How to Read a Congressional Office's Spending Report
GBH News' Paul Singer explains how members of Congress spend their money.
Welcome to a new feature on Your First Byline!
Based on reader feedback, we are adding more content on how to do journalism along with how to get a job in journalism, featuring Q&A’s with veteran reporters on how to do some of the basics of the profession.
For our first foray, we talked with GBH News editor Paul Singer, a veteran of Capitol Hill who had a specialty of looking at Congressional office spending.
Knowing how to look up this public information could help if you are covering Congress or writing about a member from your area running for re-election.
What is a Statement of Disbursements?
The U.S. Congress is not only the nation’s lawmaking body, it is also a giant office complex with about 30,000 employees. Members of the House of Representatives are each given a budget “Members Representational Allowance” to spend for running their own offices—the budgets vary by distance from Washington, seniority and a few other factors. There are rules for how this money can be spent but each office has fairly broad discretion. This is the budget each office uses to pay for staff, travel, office space in the home district, bottled water, flags … all the stuff one needs to run a congressional office. And ALL of it, every single check, is detailed in the “Statement of Disbursements”, a three-volume set published quarterly by the Clerk of the House. It’s not chicken feed: The House and Senate expenditures in these books total somewhere in the range of $4 billion a year – that’s billion with a b.
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How, specifically, do you get a copy of a particular congressional office's expenditures?
Until about 15 years ago, these volumes were only available in print; they are now published by the Clerk on-line as both PDF and Excel spreadsheet. (I highly recommend at least perusing the PDFs before you dig in—it helps provide a sense of the structure of the data and how offices compare before you start sorting spreadsheets.) You can find the House volumes here.
The Senate has a similar reporting process, but it provides much less detail, and fewer expenditures are under the control of individual offices. Comically, the Senate does not report on the same cycle as the House—the house publishes quarterly by calendar year; the Senate reports semiannually by Fiscal Year. You can find the Senate volumes here.
What are you looking for when going through the disbursements?
If you are covering an individual member of Congress or a delegation, the expenditure records give you a good sense of what they are willing to pay for. How senior/highly paid are their staff? How expensive is their travel? What other things do they spend taxpayer money on? A few years ago, before Congress set standards for intern pay, we were able to figure out who was paying their interns the most—and the least.
But you are also looking for outliers. Why did a lawmaker routinely pay thousands of dollars a month for “training” to a person who had formerly been their chief of staff.. and was now a lobbyist back in the home district? Why did a lawmaker spend thousands of taxpayer dollars on office renovations, including marble countertops, and a hand-carved “presidential” podium for speaking engagements? What’s the deal with the staff members who are employed by multiple offices? (Answer: they are usually bookkeepers, IT consultants or “shared staff” of congressional caucuses.)
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What are some pitfalls to avoid when analyzing this spending?
Don’t write about bottled water! It always comes up “Why are they spending so much on bottled water?” and the answer is always “1. Because the drinking fountains in the old buildings are suspect and 2. Because there is no centralized water contract. Every office buys their own.”
Also, always remember to check comparable congressional offices before drawing conclusions. For example, is lawmaker who spends $3,000 a month flying back and forth to their district overspending? It depends on how remote the district is and what other lawmakers nearby or in similar districts are spending. (Note that Congress use to publish much more detailed information about who in the office was traveling and where they went, but for “security” reasons they stopped releasing these VERY useful details when the ledgers became available online.
What kinds of stories can you get from looking at congressional expenditures?
The things I mentioned above are all examples of stories we wrote based on disbursement books. For fun and a little history, Google “Aaron Schock.”
Some members of Congress—particularly new members and most often Republicans—make a big deal of the fact that they did not actually spend their entire allotment, so they “returned money to the taxpayers.” That’s not really technically true, but we have seen interesting stories about who spends and who doesn’t spend every dime Congress allocates to them.
Sending this around to Capitol press newbies. We love a statement of disbursements and this is a great overview. Nice work. Cheers, Paul!
Great post! I've done some reporting on how Iowa's members of the U.S. House use their franking funds. It can be really difficult to read those quarterly reports on disbursements, and in my experience not all House members report certain types of expenses the same way. But it is worth going through them and many people don't know they are publicly accessible.