Congressional Expenses

The following post was authored by the tireless, data loving Dan Murray of our partner Interworks.

Every quarter, the House of Representatives releases a Statement of Disbursements, describing how members of the House of Representatives spend money for staff, rent, printing and other officially-incurred expenses. With the most recent Statement, there was a significant change: the data was released electronically, allowing us to analyze it more easily and keep closer tabs on what lawmakers spend on themselves. See below for a dashboard showing spending by party and state.

The following post was authored by the tireless, data loving Dan Murray of our partner Interworks.

Every quarter, the House of Representatives releases a Statement of Disbursements, describing how members of the House of Representatives spend money for staff, rent, printing and other officially-incurred expenses. With the most recent Statement, there was a significant change: the data was released electronically, allowing us to analyze it more easily and keep closer tabs on what lawmakers spend on themselves. See below for a dashboard showing spending by party and state.

These dashboards filter the data to include only data from July 1 to September 30th of this year. Congressional office spending seems pretty uniform across state and party indicating a degree of fiscal efficiency that our leaders will hopefully show us in the next budget bill. As you explore you may also wonder what the category "FRANKED MAIL" includes. This is a consulting service that Congressmen use to do targeted mailing to their constituents.

If your interested in working with this dataset I will be posting the data in a spreadsheet with additional comments regarding the workbook and the raw data. You can find the details on my blog The Data Revolution and my companies' website interworksinc.com.

Dan Murray