“[The House of Representatives] should have an immediate dependence on, and an intimate sympathy with, the people.” – Federalist 52

“By increasing the number of representatives, we open a door for the admission of the substantial yeomanry of our country, who, being possessed of the habits of economy, will be cautious of imprudent expenditures, by which means a greater saving will be made of public money than is sufficient to support them.” – Melancton Smith

“The government that governs best governs least.” – Thomas Paine

“Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone.” – Frederic Bastiat

“Either you will control your government, or government will control you.” – Ronald Reagan

Congressional District Size and Government Spending

Though the average population size of congressional districts has been growing ever since the nation’s birth, for the first 120 years their rate of growth was moderated by increasing the number of Representatives after each decennial population census.  In fact, the historical record reveals that the founders expected the size of the House to forever grow along with the population in order to ensure it was truly representative of the people.

However, the last time Congress permanently increased that number was in 1913, when it was arbitrarily fixed at 435. Over a century later, the House still consists of only 435 Representatives despite the fact that the total population is now 3½ times larger! As a result, the average congressional district encompasses 760,000 people, and growing every year.

Today, though the average congressional district size is 3.5 times more populous than it was in 1913,¹The average district size has increased from 219,527 in 1913 to 761,169 in 2020. the total federal spending (in constant dollars) is 336 times larger than it was then.²In constant 2012 dollars, total federal spending has increased from $17.1 billion in 1914 to $5,765 billion in 2020. That is not a coincidence: There is a correlative and causal relationship between the average population size of congressional districts and the growth of the federal government.

Correlation and Causation

Do larger electoral districts lead to increased governmental spending? Two published papers report on quantitative analyses conducted to answer this question. These two papers, which are described in this text box, confirmed that there is a positive correlation³The second paper (2006) also conducted an analysis to determine there this is a causal relationship, and not merely a correlative one. between government spending and constituency size. In other words, as the population size of the electoral districts⁴These studies actually refer to the average constituency size rather than “districts” simply because a few state legislatures’ lower houses have multi-member districts, or a mix of single and multi-member districts. For a list of such states, see BallotPedia.org’s “State legislative chambers that use multi-member districts”. increase, so does government spending. This relationship has been dubbed the “public choice” hypothesis.

As explained in these papers, the correlation between district size and spending exists for several reasons. One reason is that as the district size increases, it becomes increasingly difficult for constituents to monitor their representatives. In larger districts, voters are unlikely to know their representative, or to have direct information about their voting records. Smaller districts make it much easier for constituents to meet with and monitor their Representatives which can therefore improve their representation of constituent interests.

Perhaps a more compelling reason for this correlation is that the large-district-small-legislature configuration fosters an environment where a broad range of spending programs can be consolidated into a single massive legislative bill. These profligate bills are enabled by both sides of this oligarchic nexus: The huge district and the undersized legislature.

The heterogeneity of huge districts enables the Representatives to build enough of a coalition among their constituents to cobble together a broad array of spending programs (over the objections of some of their other constituencies). And the more heterogeneous their voters are, the easier it is for the Representatives to justify voting for a bill containing a plethora of spending programs.

This consolidation of various spending programs is mirrored in the undersized legislature through a process known as logrolling, which refers to vote-trading by lawmakers to ensure that each legislator’s favored provisions have a higher chance of passing. Of course, the smaller the legislature, the more conducive it is for the horse trading required for logrolling. In addition, many of these legislators may be so preoccupied with committee work or fundraising, that they may not even be aware of provisions slipped into the legislation by other Representatives or their staffers.

Conversely, that level of big-spending collaboration (or collusion) becomes nearly impossible in a small-district-large-legislature configuration for two reasons. First, as the constituency size is decreased, the districts will usually become increasingly homogeneous with respect to political ideology, demographics and economic interests. In such districts, it is far more difficult for a Representative to justify voting for a bill that contains a broad range of spending programs.

