It's Your Money!
WASHINGTON, DC - House members and committee offices spent more than $673 million in the last half of 2009 on salaries for staff, travel and outside vendors, according to a Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group analysis of six months of congressional spending data released by the House Clerk's Office.
This analysis was facilitated by the Sunlight Foundation's online searchable database of congressional expenditures that allows you to track how lawmakers spent their Member Representational Allowances, which are federal funds allocated to support expenses such as staff salaries, official travel and administrative supplies.
According to Sunlight's analysis, the corporation that received the most money in the last half of 2009 was CDW Government Inc., which earned over $8 million for computer-related services provided to the House. Among the top ten companies that do business with the House, three are companies that supply technology, followed by phone companies such as AT&T and Verizon Wireless. The full analysis, including a ranking of which corporations received the most money, is online at http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/2010/housedisbursements/
"Congress has the power of the purse, both for the nation and itself," said Bill Allison, editorial director at the Sunlight Foundation. "That is why it is so critical that we all have easy access to this expenditure information. Sunlight encourages journalists, bloggers and citizens alike to use the database we created to scrutinize how lawmakers' are spending this money."
Sunlight first called for online disclosure of the expense records in March of 2008 as part of its proposed Transparency in Government Act, posted to PublicMarkup.org. Last year, Speaker Pelosi instructed House administrators to post House members' expenses online. Unfortunately, the Chief Administrative Officer of the House posted these reports in unwieldy PDF forms, a format which does not easily lend itself to be searched, sorted or otherwise analyzed. This inspired Sunlight to create its searchable database.
Sunlight will update its database in the coming weeks with the expenditure data for the first quarter of 2010, which the House just released in PDF format at http://disbursements.house.gov
The Sunlight Foundation is a non-partisan non-profit that uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable. Visit http://SunlightFoundation.com to learn more about Sunlight's projects, including http://PoliticalPartyTime.org and http://TransparencyData.com.
