Legistorm: Transparency's Sidekick

In our quest to broaden the historical reach of our data, we have added another quarter of House staff salaries and another six-month semester of Senate staff salaries. We now have House salary data from Oct. 1, 2001 forward and Senate data from April 1, 2002 forward. In fact, we now make our coverage dates more transparent on our main salaries page, http://www.legistorm.com/salaries.html.

Vice President Dick Cheney might head his own fourth branch of government, as his critics have noted of his unusual legal claims to be outside the disclosure laws of the other branches of government, but some of his staff's salaries are reported with the legislative branch. Just not all of them.

So we are reminded by a piece by Dan Froomkin on today's Washington Post website, which points out that our web site has salaries for 33 Office of the Vice President staffers by virtue of its "mostly ceremonial role as president of the Senate." But "top Cheney aides such as chief of staff David S. Addington and national security adviser John Hannah, who are paid out of the vice president's executive appropriation, don't show up anywhere in the public domain."

It must be nice to avoid such kind of scrutiny.

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.

Due to user demand, we have added a small new feature to our website: salary totals by year.

On staffer pages, this means that you can see the total paid in any one calendar year or fiscal year (unfortunately, the Senate reports their salaries in six-month semesters beginning Oct. 1, so only fiscal year reporting is available).

You can see a sample staffer page here: http://www.legistorm.com/person/Huma_Abedin/2909.html. Note that the annual amounts can be misleading. They do not represent the annual rate of pay. Instead, they merely reflect all gross salary payments made in that year (as always, taxes are included and expense reimbursements are not included). As a result, it is important to see if the aide worked for the full period or merely a fraction of the time.

In our quest for more historical coverage of congressional aides, we at LegiStorm have just posted two new quarters of House staff salary data from 2002. Our House database is now complete from Jan. 1, 2002 forward. Our Senate data is complete from Oct. 1, 2002 forward.

Speaking of salary data, the House has published its latest books of disbursements meaning that we have been hard at work entering salary data in to our system. These latest books cover the first quarter of 2008. We hope to have the data on our site in mid-June. 

The Senate has not yet released its latest semester of spending data but we expect that to be out any day now.

Roll Call has clearly been spending some time on our site. The paper used LegiStorm's data for two stories on congressional employees this week.

In today's story Paul Singer looks at shared employees; staffers who provide IT or bookkeeping services to more than one office:

"According to payroll data compiled by LegiStorm, the salaries of many of these shared employees have skyrocketed over the past few years. For example, Susan Anfinson, a financial aide, earned just over $40,000 in 2003 from eight Congressional offices. In 2007, according to payroll records complied by LegiStorm, she earned over $141,000 in paychecks from 13 different offices.

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The newspaper Politico used our site to publish a story today about how Hill staffers often have to scrape by on their wages. Politico points out that for entry-level staffers, "living on the cheap is not a measure of frugality but a means of survival."

While some staffers, especially committee aides, command more than $150,000 a year, the competition for the entry-level jobs is such that it is a buyer's market.

But Politico may have understated the case. They said that after taxes, some staffers make only $25,000. Actually, our salary figures are gross figures before the removal of taxes and other deductions. And our data shows quite a few congressional aides make $25,000 or less before taxes. As Politico says, in an expensive town like Washington, $25,000 does not go nearly so far as in most of the rest of the country.