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Money and Power: The Wealth of
America's Elected Officials
Before his successful election to Congress, George Santos filed a financial disclosure form claiming a net worth of roughly $6 million. His status as a multi-millionaire made him an attractive candidate. Say what you will about his ethics. Santos understood the key to Congress: Wealth.
But just how wealthy is your typical member of the "People's House?"
Piecing Together the Wealth of House Members
To estimate the wealth of members of the U.S. House of Representatives, we had to do some digging. While ethics rules require annual financial disclosures, it was a surprisingly herculean effort to make use of them. Beyond their salaries, many members of Congress have extensive financial holdings. Indeed, these holdings are so vast, and the reporting so messy that other attempts to aggregate the data took hundreds of hours.
To accelerate this process, Citizen Codex used artificial intelligence to read through 4,000-plus pages of House members' financial disclosure forms and extract relevant information about each member's assets (e.g., stocks) and liabilities (e.g., car loans). By subtracting the value of their assets from the value of their liabilities, we calculated their non-real estate net worth.
Note: Given inconsistent reporting and poor data regarding real estate assets and debt, we excluded both from the dataset and calculated net worth less any real estate related assets and liabilities.
The antiquated way this data is made available was further complicated by inconsistencies across how members file their forms. In 2022, 35 House members filled out their financial disclosure forms by hand, which we had to read through manually. Ironically, members who submitted these manual forms appear to have high levels of wealth, with a median net worth of around $1.2 million.
What did the analysis reveal? The wealth gap between elected officials and the typical American was even wider than we thought.
Estimated net worth was calculated by subtracting the value of a member’s disclosed liabilities (e.g., car loans) from the value of their disclosed assets (e.g., stocks). Real estate was excluded.
In 2022, out of the 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrats held 222 and Republicans held 213.
Members of the House of Representatives can be split into 4 groups: indebted, the median, wealthy, ultra wealthy.
Let's dive in!
44 members of the House have a net worth less than $0. Some of these members have taken on business or student loans. Others have their wealth largely tied up in real estate, which is not represented here.
The median net worth, excluding their real estate, of a House member is $792,514.
199 House members, or 45%, have a net worth over $1 million...
... while at least 20 members of the House have a net worth over $25 million...
... and at least five members have a net worth of over $100 million.
James Madison
Remember that these net worth calculations are largely underestimated. Many members of Congress have numerous real estate properties around the country, which are excluded from these calculations. Yet these numbers still dwarf the experience of most Americans, whose median net worth, excluding real estate, is $57,980. That's 14 times less than the wealth of the typical House member.
When the framers of the U.S. Constitution designed the House of Representatives, James Madison famously said the House should have "an immediate dependence on, and intimate sympathy with, the people."
In Search of Greater Representation
Wealth in government is nothing new. The nation's first president, George Washington, was worth $587 million in today's dollars. You might expect such wealthy leaders in a world where only the land-owning class can vote, but why does it continue in the era of modern democracy? Why don't the bank accounts of members of the House 'look' like typical Americans'?
One big reason is the key advantages wealth awards when running for office. Elections take an enormous amount of time and money. According to Open Secrets, the average cost for a House election is $3,094,359. (For the Senate, it's $9,552,154.) Democrats and Republicans alike are under pressure to recruit candidates who can network with major donors and take time off work to organize a campaign. Most Americans don't fit that bill.
And this disparity is getting worse. Following the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, companies and individuals can make essentially unrestricted donations to politicians. When you're running for Congress, having wealthy friends is more important than ever.
Reform of campaign finance laws could change this advantage. Both Democratic and Republican senators have introduced legislation to ban corporations from making political contributions, and some House members have repeatedly sought to close the loopholes that allow the unrestricted flow of money into elections.
However, despite broad public support for such measures, there's no guarantee this legislation would close the wealth gap between Congress and the people. Some argue that stricter campaign finance laws would give wealthy incumbents more power.
The Future of Financial Transparency
Access to the financial records of elected officials is relatively novel.
It was only after the Watergate Scandal that Congress implemented mandatory financial reporting. And it was only in 2012 that Congress expanded this mandate to include stock trading.
There's been a lag in the technology to disseminate this data, but new applications like A.I. data extraction promise to level the playing field. Time will tell whether this increased transparency will drive meaningful reform.
About the Data
We obtained files detailing the assets and liabilities of each House member through the Office of the Clerk. Data are missing for a small number of congress members due to the complexities of special elections, late filings, and, in a few cases, illegible financial information. More information on how we processed these forms using the Chat GPT API can be found in our tools and methods blog post.
Note that most congressional members list ranges for asset and liability values (e.g. $500,000 to $1,000,000). Following the methodology established by Open Secrets, we average the minimum and maximum values of assets and liabilities to estimate net worth.
We had to exclude real-estate items from this analysis because while members of Congress are required to report all mortgages as liabilities, they aren't required to report personal residences as assets. When a member reports a mortgage without its corresponding property, it can make their net worth appear artificially low. In turn, when we report the typical American's net worth, we exclude their home equity, providing for a meaningful comparison.
Please note that Chat GPT's interpretation of the data is not perfect. Minor discrepancies exist where the A.I. misinterprets a value or an item's financial category. We found the rate of these errors to be lower than manually processing the data.
Further Reads
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