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Project Curia

Watching the government

Six ways to watch Congress

Tracking Travel in Congress.

Bills

What Congress votes on, in plain language, and when a yes bundled unrelated measures together.

Trading

The stocks members trade, including in the industries their own committees oversee.

Financing

Who funds each member's campaigns, the money behind the vote.

Lobbying

Who pays to work the bills, the firms that file the work, and whose desks that money reaches.

Travel

Who pays to fly members and their staff, and where those trips actually land.

Grade

One letter per member: their funding, their trading, and how they back their own voters.

Members of Congress and their staff can travel on someone else's money. The someone is a private American organization filing each trip under the House and Senate gift rules, with the sponsor, the traveler and the destination named. A destination is a place. It is never the payer.

The window

Filed trips that left between the two ends of the 118th Congress, January 2023 to January 2025. This Congress is closed and every filing period inside it has been pulled.

Trips abroad

1,113

Sponsored trips in this window that went outside the United States. A sponsor is a private organization, and the trip is filed under the gift rules.

Countries reached

66

Destination countries on record, whether one trip arrived or hundreds. Every one of them is in the list under the map.

Trips inside the country

3,010

Sponsored trips filed in the same window that stayed in the United States. The same rules, the same kind of sponsor, and their own map below.

How trips are counted
A trip is one traveler leaving on one day, and a trip with several stops files a row for each of them, so a trip that touched two countries is counted under both and the country totals add to more than the number of trips. House travel comes from the gift travel filings and Senate travel from the Senate travel reports, and each trip is placed in a Congress by the day it left. This one runs January 2023 to January 2025. Senate travel is filed on paper and read by machine, and 128 rows in this window carry no destination the reader could make out. Those rows are left off rather than guessed at. 129 trips name no place that could be matched to a country or a state, most often a venue or a city typed without one. They are in neither map and are counted here rather than dropped quietly. A sponsor is a private organization filing under the gift rules, so no country on either map paid for anything: the shading is where trips landed and nothing else.

The trips abroad

Where sponsored travel goes

Every country a privately sponsored congressional trip reached in this window, by the number of trips that arrived.

Who traveled

Least tripsMost trips
  • No trips on record
  • United States, counted apart

1,113 sponsored trips abroad reached 66 countries, January 2023 to January 2025.

Reading this map
A country is shaded by how many trips arrived there, never by what it spent: the sponsors are private American organizations. All of them are on the map above; a country drawn too small to pick out carries a dot in its own shade, and the dot hovers and clicks as the country does. Select a country, on the map or in the list, to see the offices that filed its trips. The plus and minus buttons zoom the map and the circular arrow brings back the whole world; with a mouse, hold Ctrl or Cmd and scroll to zoom toward the cursor, double click to step in, and drag to pan, and on a touch screen pinch to zoom and move two fingers together to pan, while one finger keeps scrolling the page. The zoom is a magnifier and nothing else: the same countries, the same numbers behind them, with finer coastlines as it goes deeper. No name is printed on the map itself, so hover a country for its name and its number or find both in the board below.

The destinations

Where the trips landed

Every country a sponsored trip reached in this window, in order of how many arrived.

Who traveled
1 to 5 of 66

Select a country, on the map or in the list, to see the offices that filed the trips.

How to read this board
A trip is filed by an office, so a count here is the member and their staff together and the line under each name says how it splits. Offices are ordered by trips to the country selected above, and Previous and Next walk every one of them. Every destination in this list is also on the map above, as a shape or, where it draws too small to pick out, as a dot in its own shade. Three trips were filed by an office this Congress's roster could not name, and naming no place a map could hold. They are in neither total on this page and are named here rather than dropped. A country with no trips is not a country that refused one: it is a country nobody filed a trip to.

The trips at home

The travel that never left

More sponsored travel stays inside the United States than leaves it, filed under the same gift rules by the same kind of organization.

Who traveled

Least tripsMost trips
  • No trips on record

3,010 sponsored trips in this window stayed inside the United States, January 2023 to January 2025. 40 states and the District of Columbia are on record.

