America's Talking - Congressional Perks: House account spending jumped 21% in 2022

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

(The Center Square) – Spending on U.S. House of Representatives office accounts increased by more than 85% over the past three decades but nearly half of that occurred since 2020, an investigation by The Center Square found. The Members' Representational Allowance (MRA) provides each of the 435 U.S. representatives in Congress about $2 million a year to pay staff, travel, buy equipment and run their Washington, D.C., and district offices, giving members wide latitude on how to spend the money within House ethics and administration committee rules Support this podcast: https://secure.anedot.com/franklin-news-foundation/ce052532-b1e4-41c4-945c-d7ce2f52c38a?source_code=xxxxxx Read more: https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_d7fcb6c8-de6a-4d3d-ab83-4e3c4bdfd171.html Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to America's Talking. I'm Johnny Edwards, Southeast investigative reporter for the Center Square. I'm here with Art Kane, managing editor for investigations. Art has been digging into congressional office spending, and he found a lot of taxpayer money going to luxury private jets, luxury vehicle leases, food, art. Congress can't even fund the rest of government functions right now. What is this spending and why has it been increasing so much recent? So every lawmaker, every congressperson and senator gets a certain amount of money to run their offices. It depends on how much they get, how far they are from D.C., what the cost of living is in their area, things like that. Why it's been increasing, they won't talk about, but basically they've been giving themselves bumps in this for the last three or four years.

And it's definitely skyrocketed. I think in the last 30 years, there was 85% increase. I guess people will say cost of living. But almost half of that came in the last four years. Now, can congressional offices continue to spend from these accounts, even when government workers aren't even getting their paychecks right now? It's unclear. I'm not sure, again, they wouldn't talk.

So it's not clear. I'm not sure if they get a bulk sum at the beginning of the year to disperse it. There were definitely people who were answering my calls in various offices. So I think there are people working there. We know for a fact that the lawmakers by constitution are paid no matter what happens. There's no exception to the pay of lawmakers for their $174,000 a year. So they're getting paid. But a lot of other people are not getting benefits or pay who work for the government.

You found that Congress members get an on-call physician, below-market daycare, and spend an incredible $30 million on food and beverage since 2019, including more than $200,000 for Chick-fil-A, are there any controls on this spending? There really aren't very good controls on this spending. They get this money in a chunk, and the congressman is really the person who decides what's appropriate to spend it. It's kind of like they're their own CEO or they're running their own business,

but of course on taxpayers dying because they're not funding it the taxpayers are. And so there are a few limits in the handbook, but mostly they just spend it the way they see fit. And sometimes they give the money back and sometimes a little bit of money back at the end of the year. And sometimes they don't. But they do definitely say they need it for staff and travel and other types of expenses like that. Congress members are also spending tons on travel, including private jets, and $1,000 a month leases for Lexus automobiles? Are there no limits on these expenditures?

Well, they are hitting the limits. So the top amount that they can spend on a lease is $1,000 a month, and several of them I found are doing that and sending that money to Lexus or Tesla or Volvo or other kind of luxury brands. So, for example, one of the people that I highlighted was Congressman Darrell Issa from California. He's one of the wealthiest members of

Congress. I think his net worth is somewhere in the $300 million, yet he's still asking taxpayers to pay $1,000 a month to lease him a Lexus. And some of the people I showed that to think that's a big problem. The private jets, their justification is that I have a huge district. My whole district covers the whole of South Dakota. I have to pay $60,000 or $70,000 a year for private jets. But I think that doesn't ring as true as it should because when you look at other big districts, Alaska at large, Wyoming at large, those people aren't using private jets the same amount as Dusty Johnson was in South Dakota.

So I think it's a it's a luxury or a perk that he wants to fly private, where the other people make do with commercial, which is a lot cheaper. Well, then there's also the mileage. Some members and staff have put in enough mileage reimbursements since point 19 to circle the earth eight times. How is that positive? I wanted to ask them, and they didn't want to talk about it. So there's a staffer who used to be as a congressional staffer, and now he just was hired by Ted Cruz to be his chief of staff.

he put in for somewhere in the neighborhood, $130,000 worth of mileage, which comes out to about 200,000 miles, which the circumference of earth is about 25,000 miles. So that's eight times. He didn't respond to my repeated request. His office, his prior office, where he put in those, said, well, it was, again, the large district. We cover a large amount of land. He has to drive around and talk to constituents. But it's hard to see when you can't actually see the actual documents and all you see is the disbursement's data because Congress isn't subject to Freedom of Information Act. It's hard to understand how you could log that many miles and still act as the chief of staff to a congressman and now a prominent senator.

Absolutely. Now, you also found that $50 million was spent on partisan caucuses and coalition, sometimes for controversial topics like, pro-choice or equity. Why are taxpayers paying for that? Well, the taxpayer alliance, protection alliance guy thinks they shouldn't be. We, the only argument that I got was that these caucuses and coalitions help define and understand issues in legislation, which helps the public and gets legislation done. But you're right. The fact is, if it's called the down, Democratic or the Republican caucus or the Republican coalition, shouldn't that be paid for with, with campaign funds or out of their personal funds? And we're seeing the same kind of spending out

of those coalitions, food, travel, high salaries for staff that you see in the office accounts. It's just another way to have the taxpayers pay for something they probably wouldn't want to pay pay to have their taxes pay for. And, you know, the guy from the taxpayer your protection alliance says if you are pro-choice and there's a pro-life coalition that you're paying for or vice versa, you're pro-life and there's a pro-choice coalition, there's a moral issue that your money is going to something you don't support. And it just doesn't seem necessary, as opposed to something more defined in the thing like a committee, right, that actually works with legislation. I know that you took these findings to Congress. When we did that,

what kind of response did you get? No comment. A lot of no comments. A lot of can we talk off the record, which I would say no. I don't want to talk off the record. This is for a news story. Your side should be portrayed on the record. And then they clam up or send a statement. No one wanted to sit down and have a back and forth about their spending who was already in Congress. A few people who had left Congress talked to me. But everybody else was the usual Washington, D.C. disease of off the record on background when they should be being held accountable. I did, to be as fair as possible, I did talk to some nonprofits on the record who look into congressional spending and recommend congressional spending. Some were supportive of some of the spending and not other spending. Very few people were able to justify the Lexuses and the private jets and things like that. So it's really, it really is a situation where someone needs to be, have some oversight on it past the individual offices, I think.

It's kind of far for the course these days, the record, no response, written statements. I mean, given the gravity of what you've discovered here, do you think that's acceptable for our elected members of Congress to not even want to talk about something as important as this? Well, as a journalist, I never think that it's acceptable for someone who's publicly elected, if he uses taxpayer money, not to talk about it. But I think that's what's happened is basically they've been allowed to by a lot of the media to do this kind of stuff. And so they're not going to change

just because I come to their door. And it's unfortunate, but that's Washington, D.C. for you. Art, thank you very much. It's excellent work. And we've been talking with Art Kaine. I'm Johnny Edwards with the Center Square. Thanks for watching.