Free Republic

When lawmakers travel overseas on official business they are given up to $250 a day in taxpayer funds to cover meals and expenses. Congressional rules say they must return any leftover cash to the government. According to interviews with 20 current and former members of Congress, lawmakers use the excess cash for shopping or to defray spouses' travel expenses. Sometimes they give it away; sometimes they pocket it. Many lawmakers said they didn't know the rules demand repayment. "If that was the policy, you could never get many members traveling," said Rep. Solomon Ortiz, a Texas Democrat. Mr. Ortiz said...

<p>WASHINGTON -- When 10 members of Congress wanted to study climate change, they did more than just dip their toes into the subject: They went diving and snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef. They also rode a cable car through the Australian rain forest, visited a penguin rookery and flew to the South Pole.</p>

WASHINGTON -- Spending by lawmakers on taxpayer-financed trips abroad has risen sharply in recent years, a Wall Street Journal analysis of travel records shows, involving everything from war-zone visits to trips to exotic spots such as the Galápagos Islands. The spending on overseas travel is up almost tenfold since 1995, and has nearly tripled since 2001, according to the Journal analysis of 60,000 travel records. Hundreds of lawmakers traveled overseas in 2008 at a cost of about $13 million. That's a 50% jump since Democrats took control of Congress two years ago. The cost of so-called congressional delegations, known among...

WASHINGTON -- Spending by lawmakers on taxpayer-financed trips abroad has risen sharply in recent years, a Wall Street Journal analysis of travel records shows, involving everything from war-zone visits to trips to exotic spots such as the Galápagos Islands. The spending on overseas travel is up almost tenfold since 1995, and has nearly tripled since 2001, according to the Journal analysis of 60,000 travel records. Hundreds of lawmakers traveled overseas in 2008 at a cost of about $13 million. That's a 50% jump since Democrats took control of Congress two years ago. The cost of so-called congressional delegations, known among...

Members of Congress said Thursday that details of their expense claims wouldn't be posted online before mid-November at the earliest -- two and a half months later than the deadline previously set for publishing them in an electronic format for the first time. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ordered the House Chief Administrative Officer to put information about expenses claimed by members of the House on the Internet "at the earliest date," in an announcement reversing a longstanding policy of providing the information only in books totaling about 12,000 pages a year. The chief administrative officer, a congressional employee, set an...

On Christmas Day, Sen. Arlen Specter flew to Europe and the Middle East for 11 days of meetings with government officials. The travel-disclosure form the Pennsylvania Democrat filed for the trip reported the seven-country tour with his wife, an aide and two military officials on a private military jet cost $571 a person, or a total of about $2,800. The real cost was far higher, in excess of $70,000, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Mr. Specter's travel report is one of scores of examples of the gap between the expenditures congressional delegations are required to report and what...