A few weeks ago Nancy Pelosi, in a rare display of “walking the walk”, actually fulfilled a campaign season pledge to post the expenses for the House of Representatives on-line. The actual report is a huge PDF document (you can view it here) of 3404 pages that sucks up nearly 10 MB of space in your ‘puter’s innards. One is tempted to wonder if Nancy was willing to hang out this enormous load of soiled laundry because she knew very few would bother to sort through the prodigious amount of excruciating detail it contains.
If that was her intent, I have a bit of bad news for her; rickety antediluvian bunnies have little to occupy their time in the deeps of winter other than fussing with spread-sheets and data-mining software (just as an aside, selecting and extracting meaningful data from a PDF document the size of this mammoth mama is a stone bitch - but that’s a whole ‘nother post). Trials and tribulations aside, following are some ratings/rankings of the really big spenders (top ten) in the House of Representatives that I dug out of Nancy’s Nightmare, as well as info about our own Reps – Fortenberry, Terry and Smith.
I have selected only a few categories of disbursements that I found … um … interesting – such as total spent on franked mail (mass mailings sent to constituents by Congress-critters), personnel costs (how much a Rep spends on staff), and travel. There are a few other categories such as “supplies”, rent, printing, etc., which I may report on later but for now I have only shown the three mentioned as well as the totals. Note that the “Total” category below includes all cost categories – not just the three shown.
A couple of other caveats – in the document cited, there are separate cost centers for each House committee, as well as for individual leadership offices (speaker, leaders, whips, etc.), and for each Representative’s individual office; I have summarized only those costs associated with the individual Representative’s office. Costs deriving from leadership or committee functions are not reflected in the summaries below. Also, the “cumulative” figures are for the first nine months of calendar 2009, and the “3QTR” figures represent, obviously, the third quarter of that same calendar year.
To fund their office, each House member is allotted a certain amount of money called a MEMBER’S REPRESENTATIONAL ALLOWANCE, the calculation of which is based on a complex formula involving the distance to the member’s home, the square footage of the office, etc. The exact formulation can be found at page 3329 of the Disbursement Report. The allotment for each of Nebraska’s Representatives is:
Lee Terry – $1,463,636
Jeff Fortenberry – $1,426,571
Adrian Smith – $1,492,195
You should be aware that the expense amounts shown below do not include the salaries of the individual members; The current salary (2010) for rank-and-file members of the House and Senate is $174,000 per year.
Total expended funds for 3rd quarter, 2009 = $319,753,889.31. That totals out to around 1.3 billion a year – for just part of the operating expenses of one half of one branch of the federal government – plus another 75 million or so per year for 435 House members’ salaries.


For anyone desiring more explanation/clarification, I recommend going to the original document itself (linked above). Trust me, the detail is there if you’re willing to go after it. By the way, I would recommend at least Version 8 of Adobe Reader – you can download it from Adobe’s home site.
Be well.











