30 Years of Legislative Branch Appropriations: Data Spanning from 1994-2023 All In One Place

Each year, Congress allocates funding for the Legislative Branch entities through the Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee. The Legislative Branch Appropriations bills direct congressional spending, line item by line item — but the instructions are not published as data and can run for dozens of pages, making it very difficult to see how appropriations spending has changed over the decades.

We have gone through all of the Legislative Branch spending bills for the last thirty years and lined up the spending items in a downloadable spreadsheet. The line item spreadsheet has sections for the House, Senate, and agencies, as well as tabs that adjust funding for inflation, allowing readers to see how spending on each line item has changed since 1994 in both constant and real dollars.

Download the spreadsheet data.Download

Questions, comments, concerns? Reach out to Taylor@demandprogres.org

The House’s new Statements of Disbursements with Improved Metadata Disclosure

In a win for government spending transparency, the House is publishing highly detailed information about the money it spends on itself. The Clerk of the House just released the latest House Statements of Disbursements — which catalog every penny spent by every person in the House of Representatives — with new metadata (or entity identifiers).

The Clerk of the House recently reported that as of March 2023, the Statements of Disbursements data it publishes as a CSV file “now includes additional entity identifiers for select data fields, including, but not limited to, organization, vendor name, and description, to enable the public to better analyze and understand the data provided. CSV files posted prior to March 2023 will not include these new data fields.”

“The House’s new Statements of Disbursements metadata disclosure and the entire process to make this financial data public is a shining example of open government meeting government accountability,” said Daniel Schuman, policy director at Demand Progress and co-founder of the Congressional Data Coalition. “From the start, the modernizing of the Statements of Disbursements data was developed in a transparent and collaborative effort between government and civil society facilitated by the Congressional Data Task Force. Together, they iteratively modeled what the data would look like and sought public feedback to make it as useful and user-friendly as possible. We commend the House Chief Administrative Officer and House administration for this model effort.”

Demand Progress successfully made the case to require the disclosure of such unique identifiers — like organization names including the CAO, the Clerk, a committee, an individual member, etc., to make it easier to analyze this spending data.

And we led a multi-year effort to transform the Disbursements from a paper-based to an electronic system, making it possible to track congressional spending in great detail over time.

We are still seeking the publication of unique identifiers for individual staffers, which would make it possible to better understand staff career paths, their pay and retention rates, and what happens when they leave Congress. The decision to publish that final key piece of the puzzle is up to the House Administration Committee.

Over the last 15 years, the House has gone from publishing its spending information in gigantic dusty books to publishing that information online but an unwieldy PDF, to publishing that same information as a digital spreadsheet, and now enhancing the digital spreadsheet with metadata so it’s possible to dig deeply and accurately into what the House is doing.

First Impressions: Funding Breakdown in the Draft FY 2024 House Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill

By Taylor J. Swift, senior policy advisor

The House proposes to appropriate $6.746 billion towards the Legislative branch, a 2.2% reduction from FY 23, according to a statement released by Appropriations Committee Republicans. Excluding the Senate amount, the remaining $5.313 billion in discretionary appropriations reflects a $252 million or 4.5% cut from the FY 23 enacted, according to the Committee. By comparison, the inflation rate for the 12 months ending in April was 4.9%, so this represents a cut in real terms in funding for the Legislative branch.

We reviewed the draft bill text released on Tuesday by the subcommittee and compared each line item against historical norms. Our findings on that line by line review are below. In a future blogpost, we will review the policy requests included in the accompanying committee report, which will not be released to the public until just before the full committee markup.

In summary, with the ongoing fight over the debt ceiling and calls by Republican leadership to decimate discretionary non-defense funding, this austere bill is likely as favorable to rebuilding a strong Congress as one could hope. Even with these cuts, Congress will retain much of its current capabilities to legislate, conduct oversight, and serve constituents, even as it refrains from providing itself additional needed strength.

We and our civil society colleagues recommended dozens of items to include as part of the bill text and committee report — see our FY 2024 Appropriations requests, FY 2024 appropriations testimony, and 2022 report on updating House Rules. You can watch the hearing here and don’t miss our resources on historical Legislative branch appropriations bills.

You can compare FY 2024 draft line item funding for FY 2021 versus FY 2022 versus FY 2023 by looking at our spreadsheet here. It also is embedded below.

The key funding features of this legislation include:

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AI-Enhanced House Earmark Request Data

Stacks of dollars in front of US Capitol

Cross-posted from Congressional Data Coalition

At the end of last week, the House Appropriations Committee published all earmark requests for FY 2024 on the committee’s website, including publishing them as a spreadsheet. This is great and welcome news. For the first time, the appropriations spreadsheet separated member names into different columns and included state, district, party, and recipient address. This makes the information significantly more usable. Thank you.

