LegiStorm: Transparency's Sidekick

We've added a small feature that should make it easier for our users to stay on top of members' financial disclosures.

You can now see the member disclosures we've most recently added to our database. Even though most lawmakers file their financial disclosures each year on the May 15 deadline, to be released publicly the following month, dozens receive extensions and file later in the year. Members also file amendments to their disclosures throughout the year. Usually these amendments make very minor corrections to the disclosures, but occasionally they can be wholesale changes, such as one Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) filed recently.

We've added a link to the most recent member disclosure on our financial disclosures home page, or you can follow the link above. The recently added disclosures include late-filing senators and some recent amendments. We've also expanded our disclosures by adding past reports that Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) filed when he was a candidate.

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband lost between $100,001 and $1 million on an investment in American International Group according to her 2009 personal financial disclosure.

The revelation was the main focus of a number of news stories published after LegiStorm announced we had posted the disclosures for members of the House yesterday, two days before the schedule release.

The Washington Post, USA Today, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal were among the outlets that looked at the files on LegiStorm and wrote about what they found.

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The House of Representatives Clerk's Office has accidentally released all of the personal financial disclosures of members of the House ahead of their scheduled release on Friday.

The 2009 financial disclosures went up on the Clerk's web site. They are now all on LegiStorm's site.

The disclosures were scheduled to be released June 12, but the Clerk of the House website briefly posted them yesterday and LegiStorm was able to download the available disclosures and post them (with all the pages rotated to the correct orientation for our users' convienence - the forms are released in a sideways fashion due to the scanning process).

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The difficulty in accessing records of lawmakers' spending and a general lack of transparency in those records was the subject of a Wall Street Journal article today.

The article was a follow up to Saturday's WSJ report examining official spending by Congress, including representatives that purchased digital cameras and televisions using their official expense allowances. The purchases were legal as long as they were used for official congressional business.

The latest article highlighted the difficulty in finding documenation of such expenditures. The House and Senate both publish members' expenditures in dense volumes of printed pages rather than making them easily accessible online. To get access to the records, you have to go the record rooms of the House and Senate, which are both located in basements of congressional office buildings.

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The amount House members are allowed to spend on office supplies, franked mail and staff salaries may be about to take a big jump.

The House of Representatives' chief administrative officer asked lawmakers to raise the total pool for member administrative expenses by $90 million, or about 15 percent, according to Roll Call.

The Members' Representational Allowances, as they are known, range from about $1.4 million to $1.7 million for each office. The expense allowance is based on various factors, including the distance of a member's district to D.C. and the cost of office space in their home district.

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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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