LegiStorm: Transparency's Sidekick

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.

The newspaper Politico used our site to publish a story today about how Hill staffers often have to scrape by on their wages. Politico points out that for entry-level staffers, "living on the cheap is not a measure of frugality but a means of survival."

While some staffers, especially committee aides, command more than $150,000 a year, the competition for the entry-level jobs is such that it is a buyer's market.

But Politico may have understated the case. They said that after taxes, some staffers make only $25,000. Actually, our salary figures are gross figures before the removal of taxes and other deductions. And our data shows quite a few congressional aides make $25,000 or less before taxes. As Politico says, in an expensive town like Washington, $25,000 does not go nearly so far as in most of the rest of the country.

We have added a small new feature to our site, which is the tax returns of the three main presidential candidates. While our mission has not expanded to cover the presidential race, we have their data because they are all U.S. senators. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has yet to release his tax filings, although he is expected to do so today. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) has not released her tax filing due in 2008 because she filed an extension. Instead, she released a statement with her expected income amounts from various sources.

You can find their tax forms on their personal financial disclosure pages, http://www.legistorm.com/memberdisclosure/76/Sen_Barack_Obama.html and http://www.legistorm.com/memberdisclosure/21/Sen_Hillary_Rodham_Clinton.html.

McCain's filings will be at http://www.legistorm.com/memberdisclosure/69/Sen_John_McCain.html when they become available.

The public has spoken - and they appear to like what we are doing.

For several weeks we have been a bit beaten up. Congressional aides spoke of our site in sometimes vitriolic and, frankly, paranoid terms about how we invaded their privacy by publishing financial disclosures.

One staffer accused us of aiding the break-in of a home; others talked darkly about potential kidnappings and Russian gangsters. Many suggested lawsuits against us, at times for disclosing information that was already disclosed in the white pages delivered to homes and in Internet-searchable phone books. To be sure, there were some legitimate privacy issues raised but we have always believed the public right to know has trumped any privacy concerns that we have not already addressed.

The House has worked itself up into hysteria over LegiStorm’s recent release of staffer personal financial disclosures. There are demands in Congress for a taxpayer-financed lawsuit against us. http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/aides-private-info-exposed-2008-04-02.html.

One House staffer has even gone so far as to suggest that LegiStorm aided and abetted in the burglary of his house. This has gone too far. We have a solution for the mess of the House’s own making.

First, to be clear: read more ...

Since we started, we at LegiStorm have had a lot of things we have wanted to tell our site users. We are a site primarily of data but the data can tell stories.

Take the story by Susan Crabtree in yesterday's The Hill newspaper, which uses our data to show that the campaign of a powerful member of Congress, Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pa.), paid more than $2,000 for a rifle and other weapons paraphernalia. What makes it more interesting is that Murtha, a close confidant to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and appropriations subcommittee chairman, may have violated both House ethics rules and federal statute in converting them to personal use by giving them as a gift to an aide. And it took us no more than a few minutes to discover that his campaign had officially - and erroneously - claimed this gun as a campaign "advertising" expense. His office described this as a "clerical error". The chief of staff said he refunded the money to the campaign committee after The Hill asked about it.

All this was available through public records which told a compelling story. In fact, it was information from two sources that, when combined, made it so interesting.

The latest congressional staff salary data, from the fourth quarter of 2007, is now available from the House of Representatives. We have also released historical data from both the House and Senate in 2002 that helps build our database so that it is now complete from Oct. 1, 2002 forward.

Every three months, the House releases its salary data and we transcribe it from book form into our database. For those who have not followed the process closely, it typically takes at least two months before these books are released, and another three weeks or so for us to get the data into a database form and edit it for accuracy.

The Senate salary data, meanwhile, is released every six months. Our last Senate data goes through September 2007. The Senate is not due to publish its latest expenditure and salary data for at least two months. We hope to have the Senate data on our site less than about three months from now.