LegiStorm: Transparency's Sidekick

The House of Representatives today released its full expenses online for the first time.

The move was ordered by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) this summer. The first Statement of Disclosures to be published online was the House's third quarter books, which cover all expenses for all offices and members of the House of Representatives, including staff salaries. Until now, the expense books have only been available in heavy printed volumes. LegiStorm has put the salaries online by data-entering and editing the salaries before publishing them on our website.

The data was published as a searchable PDF document, a format that allows searching and basic browsing. However, unlike LegiStorm's salary database, the PDF version does not allow a user to sort or see all listings related to a single person over time, or even from one book. Many staffers receive pay both from a member and a committee, for instance. LegiStorm allows users to easily see the total compensation from all sources, unlike the House PDF.

 The Senate is expected to follow the House of Representative's lead and post all member expenses online, the Associated Press reports.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) proposed the measure, which was approved and added to an appropriations bill allocating funds for the congressional budget. A final compromise version of the appropriations bill will need to be approved by the House and Senate before the measure will go into effect.

This follows last month's announcement by the House that it would post the House's Statement of Disbursements "at the earliest date." Originally, that was expected to be the end of August. But The Hill reported last week that the House was going to delay the release until October to plan for the expected increase in online traffic.

Closing a huge information gap, the House of Representatives expects to put the expense records of all representatives online.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) released a letter she sent to the House's chief administrative officer today, directing that the House's Statement of Disbursements be posted online "at the earliest date." The Statement of Disbursements includes all official expenses for each member, including salaries.

The expense reports have been released as printed volumes, running to thousands of pages covered in small type each quarter. The volumes were available in a basement office of a House office building.

The difficulty in accessing records of lawmakers' spending and a general lack of transparency in those records was the subject of a Wall Street Journal article today.

The article was a follow up to Saturday's WSJ report examining official spending by Congress, including representatives that purchased digital cameras and televisions using their official expense allowances. The purchases were legal as long as they were used for official congressional business.

The latest article highlighted the difficulty in finding documenation of such expenditures. The House and Senate both publish members' expenditures in dense volumes of printed pages rather than making them easily accessible online. To get access to the records, you have to go the record rooms of the House and Senate, which are both located in basements of congressional office buildings.

The amount House members are allowed to spend on office supplies, franked mail and staff salaries may be about to take a big jump.

The House of Representatives' chief administrative officer asked lawmakers to raise the total pool for member administrative expenses by $90 million, or about 15 percent, according to Roll Call.

The Members' Representational Allowances, as they are known, range from about $1.4 million to $1.7 million for each office. The expense allowance is based on various factors, including the distance of a member's district to D.C. and the cost of office space in their home district.