The second reason is that, in a large legislature, it will be far more difficult to do the logrolling necessary to build a consensus among many hundreds of legislators. This will be especially true with respect to passing a bill with numerous spending components. It stands to reason that the legislative acts will therefore have to be more narrowly focused, and that massive omnibus spending bills would be DOA. Moreover, in a greatly enlarged House, with hundreds of additional members who are not distracted by committee work or fundraising, there will be many more vigilant Representatives available to scrutinize proposed bills in order to flag any provisions that deserve wider attention.

The papers cited above are not the only ones that support these conclusions.  Another paper⁵Gilligan, T. W., Matsuka, J. G., 2001, “Fiscal policy, legislature size, and political parties: Evidence from state and local governments in the first half of the 20th century”, National Tax journal, 54, pp. 57-82 concluded that “legislature size appears to have had a positive and significant effect on state and local expenditure and revenue” (“revenue” referring to tax revenue). And that “legislature size appears to have been an empirically significant determinant of fiscal policy throughout the century”.

Spending, Taxes and Debt

Some may wonder why we should be concerned about federal spending. After all, some federal spending is unavoidable, and much of the rest may be viewed as beneficial. However, this should not be viewed as a debate on the merits of whether there should be more or less federal spending. Instead, the question that concerns most Americans is whether such spending is sustainable without bankrupting the nation.⁶Rasmussen Poll: Majority Oppose $3.5 Trillion Spending Bill, Against Raising Debt Ceiling.

Polls often suggest that there is popular support for various spending programs, especially when the purpose of the spending is purported to be beneficial to some larger societal or environmental need. Unfortunately, these polling questions are usually structured to focus on the intended benefits of a government program, but rarely describe its additional financial burden to the taxpayer and future generations. Nor do these questions mention the huge aggregate cost of all these great-sounding programs or their cumulative impact on the national debt.

However, when the polling questions link these programs’ costs to the increased tax burden, the respondents tend to become much more fiscally prudent. In a recent poll of Americans, half said that they would prefer fewer government services and lower taxes. However, 19% said they want higher taxes and more services,⁷Gallup: Americans Revert to Favoring Reduced Government Role. which is not surprising given that over half of Americans pay no income taxes anyway.⁸CNBC: 61% of Americans paid no federal income taxes in 2020, Tax Policy Center says.

Even when the costs of proposed spending programs are mentioned in the media, it can be difficult to comprehend such numbers relative to the size of the federal government (see adjacent text box).  Though it is impossible to conceptualize trillions of dollars, almost everyone understands that too much debt and interest expense will likely be devastating to the United States. According to a recent poll, though 65% support significant new spending for things like health care, childcare, and other social welfare programs, 68% said that such spending should be limited to currently available funds.⁹TheHill.com: Poll: Americans back new spending, tax hikes on wealthy, but remain wary of economic impact. In other words, we all like the idea of buying stuff, but a great majority of us understand that we cannot afford to spend so much without bankrupting our nation. In that same poll, only 32% supported raising the national deficit by $2 trillion to pay for such efforts. And why would anyone support trillions of dollars of additional debt? Either because they cannot grasp the magnitude of such numbers, or they are indifferent to the consequences.

Therefore, the easiest way to understand the federal debt problem is on a per capita basis, meaning the total debt per resident. As mentioned earlier, the number of Representatives is 435, the same as it was in 1913. In 1914, the total federal debt per capita was $787 (in 2021 dollars).¹⁰The total debt in 1914 was $2.913 billion. This is equivalent to $76.185 billion in 2020 dollars (using an inflation factor of 25.8). This adjustment was done remove the effect of the devaluation of the dollar during this time frame. $76.185 billion divided by the estimated 1914 population of 96.8 million equals $787 each. Yes, just $787 each! That’s a number we can all understand.

