Planes, trains and luxury stays:
Despite reforms, lobbyists still involved in House travel
Members of Congress have taken hundreds of AIPAC-funded trips to Israel in the past decade
On June 16, as Benjamin Netanyahu continued his year-long defiance of Joe Biden over the war in Gaza, eight U.S. House members and two staffers arrived at Tel Aviv’s luxurious Kempinski Hotel for a four-day immersion in Israeli politics. The lawmakers and…
Sugar industry pays for House trips to help safeguard subsidies
Groups associated with sugar growers and refiners have spent tens of thousands of dollars for hundreds of U.S. House staff to tour muddy sugar cane fields in Louisiana and Florida and sugar beet factories in Minnesota, according to an analysis of House travel disclosure data from 2012 through 2023 compiled by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland.
When House members travel the globe on private dime, families often go too
The spouses, children and siblings of U.S. House members are traveling around the world on trips paid for by special interest groups. Critics say the practice amounts to “influence-peddling vacations.’’
Think tanks, often funded by foreign governments, send House members on trips around the world
Private funders paid for a member of the U.S. House of Representatives or their staff to travel overseas more than 4,000 times in the past decade. The bill for the vast majority of those trips was footed by nonprofit organizations, including prestigious think tanks that receive foreign government funding.
ABOUT THIS HOWARD CENTER PROJECT
Congressional reforms passed nearly 20 years ago were supposed to severely restrict the role of lobbyists in congressional trips. Reporters for the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland and at Boston University spent nine months examining privately funded travel by members of the U.S. House of Representatives and their staffs. The investigation showed the reforms aren’t working.
To conduct the analysis of privately financed travel, the Howard Center obtained year-by-year filings and metadata from the House. This information, which dated to 2017, was supplemented by earlier filings from data maintained by ProPublica that extended the data to 2012, and from sites such as archive.org. For verification purposes, the Howard Center also purchased data on congressional trips from LegiStorm, a provider of congressional information and data.
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