LegiStorm: Transparency's Sidekick

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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 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.

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LegiStorm has added the latest U.S. Senate staff salaries onto its site, completing the 2008 year that saw the end of Senate careers by Barack Obama (D-Ill.), Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Ted Stevens (R-Alaska).

The new data include the salaries of all Senate staff from Oct. 1, 2008-March 31, 2009. Unlike the House, which releases its expenditure and salary data quarterly, the Senate releases its financial records every six months. The Secretary of the Senate published two thick books of expenditures earlier this month. LegiStorm has painstakingly converted the salary records from paper form into its database.

Meanwhile, the House has also released all of its expenditure records from the first quarter of 2009 and we have begun  entering that data as well. We will make another blog post when that is complete, which we estimate to be about two weeks from now.

LegiStorm has uploaded and made available nearly 2,500 personal financial disclosures filed by House and Senate staffers in 2009.

Our financial disclosure database now includes the disclosures from all staffers from both houses of Congress who filed by the May 15 deadline. We will continue to add filings for those staffers who received extensions of the deadlines or who file amendments throughout the year.

LegiStorm already posted the financial disclosures of every member of Congress who filed by the deadline earlier this month.

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When we first launched LegiStorm in September 2006, we presented users with less than one year of complete congressional staff salary data. Since that time, we have steadily added more recent data but also historical salary data, not to mention other data offerings.

Now we have reached a new milestone. We have entered all historical salary data from House and Senate expenditure books that the Government Printing Office still makes available. As of now, our salary data is complete from October 2000 forward, or eight full years worth.

Today's release includes an additional year of salaries from October 1, 2000 to September 30, 2001 in the Senate, as well as three quarters of House data from October 1, 2000 to June 30, 2001.

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LegiStorm has now updated its Senate staff salaries, releasing data for the second and third quarter of 2008, ending Sept. 30.

The release comes six weeks after the Secretary of the Senate published a set of books detailing all salaries and all expenditures of the Senate for the six-month period running from April 1 to Sept. 30. Since that time, LegiStorm has been keypunching the data, as well as proofreading for errors and matching the data to our existing salary and other records.

We released the House staff salaries on Tuesday. The next Senate salary data release will occur in six months, the next House one in three months.

The members of the 111th Congress will be officially sworn in Tuesday and LegiStorm has already updated its pages to reflect the new congressional makeup.

We have added all the new freshmen senators and representatives, and have updated the status of those leaving the legislative bodies. We've also added the financial disclosures for the new members filed as candidates, giving their constituents an early look at the new legislators' financial dealings.

We don't yet have biographical information or photos of most of the new members. We'll update those as soon as the official bios and pics are released. We'll also continue updating our lists of members as open seats are filled.

Although embattled Illinois Gov. Rob Blagojevich (D) appointed Roland Burris (D) to fill the Senate seat left vacant by President-elect Barack Obama, we have not yet added Burris to our list as Senate leaders have vowed to block him from being seated. In another race, Democrat Al Franken was declared the winner for Minnesota's open Senate seat today, but we are waiting to add him to our rolls until all challenges have finished and he is ready to be sworn in.

Kentucky's Lexington Herald-Leader has a story today about Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) and a charitable foundation the Senator created in 1996, the year the former professional baseball pitcher was elected to that sport's Hall of Fame.

Due to his Hall of Fame status, Bunning can command fees signing autographs for baseball memorabilia collectors. As a Senator, his outside income is limited due to ethics rules, but he can put these fees into his charitable foundation.

However, as his personal financial disclosures available on LegiStorm show, most of the foundation's payouts have gone to Bunning himself. In 2001, Bunning received $15,000 in salary from his foundation. Every year since then, he's reported earning $20,000 in salary. Overall, the Herald-Leader reports that since Bunning's foundation was created, it has raised $504,000 and Bunning has been paid $180,000 in salary. The foundation's charitable donations have totaled $136,435 - with the largest donations going to churches Bunning attends.

The foundation was approved by the Senate Ethics Committee and the IRS when it was created, but several people raised questions in the Herald-Leader's story about the proportion of money that has gone to Bunning's salary as well as the board setup. Rick Robinson - a lobbyist who is one of three members of the foundation's board (along with Bunning's wife and a family friend of the Bunnings) - told the paper the foundation is trying to build a large enough cash reserve so it could give donations using only interest generated by investments. However, he could offer no plan to do so.

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LegiStorm has posted the latest congressional staff salary data from the U.S. Senate.

The salary data covers the period Oct. 1, 2007 through March 31, 2008. The six-month semester of Senate disbursement data was made available by the Government Printing Office in book form in June and since then we have been busy converting that data into an accurate and structured database form.

This latest addition of staff salary data brings our salaries database to nearly 500,000 individual salary records. We now have Senate data from October 2002 forward and House data from January 2002. We are continuing to grow our database by adding historical data.