Where Does Your Representative's Budget Go?
Every House member receives ~$2 million a year in taxpayer money to run their office. How they spend it tells you what they value.
Two terms used throughout this dashboard
- Office budget — the ~$2 million each House member receives every year to run their office (formally called the Members' Representational Allowance or MRA). Pays for staff, district offices, travel, mailings, and ads. Separate from the member's campaign account.
- Taxpayer-funded mail / franked mail — mailings a member can send to constituents using their office budget. Must be informational (not campaign advocacy), and members can't send any in the 60 days before an election they are running in.
Your representative receives approximately $2 million per year in taxpayer money to run their office. The data below is the actual spending, pulled from the House Statement of Disbursements.
Brad Sherman
CA-32Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
NY-14Ilhan Omar
MN-5Ayanna Pressley
MA-7How they allocate it (2022)
Brad Sherman
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Ilhan Omar
Ayanna Pressley
Outbound mail & ads, year by year
Each cluster is one year; each bar is one member. Primary years (2022 and 2024) are tinted yellow — the cycle pattern jumps out: incumbents tend to spend more taxpayer money on constituent contact in election years.
How I'll spend the office budget
Marena Lin · CA-32If I'm elected, here's how I'll allocate the same $2 million budget the incumbent has been receiving for almost three decades.
- Fully bilingual constituent services. Spanish at minimum, with additional language coverage matched to the district.
- Living wage for everyone on staff. No unpaid interns. AOC sets a $52,000 floor and $80,000 cap; we'll match or exceed.
- Public dashboard for casework metrics. Medicare/Medi-Cal enrollments, ICE detention interventions, languages served — updated quarterly.
- Annual office-budget transparency report. Every line item published, in plain English, with vendor context.
- Staff that reflects CA-32. Our office should look like the district that elected it.
Source data — download the raw CSVs (40 quarters)
Every quarterly CSV the dashboard is built from. Download any quarter to verify the numbers yourself by hand — the methodology page documents every filter and aggregation in enough detail to re-derive each headline figure in a spreadsheet.
These files are the unedited House Statement of Disbursements quarterly Detail tables, mirrored at https://mra-sod-archive.marenalinforcongress.com for stable access. The originals live at house.gov.
The complete manifest with download URLs is also available as JSON: manifest.json.