Some congressional offices have open-door policies. They are organic spaces in which a staffer is free to roam into the boss’s office to discuss whatever is on his or her political mind.

Other offices have rules. Rigid, unspoken rules that make it obvious to everyone employed there that all information is to be filtered through a gatekeeper before it ever reaches the boss. That gatekeeper is the chief of staff.

Neither approach is wrong. An office with either setup could argue vigorously for the merits of one and the downfalls of the other. An office with an open-door policy can get out of control. With too many low-level staffers floating into the member’s office to suck up or bend his ear on trivial issues, he has little time to focus on important matters.

The same can be said of an office with a gatekeeper. That, too, can get out of control as the gatekeeper makes some decisions that should be made by the member.

Examples of the gatekeeper who oversteps his or her bounds have been on display in recent weeks on Capitol Hill as the House ethics committee continues investigating the Foley page scandal.

What did senior staffers know and when did they know it? What did they tell their bosses?

Kirk Fordham recently resigned as chief of staff to Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-N.Y.), who apologized in a campaign ad for not handling the matter better. As the former chief of staff to ex-Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), Fordham said he was aware of key pieces of information regarding Foley and discussed his concerns with Scott Palmer, chief of staff to House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.).

Palmer strongly disputes Fordham’s account.

Hastert has indicated that his staff did not inform him of Foley’s suspicious e-mails, even though Hastert and Palmer have a long working relationship and are D.C. roommates.

Hastert says he has no recollection of any conversations he had with House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Reynolds, who have separately claimed they approached the Speaker on Foley’s inappropriate contact with pages.

Was Palmer, a gatekeeper, insulating Hastert by handling the matter without his guidance? Had Fordham tried to address his boss’s distasteful behavior years ago and failed?

The question of the chief of staff’s role remains. How much information flows up to the congressman and how much reaches only the level of senior staff is determined by each individual office.

Largely an unknown, unrecognized figure to constituents, the chief of staff is the most powerful person in the office. In many cases he or she has a long-standing bond to the lawmaker, be it through a family member or a campaign. As the most trusted person in the office, the decisions a chief of staff makes on a daily basis aren’t easy; they can ruin or save a member’s career.

Lanier Avant, chief of staff to Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), first met his boss in 1987. His father, the Panola County commissioner, was first elected with Thompson — they were the first blacks elected to the posts in Mississippi.

Trust is not an issue between Avant and his boss; they send each other approximately 20 e-mails daily as well as talk on the phone and meet in person.

A well-known office philosophy: If you’re dealing with a problem you do everything you can to solve it before you bring it to the congressman. Avant said it is possible for a lawmaker not to know everything, but “it speaks poorly of staff to have a member in the dark.”

Richard Urey, chief of staff to Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.), receives a morning phone call from his boss between 7 and 9. They discuss news, what to be on top of, scheduling and legislative matters. The calls continue throughout the day and can extend into evening and over the weekend.

“To avoid driving people crazy, you have to make decisions about what the member needs to know in a particular minute,” said Urey, who does not consider himself a gatekeeper. “If you don’t, you will be on the phone all day and the member will work on items that will clearly be able to be handled on a staff level.”

Berkley’s office is a free-flowing atmosphere. Aides meet with her whenever they please. The catch? “The member needs to develop a sense of trust that [my] judgment is sound,” said Urey.

One GOP aide remarked, “I know some members who don’t let their chiefs of staff do a f—-ing thing. They might as well be a secretary.”

A Democratic Senate aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity said he has experienced both types of offices — those with a gatekeeper, and those with a more open attitude. “A lot of [aides] think, ‘I can clean this up.’ Others are so paranoid they need the boss to sign off on everything.

“To have a good office that runs effectively you need to be able to make decisions. It’s partly ego. In their mind they are doing the right thing for their boss. You do have some staff that operate their own little fiefdom. They wield this ungodly power on the Hill, oftentimes nameless, faceless to the voters back home, yet it’s the member who pays the price if the staffer screws up.”

It is precisely this power that must be watched. “It’s a power-hungry town,” said Avant. “With titles being as important as they are, people will create ways to make themselves seem more important than they otherwise would be. One way to do it is by setting themselves up to be the go-between for everything.”

A senior aide in a Democratic House office said she gossips with her boss any chance she gets because his eyes light up when she has juicy information to share. Whether it’s gossip about him or other lawmakers, she gets points for being such a messenger.

“We’re going to talk about someone’s personal life before legislation that person filed,” she said. “If it’s something to do with gossip there is no fricking way he’s not going to know about it.”

It’s worse if you don’t tell him, she explained, especially when it’s about him.

“We wouldn’t dare keep anything from [him]. If someone says something about him we totally go to him. We’re very protective of how people perceive him.”

She said the office has from time to time discussed implementing more of a gatekeeper policy when things run too wild. They try it for a few weeks, but always return to open door.

Urey typically avoids discussing petty personnel issues with Berkley.

“Staff management people are hired to take care of the operations within the office,” he said, insisting that if the matter affected her, he would tell her. “If someone is not doing a good job complying with an office rule, that would not be something the member would need to know, just as a CEO of a small business would not need to know everything that goes on on the assembly line.”

Which begs the question: Where is the line between imparting necessary information and wasting her time?

“There is just a lot of common sense here — you either have it or you don’t,” said Urey. “If you work for a member who does not want to hear bad news, that creates a bad climate. I work for a member who accepts the good with the bad and doesn’t kill the messenger. It wouldn’t be, ‘You moron, why did you bother me with this?’”

Jason Roe, chief of staff to Tom Feeney (R-Fla.), said it took him and Feeney four to five months to develop a strong comfort level, mostly because Feeney didn’t know him from a hole in the wall. Getting acquainted was crucial. Feeney had to learn to trust him. He had to learn what Feeney wanted to know.

“Part of the role of a chief of staff is to deal with the things that don’t necessarily rise to the level of the member,” he said.

Roe concedes that others might view him as a gatekeeper, but he said it isn’t so. “Naturally staffers are going to amass some degree of influence,” he said, but “are they amassing it for themselves or for their bosses? I absolutely see both.

“If I were to guess I would think people think that of myself. I have a constituency of one and that is Tom Feeney. Everything I do, at the end of the day I care about how it affects Tom Feeney. I don’t care how it affects me. There are people who use this job to parlay into other career opportunities.”

In the beginning of their relationship, Roe said, he often had to remind his boss to let go of the details: “A significant responsibility is to take as much off the member’s plate as possible. I’d have to jokingly say, ‘Let me be the chief of staff and you be the member of Congress.’”