Reading this map
A state is shaded by how many trips landed in it, on the same scale the world map above uses, and a state with no trips is not a state that refused one. A sponsor here is the same kind of organization as on the map above, filing under the same gift rules: a nonprofit, a foundation, an institute, a trade group. A conference in Florida and a delegation to Israel are the same disclosure. Select a state, on the map or in the list, to see the offices that filed its trips. The plus and minus buttons zoom the map and the circular arrow brings back the whole country; with a mouse, hold Ctrl or Cmd and scroll to zoom toward the cursor, double click to step in, and drag to pan, and on a touch screen pinch to zoom and move two fingers together to pan, while one finger keeps scrolling the page. The zoom is a magnifier and nothing else, which is what brings the District of Columbia up to a size a reader can pick out. No name is printed on the map itself, so hover a state for its name and its number or find both in the board below.

The states

Where the trips stayed home

Every state a sponsored trip reached without leaving the country, in order of how many arrived.

Who traveled
1 to 5 of 41

Select a state, on the map or in the list, to see the offices that filed the trips.

How to read this board
A trip is filed by an office, so a count here is the member and their staff together and the line under each name says how it splits. Every domestic trip in this window named a place these files could read as a state.

The parties

Who files the trips

The same window split by the party of the filing office, abroad and at home: a composition of the filings, never a score.

Abroad

1,113 trips

  • Democratic53.2% 592
  • Republican46.1% 513
  • Independent0.72% 8
  • Unplaced None

Inside the United States

3,010 trips

  • Democratic29.4% 886
  • Republican69.3% 2,087
  • Independent1.2% 37
  • Unplaced None
How the party is assigned
The party is the filing office's own, never the destination's, as this site's congress-dated roster records it for this Congress: one letter for the whole window, never split at a mid-window switch. Every trip in these bars was filed by an office the dated roster could place. Three trips whose office the roster could not name sit in neither total on this page; the note under the destinations board names them. Each bar is a share of its own board's total, and each board is this window's own count, compared to nothing.

The offices

Whose filings carry the most trips

Five offices to a board, abroad and at home, ranked by the trips on file in this window. A trip is filed by an office and covers the member and their staff together, so the filter below decides whose trips each ranking counts.

Who traveled

Abroad

367 offices

They filed 1,113 trips outside the United States. The five below filed 56 of those, 13 of which were taken by members.

  1. 1Chrissy HoulahanPA · House4 taken by the member, 8 by staff12
  2. 2Cathy McMorris RodgersWA · HouseAll taken by staff11
  3. 3Mark E. GreenTN · House2 taken by the member, 9 by staff11
  4. 4Michael T. McCaulTX · HouseAll taken by staff11
  5. 5Jimmy PanettaCA · House7 taken by the member, 4 by staff11

At home

490 offices

They filed 3,010 trips inside the United States. The five below filed 221 of those, none of which was taken by a member.

  1. 1Steve ScaliseLA · HouseAll taken by staff53
  2. 2Cathy McMorris RodgersWA · HouseAll taken by staff52
  3. 3Mike JohnsonLA · HouseAll taken by staff46
  4. 4Tom EmmerMN · HouseAll taken by staff37
  5. 5Elise M. StefanikNY · HouseAll taken by staff33
What a row is, and how the boards were cut
Every row is an office. A trip is filed by an office and covers the member and their staff together, so the count on a row is what the office filed and the line under the name is who actually flew. Each board ranks the offices by the trips they filed on its own side, abroad or at home, and shows the first five; the figure above each board is how many offices that list was cut from. Every trip on these two boards was filed by an office this Congress's dated roster could place. A trip is counted once here even when it touched several countries, so no row on these two boards is a row from the maps above, and the two never add. A count is a fact about how an office travels, ranked inside this window and compared to nothing: not to the other board, not to the other Congress, and not to a standard this page holds anybody to.

What this is not

  • Not foreign money. The sponsor is a private American organization, and no country on either map paid for a trip.
  • Not a rule broken. Sponsored travel is permitted and disclosed, so a filed trip is the system working as written.
  • Not a score. Offices are counted, never graded: a filing count is a fact about how an office travels, and this page attaches no judgment to a high one or a low one.
  • Not one traveler. A trip is filed by an office, so a count beside a name is that member and their staff together, and every row says how it splits.
  • Not a total. A trip reaches this page only by being filed and read, so every figure is a floor, and a country with no trips has not been shown to have refused one.
  • Not a staff list. The filings name the staffer who traveled, and this page never does: the office is the story.

One office at a time

Find a member's trips

The whole filed record for one office, every year we hold, home and abroad together.

Sources: the House Clerk's gift travel filings and the Senate travel reports, each trip placed in a Congress by the day it left; this site's own congress-dated roster for the office that filed it. For the money that firms and their clients file, see Lobbying, which also carries the register of foreign agents in Washington.