Have You Ever Considered How Many of Your Tax Dollars Go Towards X-Raying Pizza?

Congress is in a bit of a holding pattern right now as Republicans try to figure out how to confirm a new Speaker of the House. Following Jim Jordan’s latest failed attempt to get 217 votes, someone ordered pizza. A lot of pizza.

Now, I count 53 pizza boxes in that picture. And if you look on the left, you’ll notice a couple other pies were headed through the x-ray machine.

How awesome is that? Actual confirmation that pizzas do not have skeletons. Who knew?!

More importantly, it’s a reminder that when Congress has a pizza party your tax dollars don’t just pay for the pizza and toppings. You’re also paying for each individual pizza to be x-rayed to make sure it is in fact a normal pizza. Considering there are 535 members of Congress, that’s a lot of potential pizza and x-rays. Heck, even if it’s just for the 221 Republicans in the House of Representatives, there are multiple staffers for each one and they all need to eat. Who knows how many pizza were waiting in line for the x-ray when that picture was taken.

It’s unclear if anyone has ever looked into the actual taxpayer burden that comes with a Congressional pizza party, but googling, “congress pizza” does reveal that we went through a very weird newscycle in 2011 where there was a brief debate over whether or not pizza was a vegetable.

Simpler times. They probably didn’t even have to x-ray them.

UPDATE: There’s still some pizza left.