Most Expensive House Office in America is Steve Kagen’s

On last Mon­day, the House did some­thing for the first time ever.

Thanks to a change in its own trans­parency laws, the quar­terly expense report of the House is finally online.  Prior to this change, one would have to get a look at this report one of two ways.

The hard way: Request a copy of the report (typ­i­cally in three vol­umes, each 1000+ pages in size) from the House Com­mit­tee on Admin­is­tra­tion which acts as a sort of Mayor’s office for the House; if they have a copy lying around, they might give you one.

The easy way: Have a friend who works as a House staffer and ask them if you can page threw it.

Since Politico is what Politico is, it ran a story on this news the only way they knew how; a sen­sa­tional story about Speaker Pelosi buy­ing $2993 worth of flow­ers. That’s fine and all, but as much of a waste of tax­payer dol­lars (as well as odd pur­chase) that might be, it’s noth­ing com­pared to what other mem­bers might be using on such things as frank­ing priv­i­leges and print­ing of mate­ri­als.  That’s the trea­sure trove of infor­ma­tion this new dis­clo­sure now gives Americans.

For the first time ever, you can now find out how much your indi­vid­ual Con­gress­man is spend­ing in his Con­gres­sional office with­out mak­ing a spe­cial trip to Wash­ing­ton.  So, with that weapons cache in tow, blog­gers and jour­nal­ists have been pour­ing over the report avail­able either at the Office of the House’s Chief Admin­is­tra­tive Offi­cer or the Sun­light Foun­da­tion.  Some of them — like this one in New Mex­ico – have begun com­pil­ing lists of the biggest Con­gres­sional spenders for the third quar­ter of 2009.

At the top: Appleton’s own Steve Kagen.

Accord­ing to the report, U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Luján of Santa Fe spent more than $337,000 on his office between June and Sep­tem­ber and $808,000 in the first nine months of the year. That seems like a lot, but it’s less than New Mexico’s other two con­gress­men. Mar­tin Hein­rich of Albu­querque spent more than $343,000 for the quar­ter and $908,000 for Jan­u­ary through Sep­tem­ber, while Harry Teague of Hobbs spent more than $352,000 the last quar­ter and more than $899,000 as of the end of September.

The most expen­sive offices in Con­gress are those of Reps. Steve Kagen, D-Wisc., who spent $452,000 in the last quar­ter, Alan Grayson, D-Fla., who spent $449,000, and Bart Gor­don, D-Tenn., who spent $445,000.

In actu­al­ity, Kagen’s office spent $452,596.  Con­gres­sional offices get a total of $1.5 mil­lion to spend for the entire fis­cal year.

When you add up the spend­ing of the other seven Wis­con­sin Con­gres­sional rep­re­sen­ta­tives, here are their 2009 Quar­ter 3 num­bers from a spread­sheet pro­vided by the Sun­light Foun­da­tion (num­bers rounded to near­est dol­lar): Paul Ryan — $382,733;  Tammy Bald­win — $311,637; Ron Kind — $294,527; Gwen Moore — $268,778; Jim Sensen­bren­ner — $280,077; Tom Petri — $324,509; and Dave Obey — $248,945.

Year to date totals for the Wis­con­sin del­e­ga­tion are: Ryan — $951,904; Bald­win — $922,888; Kind — $931,578; Moore — $817,093; Sensen­bren­ner — $898,976; Petri — $935,137; Obey — $686,796; Kagen — $1,183,739.

Quar­ter 4 is tra­di­tion­ally a time when Con­gres­sional offices will use up their remain­ing bud­gets with fur­ther expen­di­tures.  New office equip­ment (com­put­ers, TV sets, office fur­ni­ture) often will be the major pur­chases.  Any remain­ing money after that is tra­di­tion­ally given back to the fed­eral budget.

So what is Kagen spend­ing so much of your tax dol­lars on; and what will he be able to spend the remain­ing $316,261 on?

Well, as is typ­i­cal, the biggest expense is staff salary.  For Kagen that was $234,350; which puts his office around the aver­age in Con­gress.  Staff salaries are pretty uni­ver­sal in Con­gress with only the years of ser­vice being the only deter­min­ing fac­tor in any dif­fer­ences.  In Kagen’s office, he spent an amaz­ing $59,934 in franked mail­ings, and $79,381 in print­ing and repro­duc­tion costs (most of them related to mak­ing the franked mail­ings).  A detailed look at the tim­ing of these mail­ings show the vast major­ity of them were done right before the August Recess.

(Health Care Bill sales pitches per­haps?  Yeah, those went well if mem­ory serves for the Kagen Office.)

Could some­one in the greater Green Bay-Appleton media remind Kagen about his office’s spend­ing habits the next time he tries to sound like “Mr. Tight-wad with the Gov­ern­ment Purse Strings” on the cam­paign trail next year?  The man’s about as “Fis­cally Con­ser­v­a­tive” a politi­cian as a kid in a candy store.

So far — and I’ve been work­ing on this post for the bet­ter part of a week — the only 8th Dis­trict Repub­li­can to even notice this news is Roof­ing Com­pany Owner Reid Rib­ble, who issued a press release.  My guess is the Roth team is still being assem­bled, and missed this.  The other five run­ning bet­ter have more solid excuses for not jump­ing on prime ammo like this that Kagen gives them.

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