What US House Member’s Office Had The Greatest Amount Spent in 2021 Q3?
Each and every member of the United States congress is given a budget to spend. They can use this budget to maintain their offices, pay for any traveling they might do, pay for their staff, among other things. It is truly up to each member how this budget is used. How any one member spends their budget can say a lot about how they plan to do things in office. For example, if a member spends a lot of money to maintain a strong support staff, it could indicate that they want to stay in office for a long time by keeping a strong support group around them. The rest of this post will dig into some data about spending habits of some members, and it will specifically look at 2021 Q3 to find out which member’s office had the greatest amount spent in that quarter. This is something that would be interesting to learn about because it reveals a lot about members of congress, and congress is a crucial aspect of how this country is run as a whole. After finding out the number, there will be some potential explanations drawn up about why that much money was spent and what that says.
ProPublica is a website that has a collection of standardized disbursement data that comes directly from the House of Representatives. The first year of data dates all the way back to 2009, and the data is current up to 2021. ProPublica has standardized the data into CSV files, which makes for an easy download and visualization of everything. For the purposes of answering the question that this post relates to, and as mentioned earlier, I will only be looking at the disbursement data from 2021 Q3. I chose to look only at that quarter of data because it is very recent and more relevant than the older data. I want to sort through the data and make visualizations to show which member had the most money spent and how much it was. I think there could be some really interesting findings from this and I am excited to see what the results are at the end of this post.
Data
I downloaded the 2021 Q3 CSV file and took it to a Python notebook. Using Pythons' Pandas function, I read in the CSV file and took a look. After cleaning up the data a little bit, I was able to get the following graphic that shows the top 5 spenders from 2021Q3. See the graphic below
So, Gary J. Palmer had the highest amount spent in 2021 Q3. He spent what seems like a very high amount in $474,197.54. One thing I noticed when looking at this graphic is the roughly $15,000 difference between Gary and the next highest spender Randy Feenstra. And then the roughly $17,000 difference between Randy and Joyce. That made me wonder if Gary and Randy are outliers in this data. To look more into this, I created a histogram in Python using the data of all the top spenders. A histogram will give me a good look at the general trends among all spenders. Here is that histogram
As you can see, it does not seem like the almost $475,000 dollars spent by Gary Palmer and the roughly $459,000 spent by Randy Feenstra are too big an outlier. However, it does seem like the top 5 or so are somewhat of an outlier from the rest of the group. The cluster of bars in the 10¹-10⁵ range are all very close together in spending and then there are the high peaks in the 10⁵-10⁶ range.
Explanations
So, Gary J Palmer spent $474,197.54 dollars in 2021 Q3. There could be a few explanations for that hefty amount. Perhaps he had to travel a lot and spent a lot of money on plane rides, hotels, and other trip expenditures. Or perhaps he paid a pretty penny to maintain his staff. Most people feel like they are at their best when they are surrounded by people they trust. It makes sense why someone in office would want to maximize their tenure.I think the highest spending number is definitely higher than I expect, and this was a fun post for me to make as I feel I really learned a lot from digging into the data and creating the visualizations. It seems like most congress members tend to spend a lot of money.