Mace wants a bill to ban staff from living with members. Her own staff say they lived with her.

The Capitol Hill outlet Sources Say News, founded by longtime Hill reporter Juliegrace Brufke, reported on August 17, 2026 that Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC-1) has a new rule she would like to impose on her colleagues: don't live with your staff. Former Mace aides, the outlet reports, had one question. Where, exactly, is she drawing the line?

This dispatch is built on Brufke's reporting; the credit and the link belong up top. Below, the resolutions and Mace's own quotes are verified against the public record, and Mace's office denial is reproduced in full.

What Mace proposed

On July 30, 2026, Mace introduced a pair of House resolutions, both referred to the House Committee on Ethics:

• H.Res.1465 would amend House rules to prohibit a member from "engaging in a sexual relationship with any employee of the House."
• H.Res.1466 would prohibit a member from "cohabitating with any employee of the House of Representatives," with an exception for married couples.

Her pitch was tidy. "A boss and a roommate should never be the same person," Mace said, per Holy City Sinner. She added, per Fox News: "No staffer should ever be coming home at night to the person who signs their paycheck. It's inappropriate, it's a conflict of interest, and it should have been banned decades ago."

Rep. Nancy Mace's pitch for her staff-cohabitation resolution, H.Res.1466, introduced July 30, 2026.

The resolutions came amid a run of reporting on member-staffer misconduct, involving former Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and Tony Gonzales (R-TX) and Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC), and on living arrangements, including Sources Say's own reporting that Rep. Abe Hamadeh (R-AZ) had lived with a senior staffer at his Capitol Hill residence.

What former aides told Sources Say

Then comes the turn in Brufke's story. "Several people who worked for Mace say her own history makes that line harder to draw than her bill lets on," the outlet reports.

Multiple former staffers told Sources Say that during Mace's first campaign, a senior campaign aide lived in an apartment above the garage at her home on Daniel Island.

Then there is Washington. In the spring of 2022, per the outlet, a second former staffer, a senior aide at the time, was flying up to D.C. from the district each week and, rather than expensing a hotel, was put up at Mace's townhouse. "Rather than spend money on the hotel, they basically forced me to stay at her place," the former aide told Sources Say. Mace, the aide said, "wanted me in the district when she was in the district and then in DC when she was in DC," so they crashed in the basement.

By the aide's telling, it was close quarters. "There was a curtain, there wasn't even a door, which was really weird," they said. Three people close to the office corroborated the account, per the outlet. The coffee maker was down there too, so most mornings the congresswoman would come make coffee a few feet from where the aide had slept, the two of them separated by that same curtain. "The workday would start for me at like 6:30 when I would hear the coffee maker going off," the aide said. "It's like, oh, shit, that's my boss."

"It was way too much contact with the boss for a work week," the aide said.

A former senior aide, to Sources Say News, on the spring 2022 arrangement.

Mace's office rejects the premise

Mace's office denies the characterization. In a statement to Sources Say, a spokesperson for the Office of Congresswoman Nancy Mace said:

"The suggestion that Rep. Mace lived with her staff, directed her employees to stay at her home, or maintained a 'crash pad' for federal employees is false. Rep. Mace did not and has never lived with her staff, and her home was never a crash pad for federal employees. Official travel and lodging records are maintained in accordance with applicable reporting requirements. Publicly available records include multiple examples of the office paying for hotel lodging for staff travel to Washington, D.C."

The outlet also aired the pushback in detail. One source disputed the curtain account, arguing it was a separate private space in an English-basement setup, and that the earlier campaign stay was a brief arrangement for an aide who needed a place after previously living out of state. And a proponent of the Mace bill drew a sharp distinction between letting a staffer stay in a pinch and actually living with a staffer while engaging in predatory behavior that creates improper power dynamics. The bill, they said, was written to target the latter, not last-minute platonic stays in a separate residence.

Mace's stated rationale for the ban, per Fox News.

The line she wants to draw

Mace wants a clear rule against living with staff. As Sources Say frames it, whether her own basement would have cleared it "may come down to whether you remember a door or a curtain."

A former aide's description of the townhouse basement, per Sources Say News.

The record

• Mace sponsored two resolutions on July 30, 2026: H.Res.1465 (no sexual relationship with a House employee) and H.Res.1466 (no cohabitating with a House employee, married couples excepted). Both were referred to the House Committee on Ethics and, as of this writing, have seen no further action.
• Mace's quoted rationale ("a boss and a roommate should never be the same person"; "no staffer should ever be coming home at night to the person who signs their paycheck") is confirmed in independent press coverage (Holy City Sinner, Fox News).
• The accounts of a garage-apartment stay during her first campaign and a 2022 townhouse-basement stay are reported by Sources Say News, attributed to multiple former Mace staffers, with three people said to corroborate the basement account. Maceopedia has not independently verified the anonymous-source accounts; they are presented as the outlet's reporting.
• Mace's office denies she ever lived with staff, directed employees to stay at her home, or kept a "crash pad," and points to office records of paid hotel lodging for staff travel. A source and a bill proponent draw a distinction between a brief stay in a separate space and living with a staffer.

Sources & related coverage

• Sources Say News, "SCOOP: Mace Wants to Ban Living With Staff. Her Own History Complicates the Line." by Juliegrace Brufke (Aug. 17, 2026), the reporting this dispatch is built on
• Sources Say News, "Hill Spill" newsletter follow-up on the living-with-staff ban
• Sources Say News, reporting on Rep. Abe Hamadeh's live-in staffer
• Congress.gov, H.Res.1465 (119th Congress), the sexual-relationship resolution
• Congress.gov, H.Res.1466 (119th Congress), the cohabitation resolution
• Fox News, "Capitol sex scandals spark push to ban House lawmakers from sleeping with staffers", Mace's quoted rationale and the scandal context
• Holy City Sinner, "Rep. Mace Introduces Resolutions to Ban Members of Congress From...", confirms the "boss and a roommate" quote
• Axios, House Ethics and the member-staffer misconduct backdrop
• Maceopedia, The Legislative Record, every bill and resolution Mace has sponsored

This dispatch reports Brufke's Sources Say News scoop with attribution, alongside the verified public record: the two resolutions (Congress.gov), the introduction date, and Mace's quoted rationale (Holy City Sinner, Fox News). The former-aide accounts are attributed to Sources Say News and its named and anonymous sources; Maceopedia has not independently verified them. Mace's office denies the characterization in full, and its statement is reproduced above, along with the pushback the outlet reported. Nothing here asserts wrongdoing in Maceopedia's own voice.