Eleanor Holmes Norton Has 7 No Show Jobs

We Called Every Board She Sits On. They Haven't Seen Her In Years.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s 88-year-old congressional delegate, has more than one no-show job, according to her most recent financial disclosure. We contacted the half dozen boards she claims to sit on at elite institutions, and found that three of them hadn’t heard from her in years, and two of them don’t exist anymore.

Norton’s AWOL status comes on the heels of a genuinely disturbing report by NBC4 confirming what both Washington insiders and sentient beings have been saying for months: Norton is suffering from dementia. According to a police report obtained by NBC4, a pack of scammers dressed as HVAC repairmen walked into her house and walked out $4,400 richer for services they never performed. The report also notes that Norton has a caretaker with power of attorney, who reported the fraud to Norton’s credit card company.

Screenshot from Eleanor Holmes Norton’s 5/7/25 Financial Disclosure

Norton was once a genuine force of nature in DC politics and a celebrated civil rights warrior who marched on Washington in 1963. Sixty years later, her financial disclosures list positions that haven’t existed for years, suggesting that her staff has been resubmitting portions of her ethics forms on autopilot. Her office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Two congressional sources who spoke with Deeper States confirm that Holmes Norton is largely absent from committee meetings and planning sessions. The same is true of the committees and boards Norton lists on her disclosures.

These include the executive committee of the Yale Law School Association, the board of trustees for Antioch College, the lawyers committee for civil rights, the advisory boards at the Women’s Law & Public Policy Fellowship Program at Georgetown, the Women and Politics Institute at American University, and the Sewall Belmont House.

We reached out to each of these boards to ask what exactly Norton does in these roles. After repeated attempts, not a single one could confirm Norton’s attendance. Norton was a founding member of the Georgetown Women’s Law & Public Policy Fellowship Program and as a board member used to regularly host the program’s fellows for lunch-ins on Capitol Hill. But according to a spokesperson, she hasn’t done so since 2019. American University seemed genuinely confused by our inquiry. “The Women & Politics Institute no longer has an advisory board,” they wrote.

The steward of Sewall-Belmont House delivered a similar response, relaying that the site’s ownership was transferred to the National Park Service in 2016, and that the Park Service was not aware of the museum having an advisory board. They also relayed they had no record that Norton was currently involved with the operations of the site in any capacity.

When the Trump administration decided to send troops into the nation’s capital to harass and intimidate its residents, Norton was almost entirely absent, save for a generic statement condemning the occupation.

In the weeks after the federal siege, congressional Republicans held a series of hearings to publicly berate DC officials about crime and public safety. The hearings held by the Oversight Committee that Norton sits on should have been her moment. Instead, Norton took a back seat, struggling through a prepared statement. According to sources close to the city council, Norton’s “halting” performance sparked immediate discussions in city hall about organizing a unified effort to force her into retirement.

Since the deployment of the National Guard to Washington, two city council members have announced primary challenges against Norton for the upcoming midterm election: Robert White, the current at-large council member who challenged Bowser for mayor in 2022, and Brooke Pinto, the Ward 2 council member.

Meanwhile, Norton has not only refused to resign but told reporters she intends to run again for re-election at the age of 90. Her staff, meanwhile, maintains she still hasn’t made up her mind, which is probably true in the most literal sense possible.

The Democratic Party’s leadership has been utterly silent on this slow-motion disaster, unwilling to intervene with Norton in anyway. In the meantime, ICE continues to bludgeon its way from Silver Spring to Anacostia as the government shutdown stretches towards the one month mark. As Democrats juggle the dual imperatives of not endorsing the only Democrat in the NYC mayor’s race, and propping up the animated corpse of Janet Mills in Maine, Washington D.C. is, for the first time, an afterthought.