Congressmen receive $1,340,000 for expenses?

[snopes]

Comment: I was sent this by a friend who is also my dentist.
they were told this ( by a Rt Wing ) speaker at their Rotary club meeting.
I was wondering if you had heard anything along these lines I tried to
seach the line
"Another interesting fact = each member of Congress receives $1,340,000 to
run his or her office per year"
but came up empty. I would appreciate any verification one way or another
you could provide.

[keokuk]

I just checked the proposed budget and that seems to be about the right number, although it's tough to tell because leadership offices are allotted more than regular ones.

Most Congressional offices consist of 14-18 full-time staff members to pay, plus they need to order all their own office supplies and pay rent for things like copiers, computers, fax machines and blackberries. They also have to rent out office space for the office(s) in their home district. They pay for transportation for the member and his or her staff to and from the district when necessary, and have other expenditures like any business.

There are certain maximum limits in place to prevent malfeasance, such as caps on permissible salaries and limitations on travel (no first class on the taxpayer dime), but there's a lot of autonomy for a member of Congress to designate the funds around however he or she sees fit. Some make sure to use every last dime, others make a point to brag about having a fair amount left over.

While they could probably get by with less if necessary, it's not an entirely unreasonable amount after sitting down and adding it all together.

That being said, I wouldn't characterize it as an expense account but rather the operating budget for a member's staff and office.

*The only thing that I'm not entirely clear with is whether every regular member gets $1.3-$1.4M for his or her office, or if that's the average for all offices combined. I'd imagine that they take into account differing costs of travel to home districts and regional real estate prices for district offices.

[keokuk]

Here's an article from The Hill (a Capitol Hill newspaper) on spending habits for members of Congress in 2005.

Rep. Jim Matheson (D-Utah) is Congress’s biggest spender while Rep. Virgil Goode (R-Va.) is the thriftiest, according to a report on congressional office expenses released yesterday by the National Taxpayers Union (NTU).

The report analyzes how lawmakers spent their 2005 Members’ Representational Account (MRA), the average $1.2 million allotted to each lawmaker to cover the salaries of 18 full-time aides, travel, mass mailings, leased cars, bottled water, coffee and everything else needed to run a modern office.

A lawmaker’s overall budget varies based on the distance between his district and Washington, D.C., and the rate at which the General Services Administration (GSA) charges for leasing office space.