How much do our elected officials spend on travel?
As we begin to approach the 2022 midterm elections, I believe it is important for the American people to understand how their tax dollars are being spent by those elected to represent them, especially when it comes to travel expenditures. Are the elected officials of this nation wasting large sums of money by needlessly traveling or are they living up to their promises of fiscal responsibility and not wasting our tax dollars? In order to answer this question and look at the travel habits of our elected officials, I combined two data sets, one containing basic information of members of the house of congress, and the other containing data relating to expenditures made by each member in quarter three in 2021. The expenditure data set is broken down into categories, with each category having several different purposes to label the expenditures.
I set out with the intention of finding out which form of transportation do the congressmen and congresswomen who were elected to represent the United States of America spend the most amount of money to travel around it. In order to answer this question I analyzed a dataset that contained information relating to expenditures made by each individual member of congress in quarter 3 of 2021. We find that the total amount of expenditures in this quarter was $139,729,515 and the total amount spent on travel was $4,973,119. This means that 3.56% of all expenditures in this period was due to travel, which is significantly less than I was expecting. When we ignore personnel compensation we find that travel is the category which had the third most amount of costs incurred, coming behind the rent, communication and utilities category and the other services category, which includes expenditure items such as technology service contracts, insurance, janitorial services and staff training.
When diving deeper into travel related expenditures incurred by members of congress in quarter three of 2021, we find that the largest expenditure was incurred by Norma Torres and her lodging related expenses. Lodging related expenses for congresswoman Norma Torres in quarter three of 2021 were $85,533. This is an incredibly high expenditure when taking into account the the average spending per delegate on travel is only $11,388.
As shown by the cat plot below, the Republican caucus tends to have larger travel related expenditures than. Part of the reasoning behind this discrepancy is the idea that many republican congressmen and congresswomen live in more rural areas, which typically are hard to access and far from any large airport hub. This means that in order for these representatives to travel from Washington DC back to their homes, they must first fly to the nearest airport, rent a car to get them home (or pay airport parking fees and store their personal vehicle). In addition to this more will be spent on gasoline and a higher amount of car mileage will be expensed as rural areas are also significantly more spread out than urban centers.
When we look at the box plot below, we find that the mean of travel related expenditures made by members of both caucuses is only $238, this around the price of a one way plane ticket, but we do see significant outliers on the box plot. The largest of which is a member of the democratic caucus that had an expenditure over $20,000.
After analyzing the previously mentioned data sets and creating visualizations, we find that our elected officials spend quite an egregious amount of taxpayer money on travel related expenses. This includes $51,177 spent on gasoline alone, at a time when many Americans are struggling to fill their automobiles at the pump. those elected to represent us take little action and supplement the difference with our hard earned money. In addition to the large amount of taxpayer money spent on gasoline, members of congress expended $936,709 on private auto mileage. Keep in mind that in 2021 the average member of congress enjoyed an annual salary of $174,000. Many of our elected officials will constantly rag on about egregious government spending and fiscal responsibility yet go out and charge the taxpayers for not just their plane tickets, but any aspect of travel.
