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.
How members spend their office budget on outbound mail and ads
Members of Congress use their taxpayer-funded office budget to print and mail flyers to constituents, place ads in local newspapers, and pay vendors for digital services. By statute, this spending must be informational — and members can't send taxpayer-funded mail within 60 days of an election they're running in. Within those rules, members have wide discretion over how much to spend, when, and with which vendors.
We measure “outbound communications” as postage (USPS for taxpayer-funded mail) plus mass-mailer printing (firms like Bullseye Marketing and Union Graphics) plus advertisements (digital, broadcast, and print ad placements). Each transaction is classified by vendor name, so the metric works consistently across the 2016–2025 window. Office supplies, security, cleaning, and digital constituent platforms (Fireside, HouseCall) are tracked separately.
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.
Outbound mail spend, year by year
Sherman has been in office since 1997 — far longer than the others — so cumulative totals over this dataset wouldn't mean much. (And the SOD online archive only goes back to 2016, so even cumulative totals are really just the 2016–2025 window.) Year-over-year is the apples-to-apples view. Both 2022 and 2024 were primary-election years for all four members.
| Year | Brad ShermanSherman CA-32 | Alexandria Ocasio-CortezOcasio-Cortez NY-14 | Ilhan OmarOmar MN-5 | Ayanna PressleyPressley MA-7 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | $186,188 | $1,402 | $3,490 | $813 |
| 2020 | $36,048 | $1,825 | $12,764 | $2,257 |
| 2021 | $81,182 | $2,561 | $19,197 | $75,396 |
| 2022primary year | $517,443 | $7,464 | $109,306 | $28,960 |
| 2023 | $229,596 | $5,995 | $53,910 | $1,157 |
| 2024primary year | $382,225 | $7,483 | $180,951 | $36,836 |
| 2025 | $94,029 | $36,878 | $18,728 | $2,422 |
Highlighted rows are primary-election years for all four members. Sherman's 2022 cycle ($550k of postage + printed mail) was his largest outbound year on record — he was defending CA-30 before redistricting moved him to a more competitive CA-32 in 2024.
Brad Sherman
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Ilhan Omar
Ayanna Pressley
Two parallel money flows fund a sitting incumbent's voter contact
Both money flows fund mailings, ads, and outreach to constituents. The campaign account is donor-financed and regulated by the FEC; the office budget is taxpayer-financed and governed by House rules that prohibit campaign-explicit content and bar any taxpayer-funded mail in the 60 days before an election. The two are legally distinct. Whether running both in parallel is an appropriate use of taxpayer money is a question voters can answer for themselves.
Brad Sherman's comms by year — postage, mailers, advertisements
Each transaction is classified by vendor name, so the same buckets apply to all years (2016 onward). The 2022 and 2024 election cycles are clearly visible.
| Year | Total | Postage | Mass mailers | Advertisements |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | $167,414 | $75K | $63K | $0 |
| 2017 | $116,872 | $26K | $52K | $2K |
| 2018 | $178,010 | $72K | $63K | $5K |
| 2019 | $254,426 | $81K | $91K | $14K |
| 2020 | $89,196 | $30K | $5K | $1K |
| 2021 | $126,440 | $38K | $41K | $1K |
| 2022 | $595,471 | $198K | $214K | $105K |
| 2023 | $297,675 | $90K | $107K | $33K |
| 2024 | $441,600 | $126K | $141K | $116K |
| 2025 | $142,159 | $24K | $54K | $15K |
Brad Sherman's top comms vendors (2016–2025)
Beyond the U.S. Postal Service (which receives postage payments), the largest recipients are mailer-printing and advertising firms.
| Vendor | Total paid | Transactions |
|---|---|---|
| UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE | $759,630 | 108 |
| BULLSEYE MARKETING | $384,377 | 172 |
| UNION GRAPHICS LLC | $218,355 | 16 |
| ICONSTITUENT LLC | $200,901 | 118 |
| THE HARMAN PRESS | $122,446 | 23 |
| CONEXION POLITICAL LLC | $101,093 | 5 |
| INDIGOVERN LLC | $99,804 | 49 |
| SABIO INC | $85,986 | 9 |
| HOUSECALL LLC | $78,770 | 41 |
| VALLEY NEWS GROUP | $48,205 | 36 |
| PUBLIC PRINTER | $43,331 | 25 |
| PFEIFFER DESIGN | $34,138 | 28 |
Every Sherman comms transaction we have on file
Sortable, filterable. Click a column header to sort. Negative amounts are refunds or corrections.
