New Records Show Tax Money Paid for Madison Cawthorn’s Resort Booking

A “boutique mountain hotel” got thousands in government funds.

AP Photo/Chris Seward

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), a politician who has made it a point to rail against colleagues who “love wasting your hard-earned tax dollars,” appears to have used more taxpayer money on lodging and food related to his staff retreat than almost anyone else in Congress. 

Members of Congress are permitted to fund annual staff visits to their home district. While just over half, or 286 of Congress’s 435 members, spent nothing on such retreats, according to The Washington Examiner, Cawthorn spent just shy of $5,000—almost five times the average spent by the 147 other offices that allocated money to such events. House disbursement records show that only Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas) spent more. 

The largest single expenditure by Cawthorn’s office was $2,950 to Skylaranna, a resort just outside of Asheville, N.C. that describes itself as a “boutique mountain hotel” with “luxury suites.” In the same week in early August, the Examiner explains, Cawthorn billed taxpayers $556 for four separate grocery runs, $491 after a trip to Papa’s and Beer Mexican Restaurant, two visits to Chick-fil-A totaling $382, a purchase from at Joey’s NY Bagels for $53, a stop at Bojangles costing $47, and two undescribed payments totaling $455 to his Citibank government card service. The 26-year-old lawmaker classified all the payments as “legislative planning food and beverage” expenses.

The representative’s expenditures contradict his go-to talking point of criticizing “wasting tax dollars.” In fact, in the very days his office undertook the spending spree, Cawthorn tweeted attacks on purported government waste and spendthrift politicians.

Cawthorn’s communications director, Luke Ball, defended the purchases to the Examiner: “Our district retreat occurred on those dates; those expenses were for the district and D.C. staff on the retreat. Nearly every office on Capitol Hill has a district retreat and a budget specifically designated for one.” Ball’s quote did not address the majority of representatives whose records reflect no such expenditures, nor his boss’s nearly unmatched spending.

Shortly after coming to Capitol Hill in 2021, Cawthorn told his GOP colleagues that he had “built my staff around comms rather than legislation.” Nonetheless, Cawthorn, like other members of Congress, can pay for up to two legislative planning events with staff a year. Rules stipulate the events are not supposed to be “primarily social in nature.” 

As a member of  Congress, Cawthorn, a staunch ally of former president Donald Trump, has attracted regular controversy, making himself an unusually prominent first-term legislator. Recently, his Republican colleagues have complained about his allegation that more senior D.C. lawmakers attend orgies and use cocaine. Both of his state’s sitting Republican senators have publicly criticized the congressman. One of them, Thom Tillis, has backed his primary challenger, saying that Cawthorn has “fallen well short of the most basic standards Western North Carolina expects from their representatives.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate