In an imperfect system, this is probably a reasonable situation. Having people with little to no knowledge of how government agencies work making decisions about them is probably not the best idea. This is not to say that this experience is always put to the best use, but the alternative is to pick people without any track record.
A second factor is that incumbents are hard to displace, so at 6 year terms, you win a few elections and it's decades in office. If you start at 50, three terms gets you to age 68. And many serve far more than that (https://www.senate.gov/senators/longest_serving_senators.htm - Bold indicates still serving). The senate certainly is not likely to implement term limits on themselves.
northgrave t1_iqptymv wrote
Reply to comment by New_Evening_2845 in [OC] Median age difference between US Senators and the US population (1950-2022) v2 by JolietJakeLebowski
That is probably at least partially right. Most Senators have previous government experience, either directly or relatedly, and many made the jump from the House (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_United_States_senators).
In an imperfect system, this is probably a reasonable situation. Having people with little to no knowledge of how government agencies work making decisions about them is probably not the best idea. This is not to say that this experience is always put to the best use, but the alternative is to pick people without any track record.
A second factor is that incumbents are hard to displace, so at 6 year terms, you win a few elections and it's decades in office. If you start at 50, three terms gets you to age 68. And many serve far more than that (https://www.senate.gov/senators/longest_serving_senators.htm - Bold indicates still serving). The senate certainly is not likely to implement term limits on themselves.