The annual budget of the members of the House of Representatives for their Washington and district offices are public record. This data details all quarterly official spending, including lawmakers’ offices, committee offices and administrative offices and through these insights, we can learn a lot about the spending habits of the government members, whether along partisan lines or in changes over time. We are particularly interested in the period between 2016 and 2018 when former president Donald J. Trump was elected to office as this was the time period when many changes occurred.
Using the publicly available “House Office Expenditures” dataset collected and published by Propublica, our analysis will address the following key questions about House expenditures between 2016 and 2018