Navigating Uncharted Waters: The Impact of COVID-19 on Congressional Travel Expenditures
As dawn broke over the empty streets of cities around the world in early 2020, the silence bore witness to an unprecedented global standstill. The COVID-19 pandemic. This pandemic loomed on the horizon for a while and had finally arrived bringing a tidal wave of change that swept across nations, industries and lives. Many sectors were heavily impacted such as economies, government priorities and among one of the hardest hit sectors was travel.
In early 2020, as the world grappled with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, a once booming global travel industry was grounded to a halt. Airports turned into ghost towns, tourist spots were deserted and the idea of travel became tied up with feelings of uncertainty and fear. This story unfolds through the lens of the US House of Representatives’ disbursement data from 2019 through 2023, a period that fully covers all of the different shifts brought about by the pandemic. This data comes in forms of reports from ProPublica’s comprehensive database which covers the government’s spending in each quarter for the last fifteen years. Through the story of this data analysis, the pivotal question that is trying to be answered is: How did the United States House of Representatives office travel expenditure change due to a worldwide pandemic?
Setting the Baseline
With that being said, to start, I decided to create four separate data frames to represent four of the main phases that took place during the pandemic. These data frames were aggregated in a way in which it ranked the total amount spent for each category in that given year. I started with the 2019 Q4 data. This data frame is going to be used as a baseline to analyze what the travel expenditures looked like before the pandemic occurred. The next phase is in 2020 Q2, which is when there were significant worldwide lockdowns and a steep decline in many aspects of life. 2022 Q2, is being used as the third stage when by this time a significant portion of the population had been vaccinated and most travel restrictions began to lift in many places. The last phase in this analysis is using the 2023 Q1 data which provides insight into the stabilization of travel spending and reflecting some of the post pandemic results.
The Ultimate Findings
Initially looking at the four separate data frames, you can see that, out of all of the different categories of expenses, the “Travel” category rank lies somewhere between the seventh and ninth highest amount in that given quarter and year. I then went ahead and combined the total amount spent on travel in each phase, into one singular data frame to not only make it easier to find trends but also to graph the findings. In 2019 Q4, pre-pandemic, the total amount of travel expenditures was $14,568,096.13. In 2020 Q2, a time where many lockdowns started to take place worldwide, the total amount of travel expenditures was $4,821,399.42. The total travel expenditure dropped 66.9% from 2019 to 2020! That is absolutely unheard of! Eventually the total travel expenditure goes back up as most of the population started getting their vaccines and feeling more comfortable traveling again. This started to occur in 2022 Q2 as the total travel expenditures was $16,448,283.21. Not surprisingly, the trend continued during the post pandemic phase in 2023 Q1 as the total travel expenditure increased $933,186.7
Beyond the Numbers
After looking over some of the findings, I wanted to dive just a little deeper into the travel category itself and see if I could find anything else further. I then went ahead and calculated the total amount of spending in each respected phase from all categories. Below is the graph of total expenditure over the selected phases.
As you can see, the trend from the previous visualization is consistent here as well as the drop in total expenditures from 2019 Q4 to 2020 Q2 was 7.70% and then rises in the next two phases. Now, the one aspect of my analysis that was actually very surprising to me was when I was calculating the average amount per travel transaction. The average amount per travel transaction did drop from 2019 to 2020 but then the following next two years was significantly higher than the base year of 2019. The travel industry must’ve raised their prices significantly after the pandemic or the office was taking more expensive travels than before.
Resilience and Recovery
In this analysis, we’ve uncovered the significant impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the US House of Representatives’ travel expenditures, illustrating a sharp 66.9% decrease from 2019 to 2020. This stark reduction mirrors the global halt in travel during the early stages of the pandemic. However, as the data reveals, there is a silver lining in the form of a robust recovery phase, with expenditures not only rebounding but exceeding pre-pandemic levels by 2022. Intriguingly, the increase in average expenditure per travel transaction post-2020 hints at a strategic shift towards quality or the rising costs in the travel sector. This journey through the disbursement data not only sheds light on the response to a global crisis but also emphasizes the importance of flexibility and resilience. As we move forward, these insights offer valuable lessons for future policymaking in a post-pandemic world.
