How does the House of Representatives Spend Our Money?
By Ainsley Cox
Every member of the house of representatives is granted a Member Representational Allowance (MRA), which according to the house “is intended for individual member offices’ expenditures and receipts during a single legislative year. The MRA is funded through fiscal year appropriations and authorized annually by the Committee on House Administration (CHA).” The allowance in 2016 ranged from $1.17-$1.8 million. Every member is required to keep track of and submit how they spend that allowance. Those records are then published for the public to view. The records include the names of the representatives, the amount spent, the category and the purpose for spending that money, what office it was for, and more. Examining the data thoroughly and frequently is a very important job since this data can be used to hold house members accountable if they begin spending taxpayer money in an unjustifiable way.
In this write-up, I was curious to examine how each party spends their money, specifically, seeing who was spending what in each party. However, the datasets available make that increasingly difficult. The two that I used, the quarter 3 house disbursements data from 2021 (which contains all of the spending that happened in Q3 by representatives) and the house context data (which contains personal information on each house representative), were only linked by one variable, the bio guide ID that each representative is assigned.
Below is a chart showing the proportion of Democrat to Republican spending during Q3 of 2021.
Democrats are wildly outspending Republicans in all areas, the most funded ones being Equipment, Personnel Benefits, and Personnel Compensation. However, the category with the most spending is ominously titled ‘“Other Services”. Included in this category are things like office totals and technology service contracts, once again very vague descriptions.
Another category that had unique purposes hidden inside was “Supplies and Materials”. Within this category was the purpose “Food & Beverage”. The House of Representatives spent over $4 million in the food and beverage category during the 3rd quarter of 2021. Divided between all representatives, that is roughly $10,000 each, or $110 per person per day.
Upon examining who was racking up the high prices meal tickets, I generated this:
Eleanor Norton, the big spender that she appears to be, spent over $700K in 91 days on food and beverages. That is over $7700 per day. Two other Representatives: Georgio Sablan and Madeleine Bordallo weren’t far behind.
But who was spending the most money on everything, not just sweet treats? To answer that question, I made this:
These representatives are the top ten whose spent the most in the third quarter of 2021. 7 are democrats, which supports the graphs shown above and displays just how much Democrats are outspending Republicans. However, if you look back at 2021, the Democrats held the House majority by only a slim margin with Nancy Pelosi standing as speaker of the house. While this is not enough to explain such a large disparity, it is a starting point.
The representatives who held the record that quarter for most money spent at one time is Democrat Madeleine Bordallo, former Lutienant-Governor of Guam. Bordallo spent $76,266,167.99 on “Personnel Benefits”, which I’m sure went to the benefit of all people working under her, a far more admirable case than food and beverages in my opinion.
Either way, it is safe to say the House of Representatives is a delegated a large sum of money every quarter from public dollars and it is important to follow that money. If the House begins to abuse this privilege that U.S. people have given it, we may suggest allocating those funds to separate causes, such as student loan debt, free healthcare, or even too better our education system.
The data that is published illustrates the power that analysis can have on affecting real change and displaying real life social issues. It is only one of the many ways that data plays a role in our politics, our government, our money, and our daily lives. So keep track of those politicians through their data to keep the United States of America a well-functioning place filled with checks and balances. In this case I mean that literally.