In fact, it’s so usable, we spent a little time over the weekend making it even more robust. We enhanced their spreadsheet by adding bioguide IDs for each member, appropriations subcommittee codes, a standardized recipient address (with help from ChatGPT), and extracted the recipient state and zip code. We have been playing around with using the AI to categorize whether the recipient entity is a non-profit or a governmental entity. We can imagine a lot of use cases for this cleaned-up data.

The spreadsheet is available online here. We are continuing to tinker with it.

Unfortunately, the Appropriators’ spreadsheet does not include the request summaries published on the committees website nor a direct link to the request letter. We would also love to see the EINs for the non-profit requesting entities, because then we could tie that request to their 990 tax form and maybe to their lobbying disclosure records as well.

Regardless, all in all, this is a significant step forward in improving the transparency of the requests and we hope it will continue to improve.

The earmarks dataset was also a great opportunity for us to play with marrying the new ChatGPT technology with Google Sheets. I think this technology has the possibility of fundamentally transforming how appropriators gather requests from the public — which is the subject of a current Senate request for comments — and how the committee gathers requests from members. The ability to clean up requests (i.e. moving information from unstructured to structured formats), categorize them, summarize them, and do due diligence on the requesters should be a game changer.

First Branch Forecast for March 20, 2023: Keep the MRA Funded

TOP LINE

The contrast of fast and slow continues to stand out to us in this new Congress. The House is prepping its appropriations work with breakneck speed, while the Senate will stretch its process out at a more leisurely pace.

With only themselves to respond to the baking crisis that emerged suddenly, Senators chose to respond with no response at all.

The failure of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank were historically large, and indicate some broader structural issues within the financial sector. Default on the federal debt would blow through the sector and the economy like a volcanic eruption. Nevertheless, the House majority continues its phoney war with the White House on the issue despite the apparent systemic weaknesses. At some point, governance is going to have to start.

This week both chambers are in session Wednesday through Friday. The Senate also is in session Tuesday.

The House Administration Committee will hold a rare hearing on the Office of the Attending Physician on Thursday at 3 PM, and hold an organizational meeting on House Communication Standards on Friday at 9:30 AM.

APPROPRIATIONS SEASON

Four significant House Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee hearings are set for this week. Thursday, GAO will present its budget request at 9:30 AM, the Capitol Police will present at 11 AM, and the Library of Congress at 1 PM. Friday, the panel will hold its members day at 9 AM.

Members can submit Legislative branch language until 6 PM on Friday (I apologize for combining the public testimony deadline with this deadline, which was the 17th – I was working off the majority’s website, but this dear colleague has the deadline as the 24th.)

The Senate Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee will hear budget requests of the Architect of the Capitol and Library of Congress Wednesday, March 22 at 3 PM.

Approps resources: We’ve posted a tracker for the appropriations process with testimony and hearing deadlines at this link. (n.b. six of them are Friday.) We’ve also compiled a spreadsheet of Appropriations Committee members by their subcommittee to make life a little easier. There are tabs for both the House and Senate but that may be hard to see on smaller screens.

We provided this exhaustive summary of last year’s bill, and we maintain a repository of reports and testimony over the last half-decade at this github site. Consult this guide for tracking House approps markups.

Demand Progress’ Legislative branch-related requests are available at this link.

Senate appropriators have released a hearings schedule for the rest of the FY24 hearings on the committee website with the caveat they are tentative until officially posted a week in advance. This schedule stretches into June.

Retaining MRA levels: Demand Progress and a coalition of other government reform groups and individuals are urging the House Appropriations Committee to retain funding for the MRA at its current FY2023 levels, warning that cuts would force staff from their positions and weaken institutional capacity. Before MRA increases in the last two fiscal years, staff turnover had reached its highest rate in over 20 years.

Last year, the House raised staff pay closer to parity with the Executive branch and set a salary floor. According to a LegiStorm analysis, junior staffer pay rose the most, crossing a median salary of $50,000. Cuts would return these positions to unsustainable compensation rates for young people without deep-pocketed parents or additional employment. Senior staff, meanwhile, once again would fall well below parity with positions off the Hill, restarting a brain drain that impacts legislative and oversight capacity.

As the letter points out, most House committee chairs this month requested budget increases of between 5% and 10% for FY2024 specifically for staff pay in order to attract and retain talented people. Turning around and cutting personal staff pay would be counterproductive to committee function, not to mention the effectiveness of member offices.

Demand Progress-Led Coalition: Keep Funding for Staff Pay

Read the letter we sent today to the House Appropriations Committee to retain funding for the MRA at its current FY2023 levels.

