The Big Spenders on Travel in the House
Introduction
The United States House of Representatives has many different activities, all of which require funding. Given that it is one of the two houses in the United States Congress, it would be deemed that their activities are highly important but it is also very important to scrutinize the elected officials that make up the House and their spending. The average US citizen should be paying attention to how the House is spending their budget as these funds all come from taxes, taxes that are paid by all US citizens and residents. Americans get taxed on so many different things at the federal level, such as income tax, capital gains tax, estate tax, and employment tax, and they should be very concerned about how exactly the money that they are being made to pay to the government is being used. I was mostly curious about how the House of Representatives and its members were using funds for the purposes of travel. What kinds of things is the House spending travel funds on and who is spending the most on them?
Data
The House of Representatives has been required by law to publish their Statement of Disbursements since 1964 and these statements have been published online since 2009 to increase government transparency and accountability. ProPublica has standardized the data from these statements into CSV files that are available for download. These files are published for each quarter from the House Statement of Disbursements. The data from ProPublica for 2021 Q3 was used for the analysis here.
Purpose of Travel Disbursement
The bar chart above was created by aggregating how much has been spent for each travel purpose for the quarter. From this chart, it can be seen that commercial transportation has the most spent on it. It is expected that members of Congress would need to engage in travel very often as a part of their jobs, such as to meet with constituents and make media and public appearances, but this shows that it is a significant expense and burden on the taxpayer. The House of Representatives has spent almost $2.3 million in Q3 2021 on just commercial transportation and the next two largest expenses within travel were for private auto mileage and lodging. Nearly $1 million was spent for these respective purposes.
The number of transactions for each kind of travel expense was also looked at. It can be seen that commercial transportation, private auto mileage, and taxi/parking/tolls had the most number of transactions. Of note is that lodging only had the fifth most transactions despite being the second largest expense within travel. This suggests that each lodging transaction was much larger in their amounts.
The average cost per transaction can be seen for each expense purpose in the above bar chart. While it can be seen that consult travel/related expenses had the highest average, there were only three transactions for this purpose for the entire quarter. The rest of the purposes averaged below $1 thousand per transaction, with automobile leasing having the next highest average cost.
Top Spenders
After seeing that the purposes of commercial transportation, private auto mileage, and lodging were the largest travel expenses for Q3 2021, I wanted to see exactly who the top spenders for each of these were. I aggregated the data to see how much each office spent in total for each of these purposes and selected the top five spenders. I created the charts below using this data.
The highest spender for each of the purposes is an individual representative. Out of the 15 top results shown above, only 2 of them are not the offices of an individual representative: the 2021 Homeland Security Committee and Fiscal Year 2018 Chief Admin Officer of the House. This shows that representatives are utilizing a significant portion of the House budget on travel and that more is being spent by them than organizations within the House. It is also of note that Representative Michael F.Q. San Nicolas spent the most on commercial transportation, almost double the amount of anyone else at about $41 thousand. He is also the second highest spender on lodging for the quarter as well. He is a representative of the US territory of Guam and his extremely high travel expenses are likely a result of him constantly traveling outside the contiguous United States between Guam and the capital. Overall, the top spenders on travel for commercial transportation, private auto mileage, and lodging are individuals who are spending between $11 thousand and $42 thousand for each characterized purpose of travel expense in just a single quarter.
Conclusion
The House of Representatives used a significant portion of their funds on travel for Q3 2021. While there were many different characterized purposes of travel disbursements, commercial transportation, private auto mileage, and lodging had the most disbursements at about $2.3 million, $966 thousand, and $967 thousand respectively. The offices of individual representatives are spending the most on travel instead of organizations like committees and are spending tens of thousands of dollars on each of these individual travel expense purposes in just a single quarter.
