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.
Historical Trends — Brad Sherman
Sherman has held this seat since 1997. The House Statement of Disbursements is published online back to 2009; the searchable archive currently goes back to 2016. Across that window, has his spending pattern changed?
Brad Sherman's office budget spending, year over year
Stacked by category. Quarterly SOD totals aggregated to calendar years. The earliest year in this dataset is 2016Q1 (limit of the House SOD online archive).
Year-over-year totals
| Year | Total spent | Personnel | Travel | Rent / utilities | Constituent mail |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | $1,313,467 | $935K | $24K | $133K | $75K |
| 2017 | $1,306,650 | $972K | $11K | $150K | $26K |
| 2018 | $1,476,124 | $1.1M | $15K | $156K | $72K |
| 2019 | $1,347,505 | $850K | $18K | $166K | $81K |
| 2020 | $1,546,532 | $1.2M | $8K | $211K | $30K |
| 2021 | $1,345,385 | $1.0M | $6K | $135K | $38K |
| 2022 | $2,020,410 | $1.2M | $10K | $168K | $198K |
| 2023 | $1,914,841 | $1.3M | $37K | $166K | $91K |
| 2024 | $2,163,600 | $1.4M | $37K | $186K | $126K |
| 2025 | $1,920,165 | $1.5M | $32K | $179K | $24K |
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.