One million, two hundred seventy-four thousand, seven hundred and sixty-five dollars is quite a heap of money.
What costs that much? The minimum starting salary of an NBA player? No, but it’s close: That number is $1,160,000. Is it how much Ariana Grande paid her ex-husband in their divorce? No, but we’re getting closer yet — Grande lost $1,250,000 in that expensive courtroom affair. $1,274,765.00 was the total value of the Georgetown Student Activities Fund (SAF) last year.
This is quite a heap of money. Most notably, it’s money controlled and appropriated entirely by elected Georgetown University Student Association (GUSA) senators. Specifically, it is controlled by the GUSA senators sitting on the Senate Financial Appropriations Committee, called FinApp for short.
Every spring, 11 club advisory boards, such as the Student Activity Council, Performing Arts Advisory Council (PAAC), Georgetown Program Board and Lecture Fund submit budget requests to GUSA’s FinApp Committee. Students on these boards prepare and submit these requests, with each club projecting their spending needs for the next academic year. Last year, the combined sum of those budget requests was $1,495,957, approximately $221,000 more than the amount available in the SAF. From that number, GUSA’s FinApp committee has to trim the fat somewhere.
During the process, individual senators are designated as “liaisons” to individual club advisory boards. Each one is responsible for evaluating their assigned board’s request and use of last year’s budget. They then must prepare an initial individual report and make a recommendation to the whole FinApp about whether that board’s request should be approved or cut. The senators committed to that process should be commended for their hard work and dedication, but their decision-making can be frustratingly opaque.
Unless one were to attend each GUSA FinApp meeting or measure senators’ attendance, there are few ways to measure their individual commitment to the appropriations process. I see one publicly available set of resources, which I’ve already mentioned, which can: the public budget reports that they write and publish. Two such reports included in the set, the “Student Activities Fee Initial Budget Report” and the “Student Activities Fee Final Budget Report,” are released during the process. These reports are GUSA’s chance to showcase themselves to the student body and to provide their rationale for the difficult financial decisions they are structurally forced to make. It’s a critical opportunity for the institution to demonstrate the unique value-add it brings to student life, ideally that of an impartial appropriator fighting for and accountable to only the broader interest of the student body.
A quick glance at either of these reports reveals a stark imbalance. In his initial assessment of the Media Board’s budget, which he recommended cutting by almost 18% when compared to the previous year, Senator George LeMieux (CAS ’25) prepared an impressive and commendable 1000-word, four-page report. LeMieux’s work was clearly the result of intense consideration, with a four-part narrative and photo evidence to justify his claims about past misuse of funds.
Regardless of whether one agrees with his agenda, Georgetown’s student body would benefit if such a level of effort was expended in justifying all of GUSA’s funding decisions. This is sadly not the case. In explaining final and initial decisions to allocate $91,000 to PAAC, $9,000 to Transfer Council and $8,000 to Outdoor Education, for example, senators wrote only one or two paragraphs in each case, with each report less than 200 words. Multiple final reports were even under 100 words. The issue here is not with individual senators’ commitment to FinApp (which can’t be solely measured by the amount issued in a written report) but rather GUSA’s lack of accountability and explicit standards for its elected members.
GUSA has long advocated for increased transparency in the FinApp process, passing a “Budget Guide” at the end of last semester, setting explicit standards for how advisory boards formulate their budget plans. Some senators, such as Tina Solki (MSB, SFS ’26) have even called for additional oversight beyond the budget guides, which would allow GUSA “some way to actually enforce them.”
While this zest for accountability and fairness should be commended, GUSA would do well to turn a similar watchful eye on itself. It is far from unreasonable to expect more from senators in their written, published, public-facing justification of their budget decisions and far from unreasonable to expect more from the institution in compelling them to do so. FinApp is a critical, undeniable facet of our campus life. Holding everyone involved to more account is the farthest possible thing from a bad idea.
One million, two hundred seventy-four thousand, seven hundred and sixty-five dollars is quite a heap of money. Senators could at least write one page when deciding where to spend it.
Saahil Rao is a sophomore in the School of Foreign Service.
