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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LegiStorm has added a minor feature to make browing congressional staffers' personal financial disclosures even easier.

You can now see a list of people who have filed by year, allowing users to filter only those who have filed so far in 2009, or those who filed last year. So far, 3,021 people have filed a financial disclosure or extension in 2009, compared to 3,426 people who filed in 2008.

LegiStorm will continue to add personal financial disclosures from members and staffers throughout the year as more filings are received.

LegiStorm has added a simple change to the way we display congressional trip reports. For all trips after November of 2008, if an amendment to the original trip form was filed we now identify the amendment and separately link to both the original form and the amended form. You can see an example here.

LegiStorm has always collected trip amendments as part of our data-gathering process and changed the trip records accordingly, but if an amendment was filed to an older trip we lumped both the original and the amendment into one PDF. Providing both PDFs now makes it easier to see if a traveler filed an amendment, compare the amendment side-by-side to the original and view the changes made to the filing.

We will identify amendments on all trips going forward and we will also note amendments to historical trips as we find them. We hope this small feature makes our trip database even more convenient for our users.

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The members of the 111th Congress will be officially sworn in Tuesday and LegiStorm has already updated its pages to reflect the new congressional makeup.

We have added all the new freshmen senators and representatives, and have updated the status of those leaving the legislative bodies. We've also added the financial disclosures for the new members filed as candidates, giving their constituents an early look at the new legislators' financial dealings.

We don't yet have biographical information or photos of most of the new members. We'll update those as soon as the official bios and pics are released. We'll also continue updating our lists of members as open seats are filled.

Although embattled Illinois Gov. Rob Blagojevich (D) appointed Roland Burris (D) to fill the Senate seat left vacant by President-elect Barack Obama, we have not yet added Burris to our list as Senate leaders have vowed to block him from being seated. In another race, Democrat Al Franken was declared the winner for Minnesota's open Senate seat today, but we are waiting to add him to our rolls until all challenges have finished and he is ready to be sworn in.

We have added a small but important feature to our site that should make it much easier to find people on LegiStorm even if you don't know the exact form of their name.

The names of all the congressional staffers on our site come primarily from official salary records. If we get other information that suggest those names are a bit off (and they sometimes are), we will correct them. But that still leaves a lot to be desired because Jonathan may be the person's name but someone searching for Jon won't find him.

Thanks to a new feature, that's changing. We now give users the capability of searching under alternate names, whether that is a nickname or a maiden name. And users can also suggest alternate names for our site.

Take as an example the veteran political strategist Cathy Gillespie, the wife of former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie. We have her official name listed as Catherine H Gillespie because that's how she was listed in salary records. But now we also list her more common name of Cathy Gillespie, and if her high school friends want to find her, we also have her listed by her maiden name of Cathy Hay. http://www.legistorm.com/person/Catherine_H_Gillespie/22016.html

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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.

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