LegiStorm: Transparency's Sidekick

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.

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.

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.

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.

As we work on new products we have also been working on getting historical salary data into our database. This morning, we released a new quarter of salary data, the 3rd quarter of 2002 from the House of Representatives.

Entering the data is painstaking work, requiring manual data entry from books released by the House each quarter and the Senate each semester. Our salary database alone is approaching half a million records, all which must be checked and rechecked for accuracy. The data challenges are many. One of the hardest parts is to make sure that we don't confuse staffers with the same or similar names, while properly tracking a person as he she changes offices or even names. In the near future we expect to announce some changes to our database that will help us, and our users, track these changes.

As always, we depend on our site users to alert us to any errors they see. Please let us know if you see something that doesn't look right.