Are United States House of Representatives Interns being Paid Enough?
As a congressional intern for the United States House of Representatives, the payment you receive for being an intern is mostly experience rather than an actual payment. When I was a congressional intern, I was paid a one thousand dollar stipend for the three months that I worked there. I worked 24 hours a week for roughly twelve weeks which reduces down to about $3.47 an hour. As you can imagine, only about three and a half dollars an hour is not going to help me pay rent, especially in D.C.. Therefore, when I began analyzing the House Expenditure Data, I wanted to see if other interns were being paid just as little as I was. The unfortunate reality is that they were. This article will explain and analyze the amount of money each representative is spending on interns in order to show that interns, regardless of their political party affiliation or leaning, are being paid too little for the amount of work that they are doing.
There are 435 representatives in the United States. Each representative gets a certain amount of money every year to use towards expenses like interns; however, how many interns a representative has and how much each of them get paid is up to the congressman and their staff. In Q3 of 2021, on average, 1008 dollars were spent on each intern allowance expenditure. Due to the fact that most of the expenditures are payments to individual interns, we can conclude that the average intern was paid $1008 in Q3 of 2021. Looking at Q3 of 2021 is just a small portion of what interns are being paid, however, it gives us an idea of how intern payments are fluctuating throughout the legislator. We will be specifically looking at Q3 of 2021 for our analysis today as it will provide insight into the general trends of intern payments.
In legislation and discussion, many politicians have differing views about how much employees should be paid and what benefits they should receive. For example, there is currently a large debate about a federal minimum wage which would require every state to have a minimum wage of at least 15 dollars an hour. The bill is proposed by the democratic party and generally backed by most of its members; however, the opposing party has very different opinions about how much individuals should be paid in the country. Stipends work quite differently because they are not hourly and taxes are not taken out of their payment; however, through the analysis of the expenditure data, I hoped to answer the question about how (or if) political leaning influenced the amount an intern was paid. The conclusion: political leaning does not have a strong influence on how much an intern is paid.
This visualization represents the total amount of money each congressperson spent on intern allowances in Q3 of 2021. The x-axis runs from -1 to 1 where -1 represents the most liberal representatives and 1 represents the most conservative representatives. This graph shows us that the majority of congress people in both political parties are spending around 5000 dollars on interns each quarter. However, there are some large outliers that stick out as being rather interesting. The large outlier on the republican side represents Congressman Kevin McCarthy, who at the time was the minority leader of the house. According to the analysis, McCarthy spent 22,750 dollars on intern allowances during Q3 of 2021. This was significantly larger than any other member of congress which highlights a question as to why he spent that much. In the same quarter, the current majority leader and the speaker of the house, Nancy Pelosi, only spent 3500 dollars on intern allowances. These numbers are considerably different especially when you consider both of their positions in their parties. Though McCarthy spent significantly more than the other members of congress, since most members spent around 5000 dollars total for intern expenses, there is no correlation between the amount of money spent on interns and the political leaning of the congressman.
Additionally, this visualization highlights the average amount of money each member of congress spent on each intern expenditure during Q3 of 2021. This visualization shows that the majority of members of congress spend about 1000 dollars on each intern expenditure. This makes sense because the average amount spent on each intern expenditure is $1008. Additionally, we see a lot of outliers from directions of political leaning spending more than their fellow congressmen. The congresswoman that spent the most amount of money for each intern expenditure was Sheila Jackson Lee, who is registered to the Democratic party. On the other hand, the congressman that spent the least amount of money on each intern expenditure was G.K. Butterfield, who is also registered as a democrat. These findings combined with the large amount of averages being near 1000 dollars, regardless of party affiliation, shows that there is no correlation between the amount of money spent on each intern expenditure and political leaning.
In conclusion, the party affiliation of the congressman or their political leaning does not affect how much they spend on interns. Most interns are being paid very little compared to other interns who are not working in politics however, at least each intern is having a similar struggle. I can conclude that my situation with payment as an intern for the United States House of Representatives is very similar to that of all the other interns within the house regardless of what party their member of congress is a part of. This article was written to raise awareness about how little interns in the United States House of Representatives are being paid compared to how much they work. So, in conclusion, government interns need to be paid more regardless of what party they are affiliated with.
