Franking Spending Tripled and the Channels Multiplied. Nobody Can Tell You Whether Constituents Know More.
House franking spending rose from under $30 million in the 116th Congress to $107 million in the 118th. The current Congress has already moved more than $52 million through its first eighteen months, and the Communications Standards Commission approved over 20,000 franking requests between January 2025 and July 2026 — roughly 35 a day. The median House office spent about $82,000 against an office budget with a median of $1.9 million.
Bloomberg Government reported those figures last week, and the coverage that followed asked the question you would expect: should offices be spending this much, and does some of this content look like something other than constituent communication? That question belongs to the Commission, which reviews every piece before it goes out. We are not going to relitigate it here.
There is a different question sitting underneath the same numbers, and it is the one an office can actually act on.
The frank stopped being a mail program a while ago
Most people outside the building still picture franking as a mailer. It has not been only that for years. Franked funds now cover postal mail, email, social media, digital video, broadcast television and radio, billboards, robocalls, and text messages. In the 2024 cycle, mail accounted for roughly $44 million of franked spending and other franked communications about $19 million, with television and digital advertising somewhere in the range of $5 million of that.
That shift is, on balance, a good thing, and it is worth saying so plainly, because most of the commentary treats the growth as nothing but a problem. Digital distribution dropped the cost of reaching a constituent dramatically compared with a printed drop. An office that once had to choose between a district-wide mailer and doing nothing can now reach a specific population for a few hundred dollars. That is a real expansion of what a small communications shop can do, and the offices with the least money to work with benefit from it the most.
Lower cost per contact is an input, not a result
Here is what happened next. When the cost of a contact falls, the natural response is to buy more contacts. That is what the spending curve shows. What did not change alongside it is the measurement.
A mail piece had a known recipient at a known address. An email has an open, a click, and an unsubscribe. A pre-roll video has an impression and maybe a completion rate. A billboard has a traffic estimate. The channels that grew fastest are the ones that tell an office the least about whether anybody learned anything, and the metrics they do produce — impressions, reach, views — are the easiest numbers in all of communications to mistake for outcomes.
So an office can now say, accurately, that it reached far more constituents for the same money than it could have four years ago. What it usually cannot say is whether those constituents came away knowing something they did not know before, or did something they would not otherwise have done. Tripling the spend produced a tripled input. Whether it produced a better-informed district is unmeasured, and across much of the channel mix that grew fastest, close to unmeasurable.
Decide what you expect to happen before you decide where to run it
The correction is not a smaller budget or a retreat to mail. It is deciding what a given communication is supposed to accomplish, and then holding the channel to that standard rather than to a reach number.
Some constituent communications exist to inform a specific population about something that affects them — a program deadline, an eligibility change, a disaster resource, a casework pathway. Those belong in front of a defined audience through a channel that reports back, and success is a response: a casework intake, a survey answer, a town hall RSVP, a click through to the agency form that the constituent actually needed. Other communications are genuinely about general awareness, and an impression channel is the right tool for the job. The error is running the first kind of message through the second kind of channel and then reporting reach as though the question had been answered.
This is where segmentation stops being a vocabulary word and becomes an accounting question. An office working from fifteen or more audience segments, built out of several hundred available targeting attributes, can send the agriculture content to farmers and ranchers and the school funding notice to parents of school-aged children — and more to the point, it can tell afterward which populations responded and which did not. On the programs we run, sequences built to listen rather than to broadcast have returned more than 12,000 survey responses. That is an outcome number. An impression count is not.
The offices that get this right are not the ones spending the most. They are the ones that can answer a simple question about any piece they sent last quarter: who was this for, and what did we expect them to do with it?
None of this is about changing what the mail says
Worth stating directly, because the subject invites confusion. Constituent outreach programs run with official funds concern legislative and service activity, and the content standards are what they are — the Commission reviews the material, and nothing in this argument touches what is permissible to say. This is a question about where the money goes and what comes back from it, not about the content of the communication.
The franking total tells you what an office spent. The channel list tells you where it went. Neither one tells you whether a single constituent in the district understands something today that they did not understand last year, and that is the only one of the three an office actually gets to decide.
If you want to know what your franked communications actually produced this Congress, we will go through it with you channel by channel — what went out, who received it, and what came back that counts as a response rather than an impression. You will get a straight read on which parts of the program are earning their place and which are buying reach you cannot account for, plus a short list of what to change before the next budget is set. Send us a note and we will find 20–30 minutes.