Representatives’ Spending
What House representatives spend the most? I have conducted research on datasets regarding all house representatives, and the amount they spend quarterly. I have analyzed 8 quarters of data from 2021–2022 to determine who spends the most, and why they might spend that amount compared to other representatives. I also have studied the dispersion of the costs by categories. The source of this data comes from ProPublica (https://projects.propublica.org/represent/expenditures). I will cover the top spenders, the backgrounds of these representatives, and the top categories in which money is spent.
Begging with the top spenders that are house representatives, I took 2 years of data and summed the amount they spent in that two years. The top spender from the begging of 2021 to the end of 2022 was Congresswomen Jennifer Gonzalez-Colon, the representative of Puerto Rico. Under her department, she spent a total of $9,784,289 over a two-year period. Under her, Congresswoman Anna Eshoo spent a total of $8,299,803.92 in the two-year period. This data surprised me due to the fact that Congresswomen Jennifer Gonzalez-Colon spent over a million more that the second-highest spender.
This graph shows the top 10 Representatives in the dataset with their spending summed. The amount is in scientific notation, and 1 in “AMOUNT” represents $10 million. As you can see in the graph, it appears Congresswomen Jennifer Gonzalez-Colon spends significantly more than the other representatives. In the top 10 representatives who spent the most, the mean amount spent was $8,204,067.23. The spending of these representatives is most likely higher due to the fact they have to operate in higher-cost areas such as California, Florida, and New york.
My hypothesis on why Congresswomen Jennifer Gonzalez-Colon might have spent almost a million more in her department is due to the fact that she represents the entirety of the US Territory of Puerto Rico. Due to Puerto Rico being such a large place with unique needs, I assume she needs more resources than the average US representative. She is also the sole representative of Puerto Rico, meaning she has to run such a large area herself, most likely costing more than the average representative. Anna Eshoo, Jerry McNerney, and Brad Sherman are also all representatives of California. This proves my point that places that are higher cost most likely need more resources and money to operate. It would make sense that the total cost of California is much higher than Puerto Rico due to the fact that California is 44 times larger than Puerto Rico. It would also make sense that the cost of operation would be much higher in places that have higher populations.
Moving on from the Representatives themselves, I was also interested in finding out what these costs are actually covering. After looking through the datasets, I found that the top cost was “Equipment”. The amount spent on equipment in the two years covered, the total spent between all Representatives was $2,374,972,540.98. The cost of equipment is many different things. It can range from paging, faxes, office equipment, and much more. The second highest cost is “Personnel Compensation”, which is the salaries of the workers for the representatives. It would make sense that this is the second highest cost due to the fact that operating as a representative most likely requires many workers under you to stay organized, understand finances, and much more. After compensation, it seems “Personnel Benefits” is the third highest cost. This makes sense since things such as insurance, retirement plans, and other amenities are fairly expensive.
Due to the large amount of data I was presented with when conducting this research, I decided to cover the most relevant costs and representatives. I decided to do this because covering the cost of each individual representative along with each individual cost would have clouded the important information with potentially irrelevant information. For the sake of clarity, I decided to describe the most relevant information.
The top 10 representatives seem to spend around $8.2 million on average in the two-year range, this is due to the fact that they operate in high-cost areas, and they seem to spend much of their money on their workers and equipment. The base operation costs seem to be the highlight of their spending. It also seems that the representatives that spend the most operate in high-population cities, excluding Puerto Rico. The “Equipment” costs are office supplies, communications, and other operational costs to keep things running smoothly. To accommodate their workers, their second and third highest costs are for personnel compensation and benefits.
