What does the House prefer, In-Person or Zoom?
Introduction
Every year, The United States House of Representatives receives a budget to fund their offices and staff. This budget is important because it allows them to put their political ideas into action. The political climate and where to spend what money all depends on what is happening in the world. Based on the current development of our society, the need for money to be spent on different things is ever changing, and different things are being prioritized based on society as a whole. As society shifts towards a more digital world, there are more opportunities for online communication between people and organizations. Since this is the direction our world is heading towards, would that also be reflected in our government officials? It would be interesting to see how the US House of Representatives is changing how they distribute their spending. This post is going to explore how their travel spending has changed over the past 5 years as well as the communications equipment spending. These two factors are important because they can show if the government is also doing less in person communication, via traveling, and more communication through the internet and online platforms.
Data
The US government’s expenditures data is available to the public allowing for transparency in knowing exactly where the budget goes. The US House of Representatives has this information published, and Propublica has cleaned up this data into neat CSV files. The CSV files are separated into the four quarters of each year, making it easier to track across a single year. This data has information about where the money is being spent, who is being paid, and at what times. I am going to be looking specifically at the “travel expenses” category and the amounts that correspond to it. For this project, I used the files of every quarter from 2015 to 2021 in order to analyze current trends and predict new ones about our government’s spending. I originally chose to exclude 2020 and 2021 because of Covid as that is a huge factor in a travel budget, but I then changed my mind and included those years because I felt that they would provide useful insights into where our society is headed. I combined all of these files into one large dataframe in order to tackle the question of whether or not travel spending is decreasing over the past few years.
Findings
With online communication becoming the new standard, there is less need for people to meet and connect with each other in person. More and more of our daily interactions are taking place online with social media platforms like Snapchat and Facetime taking over these mediums. In the commercial world, Zoom and Slack are utilized for communication between teams within organizations. The question is does the government also follow this trend? Or do they reject this idea and prefer meeting in person for important matters?
The overall trend of the data shows that over the years of 2015–2017 the House spending on travel is increasing at a rapid rate, with a maximum in 2017 of $44 million. However, after 2017, there is a gradual decrease in spending on traveling and this trend continues into the pandemic with an all time low in 2020. As the pandemic situation improves in 2021, the spending on travel increases from 2020. This shows that travel restrictions slightly improved during 2021. The overall trend shows that less is being spent on travel and is instead being used for other expenses. The government spending less on traveling could be due to the technological advances made in communication services. It could be easy to assume this decrease in traveling is due to the pandemic, but that is why data from pre- and post-pandemic was included to show that this is a phenomenon not only caused by Covid. The trend really starts in 2017 where the highest spending in the last 7 years takes place. After 2017 the spending decreases and up until 2020, these are all pre-pandemic years where less traveling is happening in the House of Representatives.
Conclusion
In the many areas of spending by the House of Representatives, it was interesting to see how their money is being spent on traveling. Seeing as how the world is becoming more available online and there is less need for face to face interaction, it seems that the government is also heading in this direction. The overall spending on travel has decreased since 2017 but saw a slight increase in 2021 after Covid travel restrictions were lifted. The trend is showing that more things are being moved online, but I am interested in seeing if this trend has anything to do with the president in office. This is something that I’d like to look into in the future.
