What are House Members' Financial Priorities?
When looking at American democracy, it’s important to have transparency in the allocation of financial resources of the House of Representatives as it serves as a reflection of what are their priorities. This data can be accessed through the House Office Expenditure Data. Looking at House members’ navigation of their budget and expenses, we can look at their priorities for what they feel needs more resources. For this data exploration, I decided to look at the 2022 data for Q1, Q2, and Q3 to understand the financial priorities of house members(using both the house expenditure data and house member data) during the most recent completed year. By delving into this data, we can get an understanding of what the priorities were for last year.
The initial visualization shows the expense distribution across the different categories. This lets us see what are the key areas in spending. At the forefront of expenses distribution lies personal compensation, which creates the story of how important compensation is to the House. This significant allocation of resources towards personal compensation shows how the House is dedicated to nurturing their workforce and making an environment for hard work. The second highest spending category is printing and reproduction which shows how important spreading information and gathering support is for the House. This also shows that transparency for legislative documentation is very important to the House if they are allocating funds to this section. Another notable allocation of resources is towards franked mail, which shows how important communication is within the House and outside. It seems that they are striving to cultivate transparent engagement to the public and amplify the voices and concerns of their members.
This led me to wanting to explore the financial footprints of the top 10 House members.
When looking at the financial footprints of the top 10 House members, it revealed a diverse spending pattern between each elected representative. Outside of personal compensation, which is the highest amount for all of the top 10 spending House members, 9 out of the 10 house members focus their attention on printing and reporting and franked mail. This shows a strong focus on fostering inclusive engagement with their constituents. A notable departure from this trend is Jenniffer González-Colón. She focuses her attention on supplies and materials showing her dedication to channeling resources into essential supplies and support for improvement in community development or sustainable growth. The difference between these spending profiles reflects the different values and priorities of their respective constituencies and House members feel is important in fostering their communities.
This led me to wanting to take a closer look at the top 5 highest spending officials because the stacked bar graph looked a lot harder to read.
When spotlighting on the distinct spending patterns for the top 5 highest spending officials within the House of Representatives, we can see a clearer diverse financial profile. Brad Sherman, Frederica Wilson, Scott Fitzgerald, and Dan Bishop seem to have substantial investments in printing and reproduction initiatives, showing their care and commitment to transparent communication channels and accessible legislative information. This expense allows us to have access to House dataset. Another clear idea is the spending of Scott Fitzgerald, across the categories of franked mail, personal compensation, and printing and reproduction seem to be across the same amount. This tells the story of how much budget allocation goes into these three categories for Fitzgerald, he prioritizes these 3 categories the most telling us he is dedicated to transparency in communication as much as compensation. Jenniffer González-Colón has the highest personal compensation compared to the other 4 representatives but seems to be spending less in categories like franked mail and printing and reproduction compared to her high spending counterparts.
Looking at all the financial trajectories of these top House members, we can see a focus on transparent communication channels and accessible information within the House of Representatives. Within the financial landscape, it would be best to focus on areas with impact, since these are broad categories of spending, creating a descriptive idea of what these members are actually allocating their budget to is harder. We cannot see if these allocations are supporting education, healthcare, infrastructure, or environmental issues, but we can look further into what these representatives find important in their campaigns to understand what their budget allocation could be.
