The House committee investigating the January 6 “insurrection.” (Credit: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc./Getty Images)
The U.S. House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol cost almost twice as much as previously reported, including spending taxpayer funds for TV news producers and documentary filmmakers to create videos dramatizing its case against President Donald Trump, an investigation by The Center Square found.
The Washington Post reported that the panel had a projected budget of $9.3 million in September 2022. According to a review of U.S. House disbursements, the select committee spent $17.4 million.U.S. Rep. Troy Nehls, a Texas Republican who is on a new committee appointed by House Speaker Mike Johnson to investigate security failures on Jan. 6, said the original committee didn’t spend taxpayer money properly after The Center Square told him about the final costs of the panel’s investigation.
(…) Dan Savickas, president of policy and government affairs at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, a non-partisan nonprofit, said more than doubling of the budget was not appropriate.
“The median budget for a House committee is $6 million a year, so for the Jan. 6 committee to spend $17.4 million is excessive,” he told The Center Square in an interview. “And anytime a committee is grandstanding, specifically Jan. 6, to fit a narrative instead of holding people accountable and getting the story is bad. That’s why they hired documentary filmmakers.”
Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat and chair of the committee, declined an interview request.“
The work of the committee speaks for itself, and the chairman continues to stand by it,” Yasmine Brown, a press secretary and communications director, wrote in an email to The Center Square.
An undetermined amount was spent on three dozen contractors and consultants. Many worked for a few months or less than a year, rather than all 18 months like full-time staff.
They are listed in the committee’s report but do not show up in a list of expenditures the U.S. House posted online disclosing its spending.Among them were the former president of ABC News, a longtime producer for ABC’s Nightline, an Emmy-award winning daily TV news producer, and a former documentarian for the Oprah Winfrey Network.
“I was part of the first ever team of former television journalists brought in by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol to produce the historic live hearings laying out the committee’s evidence to the country,” Melinda Arons, a former Nightline senior producer, wrote on her LinkedIn page. (Read more: Just the News, 11/16/2025) (Archive)