LegiStorm: Transparency's Sidekick

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.

LegiStorm has updated its House staff salaries, releasing data for the third quarter of 2008, ending Sept. 30.

The release comes six weeks after the Clerk of the House released a three-volume set of books containing salaries and all expenditures of the House of Representatives. Since that time, LegiStorm has been keypunching the data, as well as  proofreading for errors and matching the data to our existing salary records.

We are nearing completion of editing the Senate salary data as well. The Senate releases its expenditure records every six months, so the existing Senate salary data on our site is naturally getting a bit old, with March 31, 2008 being the last closing date. But this Thursday, we hope to bring the data current to Sept. 30.

Members of Congress will receive an annual salary increase of $4,700 for 2009 as a result of an automatic cost of living allowance that took effect on January 1, raising the default annual member salary to $174,000. A handful of the House and Senate's top leaders make even more than that.

Though congressional pay increases are rarely popular, the 2.8% increase in 2009 has come under fire from some critics who note that many constituents across the country face wage freezes, job losses and general financial despair as the year begins.The critics include such groups as Citizens Against Government Waste and the National Taxpayers Union.

Since the Ethics Reform Act of 1989, member salary increases are made based on a cost-of-living allowance that is granted automatically at the beginning of each calendar year. This practice means that Congress would have to actively take up the issue on the floor to vote to decline the pay increase, leaving a voting record come re-election time.  

We have long showed users what members of Congress earn on member salary pages such as this one for Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.). Today we have also added a new page about the recent history of member salary increases and about member salaries here.

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Election Day 2008 will take on a whole new meaning for some former congressional aides.

Tomorrow, a number of former staffers are trying to get back to Capitol Hill with a promotion as a legislator. LegiStorm has the information on how they got their political start.

Perhaps the most notable is Daniel Maffei. Maffei, a former communications aide to Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), narrowly lost to then-incumbent Jim Walsh in 2006. This time around, Walsh has announced his retirement and Maffei is expected to win the seat.

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LegiStorm has released the latest available congressional staff salary data from the second quarter of 2008 for the House of Representatives.

As usual, the salary data comes from the Statement of Disbursements books published quarterly by the Clerk of the House. The books are typically published three months after the quarter ends and we spend a few weeks converting the books from hard-copy to digital form.

The Senate publishes its salary data in semi-annual, not quarterly, increments. The next Senate data is not scheduled for release for another three months.

In our continuing quest to be as comprehensive as possible, we have added more historical congressional staff salary data to our site.

We have now included salaries from the six-month period from Oct. 1, 2001-March 31, 2002 in the Senate, as well as House data from July 1, 2001-Sept. 30, 2001.

In addition, the second quarter of 2008 for the House was released a few weeks ago in book form and we are busy getting that into digital form. We are at least two weeks away from completing that at this point. Since the Senate releases data in six-month blocks, there will be no comparable release of new Senate data for another quarter.

Over the last few days, a tempest has been brewing over an allegation made by Scripps Howard columnist Deroy Murdock that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) pays less to women than he does to men in his Senate office. All the stories have accurately cited LegiStorm as the source for the raw data.

Naturally, the allegation has lit up the conservative blogosphere and made its way onto television, including ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos".

But along the way, a few commentators have taken liberty with the facts about LegiStorm's role so we wanted to clear that up. We carry the data and are happy to be the source for anyone, liberal or conservative, who wants to do analysis of that data. That's what it's there for - to provide openess in government and spark debate. 

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LegiStorm's staff salary information has been become the subject of a heated congressional campaign in Indiana's 9th District. The race is pitting incumbent Democratic Rep. Baron Hill against Republican Mike Sodrel, who defeated Hill for the post in 2004.

Hill alleges Sodrel's office did not co-operate after Hill's 2006 victory, making Hill's transition back into Congress difficult. Sodrel's campaign has countered by pointing out Hill raised his staff salaries about 84 percent after his defeat in 2004.

Hill paid his staff a total of $181,943 in the third quarter of 2004. The number jumped to $334,005 in the fourth quarter despite adding only one person to the staff.

You can see all of the salaries paid by Hill here. Sodrel's staff salaries are here.

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.