Residential architecture gives us a glimpse into the history of a community. Sometimes, it does the same for the state of our national politics.

Visit Boise’s Warm Springs Avenue and see homes of the manufacturing and retail titans who built Idaho’s Capitol. Tour Pennsylvania Street in Denver and awe at wealth amassed in the western Gold Rush. Just outside New Orleans’ French Quarter lies the architectural record of Louisiana’s oil and gas bonanza. Visit Great Falls, Virginia, and you will see the sucking vortex of American lives and labors that define our current federal government.

The residential building boom of Great Falls has spawned a new architectural type: the “McMansion.” Usually just shy of 10,000 square feet, with six or more full baths, garages for at least four Mercedes or BMWs (you wouldn’t dare park a “domestic” in those garages), and no fewer than five bedrooms (odd, given many residents are DINKS, or dual income, no kids). Average prices range from $3 million to $4 million, all crammed onto slightly less than one acre of land. This allows for dozens to be built into one 40-acre real estate development. The D.C. area may be home to nearly a hundred such developments.

The McMansion trend has sparked a new website: Landofexcess.com, sporting the tagline “Presenting bloated and pompous residential buildings selected from the latest online real estate listings in the Greater Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Area.” Another website, McMansionhell.com, allows professional architects to delightfully poke fun at a common McMansion flaw: mimicking billionaire taste with only a millionaire’s wallet.

What makes this a national crisis? It is the question asked when visiting Boise or Denver or New Orleans: “What industry built this?” But the answer is no industry. This housing trend is ultimately underwritten by the tax dollars deposited in the U.S. Treasury.

The Greater Washington, D.C., area is home to nearly 8,000 Senior Executive Service (SES) government employees. Senate and House Secretaries report 12,000 people are registered congressional “lobbyists.” And Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon and General Dynamics, along with other government contractors, have a workforce of several thousand located in and around D.C.

The average household income in Great Falls, Virginia, is a mere $300,000, but that includes grocery clerks and auto mechanics. SES employees pull this average up, as do government contractors making well into six figures, and lobbyists for whom it is not unprecedented to pocket $2 million per year.

Sadly, this wash of money flows even more freely as the rest of the nation struggles. Earlier this year Washingtonian Magazine covered “Inside DC’s Pandemic-Fueled Real Estate Boom.” McMansions have apparently thrived on COVID-19. The article notes the D.C. market “is the craziest it’s been in 15 years,” and poses the question, “What could it mean for an already unequal region?” Good question, since grocery clerks and auto mechanics are somehow missing this “boom.”

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s COVID money tracker shows that, with President Joe Biden’s latest “pandemic relief spending,” the federal government will distribute a total of $5.9 trillion in one year, about $41,000 per taxpayer ($82,000 per married couple). But no household in America will get a COVID relief check anywhere near that amount.

Less than one percent of the relief bill was earmarked for vaccine distribution. So where did it all go? It went into countless pockets, some completely unrelated to the pandemic, or related only through tortured or contrived connection. State budgets bankrupt from underfunded pensions, and entire corporations who made poor decisions, have lined up for their “share” of this money. And of course, the government employee or lobbyist who helped deliver the goods will be “well rewarded.”

What do the McMansions of Great Falls, Virginia, say about corrupt national politics? Unfortunately, these stucco-to-look-like-granite structures may not survive to answer this question for our grandchildren. But since they will be the ones laboring to pay off the debt, maybe that’s a good thing.

Trent Clark of Soda Springs is acting chair of United Families Idaho and has served in the leadership of Idaho business, politics, workforce and humanities education.