PA’s Legislature Spends Like No One is Watching and Is Utterly Incapable of Reforming Itself

By Eric Epstein

If you live in Pennsylvania, you're paying for one of the most expensive state legislatures in the country, and there's a good chance you have almost no idea what that money actually buys.

That's not just my opinion. It's the conclusion of two separate, years-apart investigations by different newsrooms and Rock the Capital, plus the state's own audit records and open-records rulings. Below, I've pulled together what stood out most to me across all of that reporting, along with my own take on why it matters.

Operations–Only Spend: $60 million a year, and growing

Start with the topline number. A 2026 investigative series from PennLive, reported by Tirzah Christopher, found that the General Assembly spent more than $60 million annually on pure operations (utilities, food, office rent, lodging) every year from 2023 through 2025. That's before salaries, pensions, or healthcare for the state's 253 lawmakers even enter the picture.

What struck me is less the total than the trajectory: lawmakers reportedly budgeted $415 million for legislative operations in 2025 despite already sitting on more than $300 million in reserves. That's not an agency scraping by, it's one that keeps asking for more while sitting on a pile of what it already has.

That reserve isn't static, either. In the spring, I wrote How the PA legislature Cooks the Books and Starves the Taxpayers to Feed their Slush Funds. It’s my analysis of the Legislative Audit Advisory Commission's own figures found the legislature's surplus grew to roughly $389 million by the end of the 2024–25 fiscal year (enough to cover about ten months of spending) even as lawmakers still voted themselves a budget increase for the following year. If you read it, it notes something almost absurd; at $492 million, the legislature's own appropriation would rank as the seventh-largest line item in the entire state budget, yet it's the one "department" that never has to sit through the public budget hearings every other agency is required to attend to justify that spending.

This isn't a new story — it's a five-year-old one with a bigger number attached

Here's what makes the 2026 findings land harder, for me; a nearly identical investigation happened five years earlier, and it found something even larger.

In 2019, the nonprofit newsroom Spotlight PA and its partner outlet The Caucus began filing Right-to-Know Law requests trying to answer the same basic question PennLive would later ask, how does one of the country's largest and most expensive full-time legislatures actually spend the money it allots itself? It took them roughly a year, and, journalists working with a team of Temple University students, led by journalism professor Aron Pilhofer, built what appears to be the first-ever searchable database of Pennsylvania legislative expenses which included nearly 400,000 individual transactions covering 2017 through 2020.

Their number, $203 million, spent over those four years just to feed, house, and transport lawmakers and staff, and to rent their offices. About one dollar in ten went directly into individual lawmakers' pockets as reimbursements (meals, mileage, per diems). Their reporting singled out specific lawmakers by name. One representative had personally billed taxpayers more than $1.8 million over his career (about $2.2 million adjusted for inflation), including nearly $640,000 in per diems alone, and kept collecting per diem payments even during the early pandemic while the rest of the state's economy was shut down.

A companion piece from the same investigation found the legislature spent close to $10 million over two years on private lawyers for everything from public-records disputes to an attempt to challenge the 2020 presidential election results in Pennsylvania, and routinely declined to explain which lawmakers needed representation or why.

Reading the two investigations side by side, the pattern is hard to miss: different reporters, different years, same structural story. Whatever specific dollar figure gets attached to a given year, the underlying mechanism hasn't changed—a legislature that controls its own disclosure rules and consistently chooses not to disclose.

Four caucuses, four IT departments, one $34 million bill

The clearest example of pure waste in PennLive's more recent reporting on technology spending is this: Pennsylvania's legislature is split into four caucuses: House Republicans, House Democrats, Senate Republicans, and Senate Democrats. Each one independently buys, manages, and maintains its own computer systems and networks rather than sharing contracts. PennLive put the annual cost of that duplication at roughly $34 million, spread across more than 100 vendors, many of whom reportedly hold separate, overlapping contracts with more than one caucus.

This is also the rare case where the story appears to have moved something in real time. Trade outlet Government Technology reported this and within days of PennLive's piece running, a state lawmaker introduced legislation aimed at consolidating some of this redundant statehouse IT spending. It's a useful reminder that this kind of reporting isn't purely academic; it can produce an actual policy response, even if it took a $34 million embarrassment to get there.

No competitive bidding required

One detail from PennLive's series on no-bid contracts that surprised me was Pennsylvania has no law requiring the legislature to competitively bid out contracts for things like construction or technology services. Multi-million-dollar vendor decisions can legally be made entirely behind closed doors, with no obligation to document why one vendor was chosen over another, and per the same reporting, receipts for these deals are often vague enough that even the topline totals are hard to verify.

For context on how unusual that is, most municipal and county governments in Pennsylvania are required to competitively bid contracts above a set dollar threshold. The legislature has effectively exempted itself from a rule it expects nearly everyone else in state government to follow.

The lunches, the flowers, and the portrait fund

The most-shared piece in PennLive's 2026 series was probably the smallest in dollar terms: reporting on invite-only catered lunches out of one state senator's Capitol office (chicken, salmon, pork chops, and multiple dessert courses) adding up to nearly $80,000 over time. A separate piece in the same series rounded up smaller, odder line items like a staffer's speeding ticket picked up by taxpayers, flowers sent to lawmakers' family and friends, and a "portrait fund" used to commission paintings of legislative leaders. Yet another piece in the Associated Press who reviewed more than 6,000 pages of spending line items, many that are incredibly questionable.

