Personnel Compensation or Personal Compensation in U.S. House Expenditures?
During the yearly ritual of tax season, Americans once again find themselves wrestling with towers of forms and calculations that await them. As the chore overshadows the population, a smidge of uncertainty casts itself into the American mind — where do our hard-earned tax dollars flow to?
It’s a question as old as taxation itself, but to our luck, some of the pathways our taxes take once arriving at the U.S. Treasury can be uncovered. One of these trails is House of Representatives expenditure data, a spending database that ProPublica has provided quarterly since 2009. So let’s dig in, and see primarily when, why, and for what our money goes toward in the House — and whether this includes any monkey business.
To start, it’s helpful to take a glance at the count of each instance of spending for each expenditure category:
This introduces you a bit more to the topics at hand, in which some had quite little spending (transportation of things, personnel benefits, benefits to former personnel, I’m looking at you). Travel with nearly 5.2 million instances, rent communication utilities following close behind at about 5 million, and supplies and materials trailing at 3.9 million instances from 2011–2022 take the lead out of the 11 categories. Yet, are the categorical counts of documented payments an accurate measurement of where the house spends the majority of their money?
As we can see… not at all! When compiling the sums of the costs for each category over the years, personnel compensation, as seen here, is miles higher than the rest. Since 2011, it has remained nearly nine times higher than all of the other categories total yearly combined spending costs. From 2021 to 2022, along with jumps in printing and reproduction and franked mail (that truly pale in comparison), spending for personnel compensation leaped upwards by 84 million, 558 million being 2022’s final sum of personnel compensation spending. Nearly every category’s sum per year is well bellow the 50 million mark.
So, what even is personnel compensation? Are representatives rigging the system, and paying themselves or their close allies with drastically higher rates and increases each year instead, leaving the rest of the spending categories to rot? Well, not exactly. At first glance, with “personnel” compensation sounding a lot like personal compensation, and seeing how extensively high the spending is, it feels natural to assume something fishy is occurring behind the scenes. Though, as Statista demonstrates it, the average representative salary has remained steady at $174,000 since 2009, once congress voted against maintaining the annual increase since 2010. The House personally establishes what constitutes personnel compensation, saying how it is “compensation directly related to duties performed for the government by federal civilian employees, military personnel and non-federal personnel”.
Each year, each Representative is entitled to a salary to finance themselves in their government endeavors, which includes hiring civilians as chief of staff, the most affluent position here, to ease the workload. To put it simply, personnel compensation is primarily used to build a well-oiled team of directors and assistants for a representative with many tasks, including even janitors and cleaners. It is up to each Representative, depending on their needs, how many people they want to employ and how much money they want to spend in employing them. Then there comes the question: what may influence these needs or factors of spending, and has there been changes overtime?
Since 2011, sum per year of personnel compensation has varied by party. Interestingly enough, before 2019, the Republican Party appears to have paid higher total sums of compensation, which aligns with 2011–2019 republican majority that persisted in the House. Once this red throne was overthrown and replaced by more democrat seats in 2019, it is understandable as to why personnel compensation has increased for the blue party.
Intriguingly, in 2022, spending increased for the Democratic Party with a 50 million leap from 2021, which can actually be attributed to the bill passed in March of 2022 that prompted a 21% increase in Representatives’ allotted allowances. The Republican Party increased personnel compensation spending close to $30 million, not as high of a jump despite the House nearing towards more towards a bipartisan leadership (10 fewer republicans than democrats), but still, definitely a difference that explains such an increase in spending, so much so that several of the top expenditures since 2011 are from 2022.
Curiously, when we look at the top 50 personnel compensation payments made since 2011–2022, the Democratic Party seems to be responsible for the highest pay in personnel compensation, which could point to Democratic representatives potentially paying their workers more. Though, it’s also important to factor when these are primarily occurring: 41/50 of these top disbursements are from 2022 alone, with 25/41 of those being Democrat, demonstrating the impact of the March 2022 increased allowance.
The outlier here at $81,250, the highest ever personnel compensation disbursement, was specifically spent by democratic CA Representative Jerry McNerney to pay his Senior District Representative/Advisor, Gary Prost, during the Q4 of 2022. Whether this was due to salary or was a bonus is a question I am unsure of how to answer, as congressional database Legistorm depicts Prost’s salary as increasing more than double in 2022.
At face value, personnel compensation is not the same as personal compensation for House disbursements. I am quite confident that personnel compensation is just what it is: money for employing people. Regardless, it has been and still remains the spending category with the highest sum each year of all, which can draw some concerns. What are we missing out on as a country by requiring Representatives to pay with their own allowance to build a team just to function? Which opportunities are being underfunded in light of this all? Hopefully, more analysis will be conducted in the future for us all to gain a clearer understanding over time.
