Residual Forces

An RF reader was gracious enough to send me the content of this RollCall story on Congressional payroll shortfalls that I wrote about earlier today. 

House appropriators plan to take millions of dollars from various legislative branch projects — including the Capitol Visitor Center — to help pay for the raises they gave to House staffers about seven months ago.

In January, appropriators gave Members’ office budgets a 2.5 percent increase for the pay hikes by pulling about $14 million from the account that pays for employees’ health care and life insurance.

That account is now $11 million short.

Chief Administrative Officer Dan Beard said the original plan was to gain back the $14 million through a Congressional supplemental, a “gamble” that never materialized.

Now he’s looking to take millions from accounts for the CVC and Disaster Recovery fund, among others, a plan which must be approved by the House Appropriations Committee.

So they will be robbing the Peter fund for Government services, to pay Paul, the Government employee’s pay raise. Nice. But it gets worse, this wasn’t the case in the past. It was only of late that Congress decided to deficit spend for pay raises. 

At that time, appropriators and House Administration Committee officials decided to raise Members’ Representational Allowances after some Members complained that the original budget wouldn’t cover the annual cost-of-living increases for their staffers.

MRAs fund everything related to Members’ official duties, with three main components: salaries, franked mail and expenses such as travel and district office rent. They have stayed mostly stagnant for years, constrained by a tight legislative branch budget.

The House Committee members that opened up the coffers for pay raises can be found here. No Minnesotans but it does have a 6 Democrat to 3 Republican breakdown. before Democrats took control of Congress, the spending for Congressional members had stayed “mostly stagnant”. I’m willing to conclude that it was because Republicans held the House for 12 years. 

But now that Democrats have returned to power, chalk full of their “change”, they instantly open the coffers and start the padding of their own spending accounts. But it is even worse. They are robbing a Health insurance account. 

But this fiscal year, the increase for MRAs in the original budget was particularly bad, not even topping 1 percent. So in January, Members raised the MRAs by taking the needed $14 million from Government Contributions, an account that funds staffers’ health care and life insurance.

Let’s be clear. Democrats have siphoned money out of a Health care and life insurance fund to pay for spending increases for members of Congress. 

Now I would love this if the excuse was that they were going to change the benefit structure and tax code so rather than force employees into bureaucratic group health care, they would give the federal employees pre tax dollars to get their own private, affodable, and portable insurance. But that was not the case. This was just to pad the budgets of Congressional members and their staffers. 

What’s worse? This is all money that will need to be replaced. yep, that’s right, no pay go rule here. They robbed from one account that will have to be replenished in the future. 

Now, keep in mind this was a pay raise, not a one time expense. Meaning that next year we, the taxpayers, will need to pony up the extra $14 million for ‘Cost of Living Increases’ plus the 14 million to repay the accounts they stole the money from this year.

Is this cleaning up Washington? Is this cleaning up the corruption and wasteful spending? 

Heck, why don’t we just let the lobbyists pay for the meals, it would save the taxpayers millions. (that was a joke. This story really makes me upset and I needed to laugh a bit.)

I’m going to email me member of Congress (Rep. Bachmann) to see if she has a statement or any knowledge of this. I’d love to see if others out there could follow up with their own members. 

I’m going to work on an email to her and post it here on RF so others could use it as well.