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.

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.

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The salaries are in. The pay figures for staff members from the House of Representatives' fourth quarter of 2008 are now available on LegiStorm, having been entered from the thick disbursement records released by the House of Representatives.

This data period is critical because it is the time when Santa Claus brings goodies to dedicated staff in the way of annual bonuses. Bonuses are not a universal perquisite on the Hill but they are a common way for members to reward staff who have merited them. This assumes that members have budgeted well and have sufficient funds available in their annual allotment, known as the Member's Representational Allowance.

The latest collection of salary data is a window into one of the fiercest fought elections in modern times. Elections can affect how congressional staffers are paid, both in legal and not-so-legal ways. For example, staff members often take leave to work on campaigns, whether their bosses' or those of others. The pay records can reflect those absences.

And sometimes, staffers receive compensation from the campaigns but volunteers on a campaign usually vastly outnumber the paid staff. Therefore, campaign work is often a volunteer or grossly underpaid activity. Occasionally, members of Congress reward aides with bonuses, even if unconsciously, for their special dedication to the campaign. Since federal law prohibits the use of tax dollars to subsidize campaigns, such a use of bonuses would be improper.

Also controversial is the payment of large bonuses by members of Congress who are departing. With no more concern about getting re-elected, members can be quite generous with taxpayer money toward their staff.

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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.