Fast forward: In 2021, the total federal debt per capita was $89,448 which, in real terms, is 113 times greater than the per capita debt in 1914.  Another way to look at the growth in debt since 1914 is that even though the country’s total population has grown 3½ times since then, the national debt has grown 388 times in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars! Not only is this unsustainable, but our country is on the fast path to hyperinflation, bankruptcy, or both.

Given these pressing debt and spending problems, can we even afford to add thousands of Representatives to the House? Surprisingly, the answer is that we cannot afford not to.   To understand why, we first have to understand the magnitude of federal funds lost due to profligacy, mismanagement and fraud.

Profligacy, Mismanagement and Fraud

Everyone knows that the federal government wastes an extraordinary amount of the taxpayers’ hard-earned money. In the broadest sense, this waste can be divided into three broad categories: profligacy, mismanagement and fraud.

Profligacy: The federal government is funding numerous programs that most Americans would agree is either unnecessary, absurd, or outside the scope of the federal government. An example of such would be $2 million spent to study whether spending three times a week in a hot tub, for ten weeks, would relieve stress.¹¹Senator Paul “Festivus Report 2020”, page 6. (Perhaps a national hot tub trade association could have been relied upon to fund such important research.) Sadly, innumerable additional examples are available.

Mismanagement: This refers to inefficiency and management incompetency, two areas where the federal government appears to excel. An example of that is the tens of thousands of buildings owned by the government that are either vacant or only partially used. It costs well over a billion dollars annually just to maintain these building,¹²NPR: Government’s Empty Buildings Are Costing Taxpayers Billions. not to mention the foregone revenue potential of liquidating these assets.

Fraud: Perhaps the biggest example of this is health-care fraud totaling an estimated $60 billion annually.¹³Washington Post: Medical Fraud a Growing Problem.

What is the total amount wasted by the federal government due profligacy, mismanagement, and fraud? The Citizens Against Government Waste estimates the total to be $4 trillion over five years.¹⁴CAGW.org: 2021 Prime Cuts report. Senator Paul’s annual report on federal waste and fraud estimates that over $52 billion was wasted in 2021.¹⁵Senator Paul: The Festivus Report 2021. This is the cost of not having a truly representative House of Representatives!

The Benefits of a Larger House Exceed the Costs

Earlier in this article, three academic papers were cited which concluded that larger legislatures (smaller congressional districts) lead to reduced governmental spending. This is because as the legislative body gets bigger, its members will more faithfully represent their constituents (rather than their financial benefactors). These Representatives will therefore become more fiscally responsible, and far less likely to embrace huge spending bills that conglomerate a broad assortment of boondoggles.

In addition to reducing profligacy, it stands to reason that expanded representational oversight would extend to reducing waste due to mismanagement and fraud. When there are thousands of Representatives, there is a great potential for more extensive oversight of the various federal agencies. For example, it is easy to imagine that many Representatives, especially those who are military veterans, would take an active interest in how their area VA hospitals are being operated. And other Representatives, especially parents, could provide additional oversight of the Department of Education. (Such oversight by the Representatives could be further facilitated by relocating some of the federal agencies from D.C. to various other areas of the country.)

Given all the foregoing, it can be safely assumed that a larger and more representative House would materially reduce federal spending. However, even a reduction of merely 1% would generate savings far in excess the cost of adding thousands of Representatives. For example, let’s consider the scenario of adding 6,500 Representatives, bringing the total to 6,935. Based on the 2020 population census, this would reduce the average district size over 93% (from an average of 761,169 to just under 48,000).

In 2020, the Representatives’ salaries were approximately $174,000 each. For the sake of this simplified analysis, assume that all 6,935 Representatives continued to receive that same high salary (though Thirty-Thousand.org recommends otherwise). This would be an additional salary of $1.1 billion, which is only 0.017% of the astonishing $6.6 trillion¹⁶CBO: The Federal Budget in Fiscal Year 2020. in federal expenditures for 2020.

