Money and how the House of Representatives spends it

Collin Smith
Fall 2023 — Information Expositions
4 min readOct 21, 2023

The spending habits of members of the House of Representatives in the United States have long been a subject of public scrutiny and debate. As elected officials responsible for managing taxpayer dollars and making crucial decisions about the nation’s budget, it is only natural that their personal spending is closely examined. So with this in mind, I wanted to see how this spending varied among things like quarters, purpose, and year.

To start, spending didn’t fluctuate a significant amount between quarters one, two, and three, however, for some reason quarter four seemed to have more of an increase in cash amounts. For example, over the course of the eleven years given in the csv file, quarter one saw 3.813579e+09 dollars, quarter two saw 3.711488e+09, the third saw 3.819742e+09, but strangely enough the final quarter jumped up to 4.187201e+09. So what does this mean? I decided to do some research on this to figure out why this steady increase was interrupted in quarter four. As it turns out, there’s a number of factors that could have possibly affected this. House members could be making last efforts to meet fundraising goals by the end of the year. Also, donations to political campaigns can have tax implications, and some individuals or organizations may make contributions in the fourth quarter to optimize their tax benefits. After more searching it looked like the presence of elections is also likely to see more funding contributions to candidates.

Additionally, I was curious as to what roles receive the most cash flow. To my surprise, FERS, or the Federal Employees Retirement System, stood at a whopping 1.027655e+09 dollars in total from 2011 to 2022, ranking it the highest of the different purposes within the data set. This made it very clear that making sure that candidates are financially comfortable after they retire is something that is highly valued when it comes to spending. Next up, at 7.196057e+08, was the position of Chief of Staff. This one didn’t shock me that much because it seemed pretty reasonable that the person holding this position manages a lot and oversees areas of the organization. What was strange to me however was the fact that after the fourth highest paid role, the decrease between amounts significantly lowered. This makes me question the ethics of spending on these groups of people. Who determines where the money goes? How do they decide how much they get?

After taking a look at the spending over the years I came to the conclusion that there wasn’t any crazy difference in cash amounts. Surprisingly there wasn’t a big change for 2020 because of the pandemic which I originally expected to have a drastic effect on it. However, there has been a steady rise within the past 4 years which leads me to believe that something has to be changing. The year 2019 ended with a total of 1.317766e+09 which then rose all the way up to 1.685909e+09 in 2022. Maybe there’s been a stronger attempt to collect money through fundraising or possibly even a jump in taxes to fund these roles.

Finally, I was curious to know what categories of spending had the most amount of money. What I saw was exactly what I expected. Personal spending came in first at 8.712490e+09. What came next you might ask? Personal benefits at 3.253788e+09. The categories that followed that didn’t involve the financial benefit of people were greatly less than these two. This made me wonder if these personal benefits were coming from taxpayer money or other sources. Either way, I’m not surprised to see these personal compensations being among the highest sums of money.

To conclude, there are several factors that go into how the house of representatives spends money. While it is clear that the most amount of money goes towards the personal gain of the representatives, it isn’t an egregious number compared to the other things that the money goes to. Some members may face criticism for their financial choices, but it is essential to recognize that the vast majority work diligently to represent their constituents and uphold their responsibilities ethically and transparently. When it came to spending over the years, there wasn’t any correlation between the money and the year which came as a surprise to me. Also, the most spending happens in the fourth quarter which can be the result of elections and fundraising goals. Whatever the reason for the spending, it’s safe to say that there is high value in the transparency of this data which supports the idea that these cash flows are ethically and adequately distributed.

--

--