Roll Call has a great article today ($) that looks at House staff pay levels to see whether some salaries are set so as to get around a law preventing former “senior” staffers from lobbying their old bosses for one year. It certainly looks like it.

According to Roll Call, only 3 percent of the people (255 of the 8,500) currently on House payroll met the lobbying ban threshold of $130,500+ annually, or $32,625 each quarter.* However, another 1% of staffers (65 in total) earn just under that threshold: between $31,350 to $32,513 each quarter. When they leave House employment, they won’t be added to this list of former staff prohibited from lobbying for a year.

When you look at average staff salaries, you can see that these rules miss a lot more “senior” people as well. For example, Deputy Chiefs of Staff earn on average $84,121 annually, and Legislative Directors earn approximately $72,137 annually. They don’t even get close to this threshold.

Of course, we wouldn’t be able to figure any of this out but for the House’s publishing their “Statements of Disbursements” online for the first time, giving us a new digital view into how the U.S. House spends public funds. They should be applauded for making this valuable resource available online. Hopefully, next time they’ll release the information in machine readable format, and not just in Adobe PDF.

There’s a lot more interesting stuff to derive from this data. Here are some instances of what’s been found so far:

• Average staff salaries
• Whether staff salaries are correlated with a Representative’s tenure
• Spending on travel, contractors, and franking

There’s much more to come.

* Of course, we need to see the entire year’s data to definitely know annual salaries for all staff. This is the best approximation currently available.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, 12/7/09

http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page21633

Releasing data can and must unleash the innovation and entrepreneurship at which Britain excels – one of the most powerful forces of change we can harness.

Josh Tauburer has the analysis, drawn from the recently released “House of Representative’s Statement of Disbursements of the House, July 1, 2009 through September 30, 2009.”

His answer? Chief of Staff and Legislative Director salaries do not vary based upon a Member of Congress’s tenure in office. However, Staff Assistant, Legislative Assistant, and District Director salaries do vary.

Analyzing Josh’s numbers, it looks like a Staff Assistant can expect a 5% pay increase each year. Legislative Assistants, however, can expect on average only 1.1%, and District Directors can expect only 0.6%.

A list of average staff salaries is available here.

The Associated Press is reporting that the administration will soon end the TARP bailout program. No date has yet been specified, and it’s unclear how long the “wind down” process would take.

What I want to know is why there are ONLY 4 disclosures of lobbying contacts regarding TARP from September until now? They’re all regarding communications from the American Banking Association. Shouldn’t there be others?

Here’s a new CRS report on GPO, complete with rich datasets (in document form) explaining GPO’s role as information distributor.

http://opencrs.com/document/R40897/

From its establishment in 1861, the Government Printing Office (GPO) has compiled, formatted,
printed, bound, and distributed documents that have recorded the activities of Congress (and the
work of other governmental entities). In current practice, more than half of all government
documents originate in digital form, and are distributed electronically. As a consequence of
electronic production and dissemination, some congressional materials are now more readily
available to wider congressional, governmental, and public audiences than when they were only
produced and distributed in paper form.

Ever wonder how much congressional staff earn? It’s possible to look up individual staff on Legistorm, but what I’m interested in is whether staff compensation match the roles that staffers play, particularly when compared to private sector employment.

Fortunately, with the help of Sunlight Lab’s team, I’ve been able to examine the staff compensation question by playing with data from the recently released House of Representative’s Statement of Disbursements of the House, July 1, 2009 through September 30, 2009.

These numbers aren’t perfect.* But, they represent a good first approximation of House staffer salaries.

Part of what struck me is how nearly all congressional staff pay is squeezed between $30-$60k annually. The people who are working on issues worth billions of dollars and overseeing all federal agencies earn less than entry level pay for an executive branch employee with a professional degree (or a master’s degree with one year’s experience).

It would be interesting to compare the pay for these positions against their private sector or executive branch equivalents, taking into account Washington D.C.’s higher-than-average cost of living. Keep in mind that most U.S. Representatives earn $174,000 annually.

