WASHINGTON – Incoming congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez intends to be one of the few lawmakers on Capitol Hill who pay their interns, the New York Democrat said in a tweet Tuesday.

And her chief of staff told The Washington Post that they intend to pay the interns "at least" $15 an hour.

"Time to walk the walk," Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. "Very few members of Congress actually pay their interns, We will be on of them."

Ocasio-Cortez, 29, is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. The self-described democratic-socialist has taken her advocacy of workers' rights to Washington where she has already begun to take on the way congressional staffers in general, and interns in particular, are paid.

On Monday, she said that when she went to a "dive spot in D.C. for some late night food," she talked with the staff. She said many of them told her that they were congressional staffers working second jobs, prompting her to call the pay rates for people working in Senate and House offices a "disgrace."

"It is unjust for Congress to budget a living wage for ourselves, yet rely on unpaid interns & underpaid overworked staff just bc Republicans want to make a statement about 'fiscal responsibility,'" she tweeted Monday.

Later that day she commented on the "rich irony" of lawmakers asking, "How are you going to pay for it?" who then "grow awfully quiet when called out on their expectation that part-time workers magically invent money to work for free."

Although Ocasio-Cortez seemed to blame Republicans for congressional staffers' low pay, a June 2017 study by Pay Our Interns found they actually use fewer unpaid interns than their Democratic colleagues.

The study found that 51 percent of Senate Republicans offer paid internships compared with 31 percent of Democrats. In the House, just 8 percent of Republicans and only 3.6 percent of Democrats offer paid internships.

On Monday, Pay Our Interns tweeted a screenshot of an ad for an unpaid press intern to work for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. Schumer's office told Rolling Stone that the ad "was made in error" and that beginning in January, they will offer "a stipend to eligible interns."

Congress has taken steps to address the problem. An appropriations measure signed by President Donald Trump in September included an annual allowance of $20,000 per House member for internships. That money is in addition to the overall Members' Representational Allowance given to each lawmaker to pay staffers.

Another recent budgetary concern of Ocasio-Cortez drew sharp criticism. Based on an article that appeared in The Nation, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted $21 trillion in Pentagon funds "could not be traced, documented or explained" and she said that money could have paid for 66 percent of the projected cost of a decade of universal health care.

But Washington Post fact-checkers pointed out that she misrepresented the data because that $21 trillion in Department of Defense mistakes included both positive and negative errors and occurred over a 17-year period.

The Post gave the claim "four Pinocchios," a rating it reserves for "whoppers."

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's first days:Treated as intern, clothing criticized