How the government is spending
It is of no surprise that we know that our government needs to spend money. But what they choose to spend that money on is a bit more questionable, and it is something that struck my curiosity. The government has been spending money for as long as there has been a government, but the data that I chose to focus on is of 2021. And what I am curious to find is if there are any areas of expenses that seem unnecessarily out of place. And since we all are taxpayers it is important to monitor exactly how the government spends so that we can pay the appropriate amount of taxes.
To answer this question I had to look in depth into data that was released from ProPublica’s House Office Expenditure Data for the 2021 year. This data contains all the information we need to answer our question. When it came to the actual analyzation it was pretty straight forward. First things first I was curious as to how many unique “Purposes” there were within the data. The Purposes section is what they use to categorize the expenditures. And it turns out there is a whopping 3,196 different categorizations for these expenditures. Ranging anywhere from food and travel to their actual compensation. From that point I aggregated the data by their purpose and then sorted that data with the highest expenses first.
Now at this point in the process there are still 3,196 different purposes to look at and it would be an absolute nightmare trying to plot all of these different things into a nice and straight forward chart. So instead, I narrowed down the list to only look at the top twenty highest expenses for 2021. Once this was plotted it was clear to see an obvious trend and see some of the details that the data reveals.
Looking at the chart we can go ahead and exclude the “Office Totals” because this category of course contains the sum of all of the expenses for that year. So moving onto the “Personnel Compensation Totals” as the second highest expense category we can understand as to why that would make sense for that to be there as the second highest expense. And going down the list to the “FERS” (Federal Employee Retirement System) section we can see that the expenses slowly start to trail off indicating that there really is much of an expense after that.
But everything prior to the “FERS” purpose is a reasonable expense that is worth looking into. And from a distance we can see a lot of categories that sound like a reasonable thing that the government has to spend money on. But for a lot of these categories, they are using a lot of broad language in which the government could really log any type of expense into any one of these. For example, the “General Expenditure Totals” or the “Other Services Totals” are relatively high categories on our list. But they really don give us any insight of what is actually within there. And you would think that with 3,196 different categories that there would be a wider variation with their expenditures but that just isn’t the case here.
Now it does seem that there is something going on here with these general categories being so highly ranked within our list. But it also makes sense from their side of things, why would the government release information that blatantly says that they are miss spending the money we pay taxes for, for anyone to go out and analyze. So I would not totally discredit these findings, however this could be very accurate information and in further analyzation of different years it could be compared and contrasted to similar categories to find out if this is something that has increased over time or something that is remaining relatively constant within the last decade or so. With that being said I think that it is important for us the tax payers to be paying close attention to this data, because it is through this information that we can discover trends and ethically keep the government accountable for their expenses.