MGM held an internal competition to rename the characters, offering a $50 prize. An animator named John Carr won with the suggestion of Tom and Jerry — drawing on a nineteenth-century British slang term for rowdy young men popularized by Pierce Egan's 1821 novel Life in London, and on a warm winter cocktail of the same name that had been popular in America for decades.
The name also benefited from the fact that male cats were commonly called tomcats in everyday English. The Library of Congress employee and the cartoon character share a name and nothing else.
The State Department cats generated some of the most detailed surviving records. Ledger entries from the 1880s and 1890s, currently held at the National Archives, document not just food costs but veterinary expenses — including treatment costs for cats that fell ill. Tucked among the documents of American diplomatic history, there are medical receipts for cats. This seems like it should be surprising. Somehow it isn't.
The Treasury Department cats produced the most dramatic moment in federal cat history. Sometime in the 1920s, during a period of congressional debate over budget reductions, a member of Congress challenged the cat-related line items as unnecessary expenditure.
A Treasury official responded that the costs avoided by employing cats — measured in prevented losses to currency, bonds, and financial records — exceeded the cost of employing them by a factor of many times over. The cats were defended before Congress. The cats won.
What the Bureaucracy Reveals
The most interesting thing about this story might not be the cats themselves. It might be what the paperwork reveals about the humans who processed it.
The American federal accounting system demands that every expenditure be assigned a purpose and a recipient. When that system encountered a cat, it did not create a special exception. It did not establish a separate category for non-human employees.
It applied its standard logic and arrived at its standard conclusion: this entity performs a service; this entity requires resources to continue performing that service; those resources must be allocated through the budget; the budget requires a line item; the line item requires a name.
The result was "cat salary" in an official government document. Not as a joke. As an administrative record.
It is worth placing this alongside what we have seen in other countries and other institutions. Britain gave its Downing Street cat an official job title. Russia recognized its Hermitage cats as cultural heritage guardians.
America put its library cats on the payroll. The forms are different. The underlying acknowledgment is the same: this animal is doing something real here, and that reality deserves recognition in whatever language the institution uses to record what is real.
After 1952 — From Official to Unofficial
When Congress removed the cat program from the approved budget in 1952, the stated rationale was the availability of superior modern alternatives. Professional extermination services. Improved rodenticides. Ultrasonic deterrents. Technology had, at least in theory, made the cat's traditional function redundant.
The cats disagreed, in the sense that they continued to appear in federal buildings regardless of their official status. Staff members at the Library of Congress have described cats being present in the building through the latter half of the twentieth century — some accounts extend into the 1990s.
These were not authorized employees. They were sustained by the voluntary contributions of the people who worked among the books, who understood from daily experience what the budget documents of the 1920s had formally established: that the cats were earning their keep.
The Jefferson Building at Night
The Thomas Jefferson Building. The Library of Congress's main home.
Its Great Hall is one of the most extraordinary interior spaces in the United States — mosaic tiles of extraordinary intricacy, marble columns, a gilded ceiling that rises to a height that makes the people below it feel appropriately small in the face of accumulated human knowledge.
Imagine that hall late in the nineteenth century. The last staff member has left for the evening. The gas lamps have been turned down. Darkness has settled into the space between the columns and among the shelves.
And somewhere in that darkness, a cat appears.
It moves through the stacks where copies of the Constitution are kept, past the shelves where explorers' journals and presidents' speeches and poets' first drafts are stored, through rooms that hold everything the United States has ever thought important enough to write down.
It is not admiring any of this. It is following a scent trail along the baseboard.
It is doing its job. The job it was hired to do, at a salary of somewhere between twenty-five and forty dollars a year, by the largest library in the world, operating under the full administrative authority of the United States federal government.
That is what cats have always done. In every civilization that ever built something worth protecting, in every institution that ever assembled something worth preserving — the cat was there, moving through the dark, keeping watch over what the humans cared most about.
With or without the paperwork.
The paperwork just makes it official.
