As ProPublica just pointed out on Twitter, the White House today released staff salaries, as they do each year.

Since 1995, the White House has been required to deliver a report to Congress listing the title and salary of every White House Office employee.

What's unique about this year's report is the data that accompanies it, helpfully presented in a sortable chart, which is itself downloadable.

Using Google Spreadsheets, I made the following chart, to see whether my first impression was correct: that many White House staffers were concentrated at either $30 - 40,000 per year, or around $160,000. Turns out my first impression was wrong, and that there's a fairly even distribution.

This is a step in the right direction, where a simple explanation, accessible chart, and exposed data all combine to give a useful look at something that's required to be made public.

(Note -- please interpret this chart as a stab at making sense by an amateur, and should not represent Sunlight's visualization work, which far, far exceeds my own.)