LegiStorm: Transparency's Sidekick

A trip to South Florida by a dozen senators last weekend highlights a loophole in congressional travel regulations.

The House and Senate both restricted most privately funded travel for trips that have any connection with lobbyists in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal. But that hasn't stopped lawmakers from taking trips with lobbyists.

According to a report in Politico, 12 Democratic senators took a trip to Miami Beach last weekend for a fundraiser attended by top lobbyists. The guest list for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee's "winter retreat" included 108 senior Washington lobbyists. Many of the lobbyists represented fields that are normally in the crosshairs of Democratic rhetoric, including banking, tobacco, oil and pharmaceuticals.

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A Huffington Post effort to get people to take money out of bailed-out banks and into local community institutions has gained at least one follower in Congress.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) announced Monday she'd be moving her accounts from Bank of America to her local Devon Bank. The move came after the Huffington Post analyzed the personal financial disclosures of most members of Congress to find out where they banked. According to their findings, at least 53 senators and 104 representatives use one of the U.S.'s six largest banks.

The Huffington Post has compiled all the data on where lawmakers bank in a set of two spreadsheets: one for House members and another for Senate members.

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Privately funded congressional travel may become an issue in the hotly contested New York Senate race.

The New York Daily News used LegiStorm's data to take a look at former Tennessee Rep. Harold Ford's travel when in office. Ford took more than 70 privately funded trips, ranking him among the most-traveled members of Congress.

Ford is widely expected to challenge Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) in this year's Democratic primary, and Daily News indicated his past travel could become a campaign issue. Gillibrand took office after Congress passed reforms restricting travel, and she has not taken or approved a single trip for her staff during her tenure.

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According to a report in the The Hill, it appears to be all but certain that Congress will once again vote to forego its annual pay raise. However, there have been some competing proposals about what might happen after this year.

Currently, Congress gets an automatic cost-of-living increase each year unless they vote against the raise. Both chambers voted against a raise for 2010, and members of Congress are likely to deny themselves a raise again for 2011 given the combination of a bad national economy and an election year.

However, the picture beyond 2011 isn't clear. The Hill reports that Reps. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Harry Mitchell (D-Ariz.) have proposed freezing salaries only for 2011. Rep. Nathan Deal (R-Ga.) is proposing to cut member salaries in any year the government runs a deficit. And Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has suggested totally revamping the system, abolishing the automatic pay raises and instead establishing an independent commission to set pay, subject to a yes-or-no vote.

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Last summer, the Wall Street Journal found the amount of taxpayer funds spent on travel by members of Congress has increased dramatically since strict rules on privately funded trips were introduced in 2005.

Now, one congressman wants to curtail his colleagues' travel.

Rep. Timothy Johnson (R-Ill.) introduced the "Suspending Travel After Years of Pleasure Trips on Unwitting Taxpayers Act" – or the STAY-PUT Act – calling for a moratorium on overseas congressional travel unless it can be proven the trip is in the best interests of taxpayers.

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Nearly half of the staffers who have left the powerful House Financial Services Committee in the last decade have registered as lobbyists, according to a report yesterday by the Huffington Post.

The web site used LegiStorm to identify the 126 people who have left the committee since the end of 2000. Some 62 eventually became registered lobbyists. Often staffers leave their position writing financial laws to represent key players in the financial services industry. One former staffer called it "a logical progression" for people who understand the legislative process. Others described the moves as "cashing out," using experience on an influential committee as a stepping stone to a higher-paying job in the private sector.

But the revolving door goes both ways. 16 people currently serving on the committee previously worked as lobbyists, having represented clients such as Wachovia, MetLife, H&R Block and the New York Stock Exchange. Some even go from Capitol Hill to K Street and back again - at least five people now on the committee are there for the second time, having lobbied for organizations like Fannie Mae or the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America in the interim.

Some of the staffers and members interviewed by the Huffington Post said that having K Street experience on the committee provided perspective and diversity. Others, such as Rep. Mel Watt (D-N.C.), worry that lobbyists may be returning to the public sector to advocate for clients' interests from the inside. "You have to be careful with that," Watt said.

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LegiStorm has added the latest U.S. Senate staff salaries to our database.

The latest information on salaries of all Senate staff covers the period from April 1-Sept. 30, 2009. The Senate releases its expenditures every six months in large printed volumes - unlike the House of Representatives, which releases the information quarterly and recently started to publish the records online.

The Secretary of the Senate published the two thick books of records earlier this month, and LegiStorm has painstakingly converted the salary records from paper form and entered them into our database.

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Finding privately financed congressional travel in decline, The Wall Street Journal found a big upsurge in lawmaker trips instead funded by taxpayers.

The Journal used LegiStorm's data to show that since 2005, when an ethics scandal brought about new rules limiting congressional trips paid for by outside organizations, lawmaker participation in such trips has fallen by 70%, to a cost of $2.9 million in 2008. Over the same time period, though, publicly funded trips - known as congressional delegations, or codels - has risen by 70%, to a cost of $13 million in 2008. Unlike the privately financed travel, the disclosed cost of taxpayer-sponsored trips does not include airfare, which usually takes place on passenger jets provided by the military.

Like many of the privately financed trips now on the wane, codels often provide a mix of business and pleasure. The Journal cites as an example a trip to Scotland by 12 members of Congress. In Edinburgh to discuss security issues, the lawmakers found time to do some sightseeing, go shopping and dine at well-known restaurants. Eleven of the twelve lawmakers on the trip then returned home two days before the conclusion of the conference they were in Scotland to attend.

A grand jury handed down an indictment yesterday against Ngozi Pole, the office manager for former Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.).

A press release issued by the Justice Department notes that Poole, using his role as office manager, falsely submitted salary paperwork on several occasions between 2003 and January 2007 that allowed him to receive higher pay and larger bonuses than he had been authorized. Pole allegedly concealed the extra money he was receiving by forging documents that showed he had received the correct amounts, and displaying these documents to his supervisor. He is alleged to have stolen approximately $75,000 in this manner.

Pole is charged with five counts of wire fraud and one count of theft of government property. Each wire fraud charge carries a maximum sentence of twenty years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Theft of government property is punishable by 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Pole's salary records, available on LegiStorm here, show that his salary increased by over $35,000 between 2002 and 2003, and was over $100,000 throughout the years covered in the indictment - until 2007, when Pole left Kennedy's office and went to work for Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). In that year, his salary dropped back to below his pre-2003 levels - around $63,000.

LegiStorm has added the House of Representatives 2009 third quarter salary data to our database.

This is the first set of data taken from an electronic copy of the official record, the Statement of Disbursements of the House, which was published in PDF format on Nov. 30. Before this release, the information was released in large printed volumes that required us to enter the data by hand.

Having an electronic version of the document allowed us to cut the time required to get the information on the site down from about a month to less than two weeks. However, since this was the first electronic release most of that time was taken in redoing our procedures to handle the new data format. In the future we should be able to cut the turnaround time to three days or less.

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