| Date | Quarter | Vendor | Category | Purpose | Amount ↓ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 29-Feb-24 | 2024Q1 | UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE | Franked-mail postage (USPS) | FRANKED MAIL | $75,314 |
| 31-May-22 | 2022Q2 | UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE | Franked-mail postage (USPS) | FRANKED MAIL | $50,889 |
| 1-Feb-22 | 2022Q1 | UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE | Franked-mail postage (USPS) | FRANKED MAIL | $48,160 |
| 28-Apr-22 | 2022Q2 | UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE | Franked-mail postage (USPS) | FRANKED MAIL | $43,619 |
| 31-Jan-24 | 2024Q1 | UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE | Franked-mail postage (USPS) | FRANKED MAIL | $39,755 |
| 26-Nov-19 | 2019Q4 | UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE | Franked-mail postage (USPS) | FRANKED MAIL | $35,157 |
| 2-Nov-23 | 2023Q4 | UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE | Franked-mail postage (USPS) | FRANKED MAIL | $34,948 |
| 29-Dec-23 | 2023Q4 | UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE | Franked-mail postage (USPS) | FRANKED MAIL | $34,773 |
| 29-Jan-16 | 2016Q1 | UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE | Franked-mail postage (USPS) | FRANKED MAIL | $34,238 |
| 28-Apr-16 | 2016Q2 | UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE | Franked-mail postage (USPS) | FRANKED MAIL | $31,787 |
| 8-Jul-22 | 2022Q3 | SABIO INC | Advertisements (digital, print, broadcast) | ADVERTISEMENTS | $30,208 |
| 31-Jan-20 | 2020Q1 | UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE | Franked-mail postage (USPS) | FRANKED MAIL | $29,724 |
| 28-Jan-21 | 2021Q1 | UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE | Franked-mail postage (USPS) | FRANKED MAIL | $29,406 |
| 1-Mar-22 | 2022Q1 | UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE | Franked-mail postage (USPS) | FRANKED MAIL | $28,813 |
| 22-Jan-24 | 2024Q1 | CONEXION POLITICAL LLC | Advertisements (digital, print, broadcast) | ADVERTISEMENTS | $27,000 |
| 14-Mar-22 | 2022Q1 | UNION GRAPHICS LLC | Mass-mailer printing | FRANKABLE PRINTING & REPROD | $24,950 |
| 30-Mar-22 | 2022Q1 | UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE | Franked-mail postage (USPS) | FRANKED MAIL | $24,893 |
| 22-Jan-24 | 2024Q1 | CONEXION POLITICAL LLC | Advertisements (digital, print, broadcast) | ADVERTISEMENTS | $24,067 |
| 16-Jan-22 | 2022Q1 | INDIGOVERN LLC | Digital constituent platforms (CRM, email, text) | TECHNOLOGY SERVICE CONTRACTS | $22,380 |
| 20-Apr-22 | 2022Q2 | UNION GRAPHICS LLC | Mass-mailer printing | FRANKABLE PRINTING & REPROD | $22,280 |
| 30-Jan-18 | 2018Q1 | UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE | Franked-mail postage (USPS) | FRANKED MAIL | $20,502 |
| 28-Jun-19 | 2019Q2 | UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE | Franked-mail postage (USPS) | FRANKED MAIL | $19,225 |
| 21-Feb-24 | 2024Q1 | UNION GRAPHICS LLC | Mass-mailer printing | FRANKABLE PRINTING & REPROD | $19,215 |
| 31-May-18 | 2018Q2 | UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE | Franked-mail postage (USPS) | FRANKED MAIL | $18,949 |
| 16-Nov-23 | 2023Q4 | UNION GRAPHICS LLC | Mass-mailer printing | FRANKABLE PRINTING & REPROD | $18,850 |
Methodology & transparency
Headline = postage + mass-mailer printing + advertisements (vendors classified by name, working across all years). Adjacent = digital constituent platforms (CRM, email, text) and design/creative. Unclassified = vendors not in our lookup; surfaced explicitly so reviewers can verify and tag.
Some vendors don't map to a known bucket — typically individual contractors, specialty consultants, or one-off services. We surface those amounts as “unclassified” rather than guess. Treat them as the upper bound on error: if every unclassified vendor turned out to be a hidden ad firm, each member's headline outbound figure would rise by the amount shown below.
- Brad Sherman: $44,956 unclassified (vs. $1,884,026 headline outbound).
- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: $62,747 unclassified (vs. $63,608 headline outbound).
- Ilhan Omar: $11,202 unclassified (vs. $398,345 headline outbound).
- Ayanna Pressley: $127,553 unclassified (vs. $147,841 headline outbound).
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.