Thirty-Thousand.org proposes that the vast majority of those Representatives work from their home districts, in which case they will not have all the other expenses associated with the current pool of Representatives. They won’t be commuting to and from Washington DC., and they won’t be maintaining a second residence there. In fact, most of the Representatives would probably choose to work from their own homes or an inexpensive local office space. In addition, they should not be provided with any additional personal staffing at federal expense. For such a high salary, they can be expected to answer their own phones and personally oversee constituent services in a district of 50,000 people or less. Given that the legislative branch currently employs over 34,000 people, they already have more than enough staff to support thousands of Representatives.¹⁷CRS: Federal Workforce Statistics Sources: OPM and OMB. Table 3 on Page 6. Note c of that table appears to suggest that the total FTE (full-time equivalents) staff data did not include the Senate. In fact, with so many additional Representatives to serve on, or support, the various committees (instead of having too few Representatives spread across several important committees), we should expect that the staffing can be reduced by an equivalent amount.

However, let’s look at a worst-case cost analysis: Assume that the additional 6,500 Representatives not only kept the same high salaries, but that they were also given an additional $50,000 annually for office expenses, and that the overall staffing levels remain unchanged. That would have increased the 2020’s total expenditures by $1.46 billion, which is only a 0.022% increase to the total federal spending. Given that the federal government wastes well over $50 billion annually, it cannot be doubted that a body of several thousand citizen legislators would reduce federal spending by much more than this $1.46 billion increase.

Using these same cost assumptions, even if the House of Representatives were increased to the maximum size allowed by the Constitution (at one for every 30,000 people), a 1% reduction in total federal spending would save over 10 times the expense of these additional Representatives!¹⁸Calculation: 10,600 additional Representatives, at $224,000 for each additional one, totals almost $2.4 billion, which is 0.1% of the total 2020 federal spend of $2.2 trillion.

The preceding analyses are offered only to demonstrate the financial benefit of significantly enlarging the House. However, the actual cost of additional Representatives should be much lower.  Thirty-Thousand.org recommends minimizing this cost by adjusting the Representatives’ salaries to reflect regional cost-of-living differences.  For example, if the maximum salary of $174,000 is paid to Representatives living in Manhattan, the corresponding salary for those living in Kansas City would be approximately $66,000.  Whatever the Representatives’ salary will be, it should be large enough to attract the best and brightest to compete for this important responsibility.

Constituency Size and Liberty

In a recent poll, 54% of Americans responded that the “federal government has too much power”, and only 9% thought the government had too little power.¹⁹Gallup: Americans Revert to Favoring Reduced Government Role. Clearly, federal government overreach is a major concern for Americans.

A state-by-state analysis of governmental authoritarianism suggests that there is a correlation to average constituency size. That is, the data suggest that the larger the electoral districts, the more authoritarian the government becomes. This relationship is substantiated by the states’ rankings relative to the personal and economic freedoms enjoyed by their citizens. By comparing these freedom indices to the population sizes of the states’ legislative districts, it is possible to uncover a very important relationship that can be illustrated with the example provided by California and New Hampshire.

The state of California always scores poorly in the various freedom indices, while “Live Free or Die” New Hampshire is always highly ranked. California’s 34 million people (per the 2000 census) are represented by only 80 representatives in the lower house of their state legislature. In contrast, New Hampshire’s 1.3 million people are represented by 400 representatives in their lower house! Therefore, the resulting population sizes of California’s and New Hampshire’s legislative districts are 424,135 and 3,096, respectively. As it turns out, this example is indicative of a larger underlying trend in which the average district size of the low-freedom states tends to be substantially larger than that of the high-freedom states. For more information about this analysis, see “State Freedom Indices and Legislative District Population Sizes”.

Restore the Separation of Powers

The Constitution provides for a clear separation of powers between the Congress and the White House by specifying that “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in the Congress”, while the President “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed”.