None of these move the needle on a $60 million annual budget. But they're useful precisely because they're vivid, and because the Spotlight PA/Caucus reporting from years earlier found its own version of the same phenomenon including one lawmaker's expense reimbursement for a pair of walking shoes. Different year, different outlet, same category of spending that only exists because nobody with the authority to say no ever really has to.

Why it's this hard to find any of this out in the first place

This is where the public record itself becomes part of the story, independent of any single news outlet's framing.

The Spotlight PA/Caucus team documented their own process for getting these records: filing Right-to-Know requests starting in November 2019, going back and forth with legislative staff over the wording of each request, and eventually receiving thousands of pages of expense records that were, in their words, riddled with redactions obscuring the purpose of trips and meals and the identities of the people lawmakers met with. At one point, the state Senate went further and asserted a claimed constitutional "legislative privilege" to withhold those details entirely, a position that an open-records appeals officer within the Senate itself later upheld when challenged. That's not a reporter's characterization, it's the outcome of an actual open-records appeal on file.

It isn't just redacted records, either. My 2026 spring review of the same audit data found that the four legislative caucus accounts alone (roughly $245 million of the $492 million total legislative appropriation) have no public breakdown of what they actually pay for, not even categories. That's over half the entire budget with essentially zero itemized accountability.

The body responsible for auditing the legislature's own finances hasn't fared much better under scrutiny. We, Rock the Capital, sued the Legislative Audit Advisory Commission in 2019, after the commission violated the state's open meetings law by holding its annual hearing on the legislature's finances without any public comment period, and we asked a court to force the commission to competitively bid its own auditing contract and release related records. We did it again in 2024, making 10 transparency recommendations.

If you want to see some of this for yourself rather than take any outlet's word for it, a few public records exist independent of any single story:

• Right-to-Know Law requests are the underlying mechanism behind essentially all of this reporting, and any resident can file one with the House or Senate directly.

• The Legislative Audit Advisory Commission publishes an annual financial report for the legislative branch, which is where topline reserve and spending figures, like the $300+ million surplus mentioned above, ultimately originate. These reserves are non-lapsing. A non-lapsing account is a financial reserve where unspent money from a budget does not return to the general fund at the end of a fiscal year. Instead, the organization or government agency keeps the remaining funds for future use, usually subject to strict caps and specific rules.

• Some individual lawmakers voluntarily post expenses on their own official websites, though as of the Spotlight PA/Caucus reporting, only a small fraction of members did, and the postings weren't standardized or necessarily complete.

The part that ties it all together: a grand jury already said this, over a decade ago

Maybe the most damning context in PennLive's series isn't a dollar figure at all, it's historical. After one of Pennsylvania's biggest Capitol corruption scandals broke in the late 2000s, a grand jury interviewed more than 100 staffers and lawmakers and produced a report concluding that the General Assembly would "meddle with, obfuscate, ignore, or kill every recommendation," and that, left to its own devices, it was "utterly incapable of reforming itself." Among its specific recommendations: eliminating the separate IT departments and print shops run by each caucus.

That recommendation is now well over a decade old, and per the 2026 reporting, still unimplemented. That's exactly why the $34 million redundant–tech bill exists today, and exactly why it took another round of embarrassing headlines to get even one lawmaker to propose fixing it.

Why this keeps happening

None of this is unique to Pennsylvania. Legislatures resisting outside scrutiny of their own spending is basically a genre of state government journalism. What makes Pennsylvania a strong case study is scale is it's the largest full-time state legislature in the country, so the redundancy, the discretionary accounts, and the lack of bidding requirements all compound at a bigger scale than in most other states.

If there's one lesson across several investigations, five years apart, it's that transparency here has never been self-executing. A legislature that writes its own disclosure rules will, unsurprisingly, write rules that are convenient for itself, and will defend them all the way to an internal open-records appeal if challenged. The one time in this whole story something actually changed (the IT-spending bill) happened only after sustained public pressure from PennLive’s reporting. Structural fixes like competitive bidding requirements, centralized procurement, standardized and mandatory expense disclosure don't seem to originate from inside the Capitol. They get forced in from outside.

After all, it’s not their money, it’s yours the PA taxpayer. Rock the Capital will continue to fight for accountability and transparency in our government.

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In addition to our own work at Rock the capital, full credit to the original reporters and outlets underlined and linked throughout. I'd encourage everyone to go read their work directly. This post draws on a series of original reporting by Tirzah Christopher for PennLive (2026), the "Hidden Tab" investigation by Mike Wereschagin, Sam Janesch and Brad Bumsted from Spotlight PA and The Caucus (2019–2022), Associated Press wire reporting by Mark Scolforo, and Evan Brandt from The Mercury in Government Technology's coverage of the legislative response, along with Pennsylvania's public Right-to-Know Law process and Legislative Audit Advisory Commission records.