House of Representatives Expenditures: What’s Franked Mail?
“Members of the House of Representatives get an annual budget for their Washington and district offices, but how they spend it is up to them.” This is how the ProPublica website introduces the United States House of Representatives office expenditure data. Every two years we get to vote for who we want to represent our state in the House. Each member has gone through a huge campaign to get to where they are, so as citizens, we hope that the people we elect are using our tax money appropriately. I became curious about where exactly this money goes, who uses it, and how much are they using. ProPublica, which collects and publishes this data each quarter, makes these records easy to download. Let’s dive in by looking at the expenditures in 2022.
The data set for each quarter was joined to have one source to work with. I started my investigation by looking to see which categories have the most expenses in them. Equipment and Personal Compensation were the top two categories in 2022 with them each grossing $502,545,907.74 and $451,642,853.00 respectively. However, there was one category that stood out to me — Franked Mail. What is franked mail? Why are we spending $15 million on this? Who is Frank? These were just the first questions to come to mind. After some research, I learned that 1) Frank isn’t a person, and 2) franked mail is pre-paid postage that members of Congress get to use. Lots of documents, packages, and other files get mailed every day and the USPS offers free postage to members of Congress — to use within reason. With today being such a digital age, I was curious who was using this service the most. By grouping the member’s data and aggregating the sum of their expenses on franked mail I found the top 10 spenders.
It was clear from this first look that the Republican members of the house were more likely to spend money on franked mail than Democratic members, but I needed to make sure. So, I compared these categories by party.
I further investigated this by finding the top spenders for each party. In the Republican party, Scott Fitzgerald from Wisconsin, Dan Bishop from North Carolina, and Cliff Bentz from Oregon were the top three spenders averaging $287,292 between the three of them. In the democratic party, Brad Sherman from California, Marcy Kaptur from Ohio, and Gerald Connolly from Virginia were the top spenders averaging $171,042 between the three. I think we can all agree that both parties are spending a lot of money on mail. This got me thinking though, are these same people spending a lot of money on just mail, or all around? This question leads me to my next investigation, how much are these members spending on equipment — the top expense category for all of Congress? To do this I calculated the total equipment expense for the top 10 Democrats and top 10 Republicans who are also the top 10 spenders for franked mail.
In this list, we see Brad Sherman (D) leading with $1,253,893 spent on equipment in 2022. There is more of an even spread of Democrats and Republicans this time around, but remember, these members are only those that had the top franked mail expense. What about everyone else you ask? Well, I thought the same thing and switched gears to look at the equipment category. Unlike franked mail, this time we found that Democratic members of the house spend more than Republican members.
Now, we’ve investigated franked mail spenders and equipment spenders. We found that for franked mail, Republicans spend more, and the opposite for equipment. At this point, I felt stuck. I wasn’t expecting to find some huge difference in the parties. I was pleased that members on both sides of the aisle seemed to be spending our money equally overall. Yet I still don’t feel right about over $15 million being spent on mail, so I wanted to look at the overlap of the top franked mail spenders and the top equipment spenders. Maybe they didn’t overlap and some members just allocate money differently? Well, not exactly. I found that three Republican members and four Democratic members made it on both the top franked mail and top equipment lists of their respective parties. Members of the house overall spend more on equipment purchases than they do on each piece of franked mail. For the seven members that overlapped for the respective parties, the distribution of each purchase looks like the following:
American citizens pay a lot of money in taxes, old news, but little did we know that $15 million would go to franked mail for members of the house, and over $502 million on equipment costs. These numbers seem like a lot when we compare them to how much we each pay individually, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that much. The house is made up of 435 members and these funds must support their offices and staff. It’s reassuring as a citizen, and as a data science student, to see that our government (for the most part) keeps clean and strict records for us to be able to see how our tax money is used. Hopefully none of the members in my search end up being turned in for fraud, but I’ll leave that investigation for the professionals.