During our nation’s first 150 years, the Supreme Court largely upheld the Constitution’s separation of powers, requiring that Congress, rather than administrators, make the laws. The courts understood that the Constitution neither explicitly nor implicitly gives Congress the power to delegate their authority. Beyond that, the Supreme Court and Congress both feared power concentrated in any one branch, and Americans generally believed that those who make the law should be directly accountable at the ballot box. However, during the 1930s, the founders’ design was upended by the Roosevelt administration when it was supplanted by “delegation running riot”.²⁰For a fuller discussion of this subject, see The Delegation of Legislative Powers in the Cato Handbook for Policy Makers (7th Edition).

That is how the administrative state effectively became our country’s fourth branch of government.

Congress’s practice of delegating authority to the executive branch enables the congressmen to proclaim success for supposedly addressing problems, while also allowing them to blameshift the consequences of regulatory burdens and other costs to the unelected bureaucrats who impose them. For the most part, the congressmen’s delegation of their legislative authority to the federal bureaucracy is nothing more than a cowardly evasion of their constitutional duties.

For reasons explained throughout this website, replacing 435 career politicians with several thousand citizen legislators would result in a legislature comprised largely of stalwart Representatives who, being unambiguously committed to their constituencies, would oppose delegating their legislative authority to unaccountable bureaucrats.  This alone could do more than anything else to liberate Americans from the soft despotism of the administrative state.

Restoring Representative Government

With the imperial-sized districts that we have today, the Representatives are usually assured of 90%+ reelection rates  thanks to the financial backing of their true masters: Those powerful Special Interests that induce Congress to squander money and provide special tax breaks. So it’s no wonder that Americans’ trust in government has been declining.²¹Pew Research: Key findings about Americans’ declining trust in government and each other. As the population sizes of electoral districts are significantly reduced, not only will fiscal responsibility be restored at the federal level but, more broadly, a transformation from statism to greater individual liberty will naturally occur.

Replacing 435 politician-oligarchs with six to ten thousand citizen-legislators would bring about a democratic revolution that returns our nation to the principles of representative government upon which it was founded. Though this restoration of representative government comes at a cost, this additional cost will be more than offset by the savings that result from greater fiscal responsibility that is consequent to the small-district-large-legislature configuration (as explained above).  But just as importantly, a very large number of ordinary citizens will be elected to the House of Representatives, and these people will be “possessed of the habits of economy” as noted in 1788 by a delegate to New York’s constitutional convention:

The man who would seriously object to [the additional expense of a sufficiently numerous House], to secure his liberties, does not deserve to enjoy them. Besides, by increasing the number of representatives, we open a door for the admission of the substantial yeomanry of our country, who, being possessed of the habits of economy, will be cautious of imprudent expenditures, by which means a greater saving will be made of public money than is sufficient to support them.²²Melancton Smith, delegate to the New York constitutional convention (transcripts).

According to the 1828 edition of Webster’s dictionary, the term yeoman then referred to the “common man, or one of the plebeians” (a plebeian being “one of the common people or lower ranks of men”). “Thus, the common people in America are called the yeomanry”.²³Noah Webster’s First Edition of an American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). As stated in the quote above, it is the yeomanry who “possessed of the habits of economy, will be cautious of imprudent expenditures, by which means a greater saving will be made of public money than is sufficient to support them”. Thirty-Thousand.org believes that it is the yeomanry, or the “common people”, who will save our republic from the foolish and profligate political ruling class who has been controlling our government for far too long.

Restoring liberty and fiscal responsibility are just two of the ways that significantly downsizing our congressional districts will enable we the people to take back our government from the powerful Special Interests and the political ruling class. Numerous other benefits of representational enlargement are explained elsewhere in this website.

© Thirty-Thousand.org [Article published 02/01/22; updated 06/04/22]

Related articles:

USAspending.gov: Visualizing Federal Government Debt.
StLouisFed.org: Federal Debt: Total Public Debt as Percent of Gross Domestic Product.
USDebtClock.org: US National Debt.