PropertyValue
?:author
?:datePublished
  • 2022-03-16 (xsd:date)
?:headline
  • Did Congress 'Give Itself a 21% Raise' in 2022? (en)
?:inLanguage
?:itemReviewed
?:mentions
?:reviewBody
  • In March 2022, social media users, and in particular right-leaning commentators, protested what they characterized as a decision by Congress members to award themselves a 21 percent pay rise, while U.S. residents endured inflation and record high gas prices. For example, former Republican Congressional candidate Buzz Patterson wrote: For his part, Donald Trump Jr. — the son of and adviser to former President Donald Trump — tweeted: What the hell has Congress done to deserve a 21% raise? Similar claims were made by various right-leaning commentators. On March 10, the right-wing FrontPage Magazine posted an article with the headline Americans Can't Afford Gas, Congress Just Gave Itself a 21% Raise: On Facebook, screenshots of that headline went viral, as shown in the image below: In reality, Congress members did not award themselves a 21 percent pay raise in 2022, but they did vote to increase their operating budgets and expenses by that much. As a result, we're issuing a rating of Mostly False. What those claims actually referred to was something called the Members Representational Allowance (MRA), which the non-partisan Congressional Research Service describes as follows: The MRA can be used to pay office staff, but does not include the salary of House members themselves, which has not changed since 2009 and is $174,000 for a typical member. Usually, representatives spend their MRA on travel, paying staff, printing services, office supplies, and so on. On March 15, President Joe Biden signed into law the massive omnibus spending bill. H.R. 2471. Around halfway through the 2,700-page text of the bill, the following stipulation can be found: In other words, the collective MRA for the House of Representatives is just over $774 million for the 2022 fiscal year. For the 2021 fiscal year, the MRA was $640 million, which means a year-on-year increase of $134.4 million, or exactly 21 percent, as highlighted by Roll Call. Senators, who also typically have a salary of $174,000, avail themselves of a roughly equivalent allowance, called the Senators' Official Personnel and Office Expense Account (SOPOEA). For the record, that too increased in the 2022 omnibus spending bill: from $461 million in 2021 to $486.3 million in 2022 — a 5 percent increase. (en)
?:reviewRating
rdf:type
?:url