* The numbers below represent educated guesses drawn from that data. My summary is error prone in many ways: I’ve multiplied quarterly earnings by 4 to obtain annual salaries, thereby omitting bonuses and including people who didn’t work the entire quarter; not everyone uses the same title to describe the same job; some people change jobs during the quarter; this does not include committee office staff; and I’ve omitted a number of job titles that I couldn’t easily classify or did not have at least 50 people with that title. Another possible problem is that I cannot disambiguate staff who live in the DC metropolitan area, and those who live elsewhere in the country.

This page turner is available in PDF format from the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer, and the underlying data on Members of Congress’s personal offices has been arduously pulled from that report and is available from Sunlight. (There still more information that needs to be scraped, such as from committees, non-legislative offices, etc.)

The Hill this morning has a short story on HR 1242, which it describes as “mandating that the Treasury Department create a real-time electronic database of information related to the bailout.” The House is expected to approve the measure, sponsored by Reps. King and Maloney this week.

Real-time? Online? Nice. It would be nice to get those lobbying disclosures updated, too.

Here’s the CRS summary of the legislation:

Amends the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (EESA) to direct the Secretary of the Treasury to provide to the Special Inspector General of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the Comptroller General, and the Congressional Oversight Panel ongoing, continuous, and close to real-time updates of the status of funds distributed under EESA through a standardized electronic database that combines all of the necessary information from existing public and private sources to track the status of the funds distributed under the Act.

Requires the Secretary also to: (1) compare the data in such database with any other data for any activities that are inconsistent with EESA purposes; and (2) collect from all federal agencies any regulatory filings, internal models, financial models, and analytics associated with the financial assistance on at least a daily basis in order to help the Secretary to determine the effectiveness of TARP in stimulating prudent lending and strengthening bank capital.

Directs the Secretary, if TARP goals are not being met, to work with the federal agencies supplying the information to have them provide the recipients with recommendations for better meeting such goals. Requires the Secretary, furthermore, to adjust the future uses of TARP assistance if such goals are not met even following such recommendations.

I recently looked into websites that make available government data at no cost but are privately run. What emerged was a list that most people would expect: federal laws and rulemakings, court decisions, public influence data, general voting information, and an agglomeration of special interest sites. They, in short, contained the “good government” information that attract people active in the political sphere.

What I didn’t consider at the time was information related to genealogy. This includes immigration records, census data, military records (induction and service data), birth and death records, tombstone locations, social security numbers (especially the “death master file“), and so on.

There’s an industry devoted to cataloging and transforming genealogical information into machine-searchable formats. For example, EllisIsland.org makes available 25 million immigrant arrival records created between 1892 to 1924. Users can search by passenger name, birth date, gender, marital status, place of origin, and view the original ship’s manifest. In addition, some newspapers, like the Hartford Courant, make freely available subsets of their obituaries.

The government has a fee-based genealogical search as part of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The National Archives has a list of helpful information finding aides. In addition, many of NARA’s holdings have been digitized and are available from “Ancestry,” “Heritage Quest” and “Footnote”; these services are available free-of-charge at any NARA facility.

I was surprised that businesses regularly use the SSA’s “death master file,” and likely use much other information provided by the government.  I wonder what other information the public would use (or would use more often) were it available online, especially if available in easily searchable formats.

Today’s National Journal has a story on Congress’s best and worst committee websites. Sunlight participated in the evaluation process, and the results are available here. My favorite comment is by the communications director for one of the committees about his committee’s (old) website: “Everybody hates it, and it’s not user-friendly, and it sucks.”

A month or two ago, we put together a list of suggestions on what should appear on congressional committee’s websites. Here’s the list, in all its glory.

The U.S. House’s Office of Law Revision Counsel has collected bulk text data from the United States Code dating back to 1991 and posted it here:  http://uscode.house.gov/zip/bulktextdata

More info:

This is the data in the “pls” format (plain text).  There is a ZIP file for each year that contains the entire USC….

This data was previously available by downloading the CD-ROM ISO images and using the data files from those CD-ROMS, but that didn’t seem to be a very useful way to post it.  [It is now] posted [as] zip files for each year in hope that it will be more accessible.

Off the top of my head, it might be interesting to see how much of the U.S. Code has changed from year to year (perhaps percent change over time as a chart), or to have redline versions of specific titles, or to run capitol words for specific titles. For example, a capitol words guide that links to other related sections of the code. It’s great that they made this available.