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Don’t Slash Hill Staff Pay Says Left-Right Coalition

There’s a growing effort this appropriations season to decrease Member Representational Allowance (MRA) funds, which would inevitably result in lower pay for congressional staff, something a new coalition led by Demand Progress is fighting.

Today, Demand Progress sent a bipartisan letter to leadership on the House Committee on Appropriations, urging them to retain MRA funding levels to the FY23 amount.

Why? Low staffer pay fuels the revolving door and drives a high turnover rate on Capitol Hill — a staff exodus hit a 20-year high in 2021. When Congress loses institutional knowledge like that, it’s less able to govern and conduct oversight. It’s more likely to let lobbyists sway policy.

“Cutting MRAs is a horrible return on investment for the Legislative branch. For decades, Congress underpaid its own staff, self-inflicting a wound of diminished capacity, which undercut its ability to oversee and rein in the federal government’s sprawling administrative bureaucracy,” said Taylor J. Swift, senior policy advisor at Demand Progress. “To retain expert staff and promote a strong workforce, it’s essential Congress pays its staff at least as much as their counterparts in the Executive branch and private sector.”

Read the full letter here and below:

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Demand Progress Education Fund Affirms Right to Unionize by Congressional Staff in New Analysis of House Rules that Sought to End Unionization

“Unions in the House of Representatives in the 118th Congress,” a new report released today by the Demand Progress Education Fund, analyzes how the new House Rules aimed at rolling back the rights of House staff to unionize fall short of achieving that purpose. Its analysis shows House staff can assert their rights to organize unions in the 118th Congress. The report was written by Kevin Mulshine, former Senior Advisor and Counsel on the first staff of the Office of Compliance/Office of Congressional Workplace Rights.

The report explains in detail the employee protections under the Congressional Accountability Act — a Gingrich-era congressional workplace law that allowed Legislative branch staff to unionize — and how that law applies today. House political and non-political staff earned the right to unionize last year with the passage of H.Res.1096.

“House staff can assert their rights to organize unions in the 118th Congress,” said Kevin Mulshine, special advisor to Demand Progress Education Fund and author of the report. “Contrary to what the House Rules may have intended to proscribe, staffers who want to exercise their rights to collectively organize should have little fear of a loss of legal protections for their actions.”

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Demand Progress Education Fund, Freedom of Press Foundation Lead 43 Organizations Calling on House to Let C-SPAN Control Cameras on the House Floor

Demand Progress Education Fund and Freedom of the Press Foundation led a broad coalition of press freedom organizations, government accountability and civil liberties organizations, and media outlets in urging House leadership to let C-SPAN have independent control of cameras that broadcast and stream House floor proceedings.

The group sent a letter today to Speaker McCarthy and Democratic Leader Jeffries endorsed by organizations spanning the ideological spectrum.

“When C-SPAN is able to call its own shots, the American public benefits by getting an authentic and transparent view of how Congress functions and the mood of the chamber,” said Daniel Schuman, policy director at Demand Progress Education Fund. “We can see what really happens on the House floor, such as unexpected bipartisan negotiations like when Reps. Ocasio-Cortez and Gosar had a one-on-one conversation during the Speaker vote-a-rama.”

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Legislative Branch Funding Breakdown in the FY 2023 Omnibus Bill

The FY 2023 appropriations omnibus was passed by both houses of Congress and signed by President Biden. The FY 2023 Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill was rolled into the package, and it is packed with good government initiatives and significant investments in Congress’s capacity to legislate, conduct oversight, serve constituents, and more.

We and our civil society colleagues recommended dozens of items to include as part of the bill text and committee report — see our FY 2023 Appropriations requests, FY 2023 appropriations testimony, and 2022 report on updating House Rules — many of which appropriators graciously considered and included.

As Congress turns to the FY 2024 appropriations process, this blogpost highlights some of the notable funding changes reflected in the FY 2023 Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill. You can find the complete FY 2023 Legislative Branch portion of the bill here and the Joint Explanatory Statement here. The Senate summary can be found here and the House summary can be found here. For resources on prior Legislative Branch Appropriations bills, go here. In a future blogpost, we will look at the report language.

You can compare final line item funding for FY 2021 versus FY 2022 versus FY 2023 by looking at our spreadsheet.

The FY 2023 Legislative Branch bill appropriates $6.9 billion towards the Legislative Branch, a $975.0 million increase over FY 2022, representing 16.5% increase.

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Legislative Branch Appropriations Line Items: FY 2021 to FY 2023

Congress finally introduced its FY 2023 omnibus bill. In the spreadsheet here and below, we broke down the Legislative Branch line items contained in the FY 2023 omnibus bill and compared them to FY 2021 and FY 2022. The spreadsheet also contains the requests published in the president budget, the appropriations levels supported by the subcommittee and full committee as they come out, and a comparison of how those levels have changed over time.