How did House Spending change from prior to the pandemic to when it started?
The United States House of Representatives has been through a lot with the start of covid. They have needed to completely change how they worked with needing to quarantine. With this, it is important to look at how spending has been taking place inside the different offices of the House of Representatives. Not only is it important to look at what spending is being used on, but looking at how funding changed from before covid and after covid.
To analyze how funding changed I used cleaned and standardized house detail data from ProPublica. Link Here. For this, I sued the two quarters before Covid started, 2019 quarter 4 and 2020 quarter 1. I also used the two quarters after covid started, 2020 quarter 2 and quarter 3. I also used a house members data sheet to help contextualize who the members were, what parties they belonged to, and what states house members were from.
To start we can look at the total spending from before covid to after covid for representatives.
When we look at these charts, we can see how the total spending for each representative generally went down from how much the representatives were spending prior to the covid outbreak to after it started. If we look at spending, not divided by party, we can see that the average amount spent in a quarter by the bulk of representatives dropped by almost $100,000. The average spending prior to covid in $213,116.44 while after covid started, the average total amount spent dropped to $155,754.66.
In the chart with the representatives split between parties, we can still see this to be true, with the built of each party spending at least $200,000 prior to the pandemic, but it decreased when the pandemic started. There are a few outliers in the data, such as someone in the democratic party spending a lot prior to the pandemic and the same with someone from the republican party after the start of the pandemic. When we look at the true means of each party for total spent, democrats spent an average total of $209,341.14 and republicans spent $217,980.77 prior to the beginning of the pandemic. After the pandemic started, democrats dropped to $153,985.53 and republicans dropped to $157,988.18.
When we look at this data, we can infer some things that might have caused the decrease in spending. The major thing was the amount that the representatives flew to and from the capital. There were also probably other things that the pandemic had affected that caused representatives to be spending less.
We can continue to look at how the average payment went that representatives were paying.
When we look at the average amount spent for each transaction that representatives have, we can see that the amount has increased since the pandemic started. When we look at the chart comparing the average amount spent that isn’t separated out by the party, we can see that most average transaction prior to covid is around $500. When we move to after the start of the pandemic, we can see that the bulk of payments is still around $500, we can see that the amounts are more spread out and in general, the cost of each payment is a little bit more. The true mean of the average amount spent per expense was $607.38, but after the pandemic started, that increased to $685.46.
When we look at the average spending divided up by party, we can see a similar thing happening. Prior to covid, both parties have similar average spending around $500, but when we move to after the pandemic started, we see the general price increase in each of them. Democrats, in general, had a little more expensive spending, while Republican spending got a little more spread out. When we look at the true average values for the average amount spent by each party, prior to the pandemic, democrats had an average expense of $618.02 and republicans had an average expense of $593.66. Once the pandemic started, we can see that the average expense for democrats increased to $726.58 and for republicans, it increased to $633.54.
When we look at this mean data, we can infer that the house representatives experienced similar things to us when it came to prices as we can see that their average expense went up regardless of what party they were a part of. Even though the house members were spending less in general when the pandemic started, the stuff that they were spending money on, was costing them more money.
Download the code here.
