How does the U.S. House divide its money between members, committees and leadership?
In order to think clearly about legislative capacity, or the lack thereof, we need a clear picture of Congress’ resources today. One of the most obvious starting points is to look at congressional spending: what exactly do the House and Senate spend their money on?
The data needed to answer this question, describing the spending done by each chamber on a line-item basis, has been publicly available for several years thanks to the Sunlight Foundation. Alas, there has been little analysis of it to date. In this and subsequent posts we will offer the first comprehensive look at patterns apparent in the House Statement of Disbursements, focusing on 2015.[1]
Total spending in the House for 2015 was $1.05 billion. This excludes members’ salaries which, at $174,000 per-member annually, amount to around $75 million. Of the $1.05 billion, $194.2 million was categorized as “personnel benefits”; overwhelmingly, these are contributions to employee pensions and to the staff student-loan repayment program. Ideally, we would want to apportion those personnel costs proportional to the offices that employ relevant staff, but data-formatting issues make doing so a daunting project we do not take up today.
The remaining $859.3 million in spending is divided between members’ personal offices, various miscellaneous administrative offices, committees and leadership as follows:
House committee spending breaks down as follows:
Members’ personal offices are each given a members’ representational allowance (MRA), which is set according to a formula that takes into account the distance from the member’s home district to D.C.; the cost of office space in the member’s home district; and the number of constituent addresses in the home district. Most members spend nearly their full MRA (set at a minimum of $1.2 million for every office—see p. 2526).
The five personal offices with the highest spending are thus those with some of the highest MRAs (and the closest to 100 percent spent).
The five personal offices with the lowest spending are:
Some of these members are making a point to spend far less than their full MRA, with their surplus allocated toward deficit reduction. For example, Sanford and Webster have both drawn attention to their offices’ frugality. Others on the low-spending end may be doing the same, or it is possible that reporting of their 2015 spending is delayed or problematic for some reason, which would affect the data we are working with.
The next installment will look at what funds are actually spent on.
[1] In order to do this analysis, we cleaned the data in Sunlight’s summary reports in various ways. Where necessary, we collapsed differently labeled entries that referred to the same office into a single category. We also removed personal office records for members who didn’t serve for the full year—or, more precisely, who didn’t have expenditures from all four quarters. Our analysis is based on sum totals obtained by manually combining quarterly totals (which avoids certain problems introduced by relying on the “YTD” column computed by Sunlight).
Guest blogger Philip A Wallach is a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. Guest blogger Nicholas W. Zeppos is a research assistant in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.
