With Travel Expenses, Some in Congress Keep the Change
Congressmen like to travel -- in the past two years alone, members of the House and the Senate ran up 5,300 travel days, according to the Wall Street Journal -- and when they're abroad on official business, they get a chunk of spending money each day to cover basic costs. In Paris, for example, it's $178, in Tokyo it's $214, and in Kabul it's $28. When the trip ends, any unspent funds are supposed to be returned to the taxpayer, but as the Journal reports today, this doesn't always happen.
Instead, "lawmakers use the excess cash for shopping or to defray spouses' travel expenses," the Journal writes. "Sometimes they give it away; sometimes they pocket it. Many lawmakers said they didn't know the rules demand repayment."
Because there is no internal system of tracking these payments, it's unclear how much money has been disbursed, what it has been spent on and how much ought to have been returned. The Journal estimated that $375,000 to $625,000 had been given to House members in the past two years alone.
For their part, members of Congress from both political parties expressed little concern over the practice of not returning the cash. "You are all concerned about nickels and dimes, and I'm not," Rep. Alcee Hastings, a Florida Democrat, told the Journal, while former Rep. Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican, characterized the practice of using excess funds for shopping as "fairly standard."
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2 comments
Bill_Harshaw
March 2, 2010, 1:45 p.m.
When you think about it, this is an odd story. Most federal employees pay for travel expenses with their federal credit card, so why do Congresspeople get cash?
I suspect, if you dig into it, this is a holdover from the Marshall plan and subsequent PL-480 aid. As I understand it, the US treasury exchanged Marshall Plan aid dollars for the local currency. For example, if the UK got $100 million in dollars, the Treasury got 40 million pounds (or whatever the exchange rate was) in an account in the Bank of England. The key thing was that, though the Treasury got the money, they couldn’t move the pounds outside the UK, because that would undermine the purpose of the aid. The US had to find things to spend the pounds (or whatever local currency was) within the country. So the US bought lots of stuff with those “counterpart funds” (see Wikipedia). And the Congressional delegations used to tap those funds for their in-country expenses.
When USDA started aiding foreign countries through PL-480, etc. the same sort of system was used. In many cases we accumulated large sums of local currency.
Bottomline—my guess is we’ve never changed that system and Co-dels have been abusing the process for 60 years.
Malik Nash
March 2, 2010, 9:26 p.m.
Aside from the fact that their system is weird in that they’re actually expected to return the unused portion of their per diem, that’s no different from any other federal employee. Once it’s paid, your per diem is yours. It actually gives you an incentive to economize when you travel, because if you don’t exceed your per diem, you get to pocket the difference. That helps in holding down costs. I don’t know of any state or federal agency that handles per diem any differently.
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