How did money spent on traveling change from 2019 to the start of the COVID pandemic?

Ask anyone in the world, (who doesn’t live under a rock), “What’s COVID’? Chances are they’ve got a pandemic anecdote ready. Everyone who lived through the pandemic knows that it led to many changes in our daily lives through mandated lockdowns, quarantines, and travel bans, but it also had an impact on government workers spending as well.

Public data files regarding US House of Representatives offices’ spending and disbursements are published on ProRepublica.org. Examining data files from the second quarter of the year, I was curious to know more about how US congress members’ travel expenses differed from 2019 to 2020 during the start of the pandemic. Congress members travel for a variety of reasons and more often than one might think. Attending committee meetings, conferences, events, and fulfilling international relations are major responsibilities of the job. There are two noticeable trends that were discovered in the data: there was a significant decrease in congress members’ travel spending from a year prior to the pandemic to the start of lockdown, however the top purposes of the travel expenses remained the same.

Looking at the big picture, the total amount of money spent on traveling in 2019 was around 6.8 million dollars. The total amount spent on travel during the height of the pandemic and lockdown was 2.0 million dollars. The percent difference between both total expenses is 109%- a very large gap between the two.

In mid March of 2020 regulations were implemented in an effort to slow the spread of the virus and protect public health. The pandemic has also resulted in many governments reducing their travel, both domestically and internationally. Additionally, several countries have closed their borders or imposed travel restrictions.. This had significant impacts on international business and personal travel, which could indicate why travel expenses were significantly lower in 2020 than 2019.

Looking more closely at the individual office expenses, there is a noticeably large difference in office spending in 2019 and 2020. In the image below, the column labeled “AMOUNT_Q2.2019” is the 2019 travel expense in the second quarter of the year, and column “AMOUNT_Q2.2020” is the 2020 expense per office in quarter two.

Let’s examine an office at random using their bioguide identification, for example, C001051. This house member spent almost 80 thousand dollars on travel in the second quarter of 2019. He must have been a very busy traveler considering he is the biggest spender on this list. However, compare his 2019 spending to 2020– $5,854. That is a huge difference in money spent on travel just in ¼ of the year. Not only was the COVID pandemic affecting the country as a whole, we can see that it had immediate impacts on government workers’ jobs, limiting them to what business they can and cannot do.

Looking at the histogram below titled “Office Travel Expenses in 2019 Q2” the majority amount of money spent is between $5,000 to $25,000. The average amount is $15,800 spent on travel expenses in 2019. Compared to the histogram below the 2019 graph, regarding 2020 spending, the majority amount of money spent is between $0 and $1,000. There is an $11,000 difference in the average amount spent on travel expenses in a quarter of 2019 and 2020.

But what exactly was all this money being spent on? Looking into the purpose of each travel transaction, I found that the reasons for the expenses are fairly similar in both years. The top three purposes for spending were commercial transportation, private auto mileage, and taxi/parking/tolls. However, the count of each purpose in 2020 was significantly lower than in 2019. There was more than double the amount of recorded commercial transportation expenses in 2019 than in 2020, which makes sense. There was notably less travel occurring in the second quarter of the year compared to the year prior.

Overall, the COVID-19 pandemic has had far-reaching and direct effects on almost every aspect of the world. The pandemic has had a significant impact on daily routines, with many people forced to change the way they work, learn, and socialize due to lockdowns, social distancing measures, and other restrictions.