The House of Representatives' document portal, docs.house.gov, launched in January 2012 with a surprisingly rich and relevant set of data: all bills and amendments (including drafts) that would come to the floor over the next week, and extensive XML metadata about each document and when it was updated. It's pretty difficult to overstate the value of this data. After all, information on what the House is about to do is vital -- to participate effectively in our democracy, you need to have some lead time.

The House has doubled down on its pledge to keep innovating, and has begun to release what promises to be an expansive set of committee information. Docs.house.gov’s expansion in breadth from floor proceedings to include committee activities provides significant new opportunities for the public to understand how the House functions as well as a much earlier entry point for citizens to become substantively involved in the legislative process.

Docs.house.gov is organized around a new calendar of committee activities that extends what's available on House.gov. The calendar identifies committee activities further in advance than the current system and provides a landing page with extensive information and documents related to committee activities such as the names of witnesses, written testimony, draft legislation, and so on. In addition, each committee activity has associated XML with structured information on both the activity and all related documents, so that developers can easily access and reuse the information. This more than satisfies our recommendation that the House improve how it gives notice about upcoming committee activities.

All documents contained in this portal can be searched and filtered by committee and subcommittee (here's documents from House Rules, for example), and every committee and subcommittee has its own RSS feed (like this one). It’s still not perfect: for example, it's not obvious how one could automatically discover the available XML on the site without scraping any HTML to discover associated IDs and URLs. But this could be addressed by offering a full XML feed of activity, like the House’s Floor page already does.

Taken together, these additions to docs.house.gov provide both a useful set of data and a promising new scope for this important legislative information portal. Our experience has taught us that gathering information in any automated way about House and Senate committees is an extremely frustrating experience, because every committee has its own website and its own way of doing things. Because of this, even while House and Senate floor votes are posted quickly and centrally, we've ended up in a situation where the votes members of Congress take while in committee are in no timely, central location. It's easy to imagine docs.house.gov evolving to become an incredibly useful guide that connects citizens to the information they seek. While it will never replace committee webpages – nor should it – docs.house.gov will help ensure that committee information is made more prominent among the activities of the House.

One additional noteworthy aspect of docs.house.gov is that it is built and maintained by the Clerk of the House. This means that the information it contains is non-partisan and should persist over time. While committee websites are often wiped clean when a new chairperson takes power, docs.house.gov should provide a measure of institutional memory independent of leadership and party. This is a smart move. In addition, we’ve noticed that some of the legislative support agencies have been unwilling or unable to play the role of a central legislative document clearinghouse. Having the Clerk’s office serve as a clearinghouse has managed to sweep aside all the bureaucracy and allow tangible progress to be made. Let’s hope that both the Senate and the legislative support agencies follow this example, now that the House has demonstrated what’s possible.

written by Eric Mill and Daniel Schuman

In the last 18 months, the House of Representatives has made significant strides towards greater openness and transparency in congressional deliberations, but significant work remains. The Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill for 2013, which was marked-up by a subcommittee last week, presents a major vehicle for the House leadership to make good on its promise to implement common-sense transparency measures this session.

While there are many issues that can be addressed a number of different ways, Sunlight will be looking at  the full committee markup to see if the bill:

-- Provides bulk access to THOMAS data

-- Fully funds the Office of Congressional Ethics

-- Requires Publication of  CRS Reports online

-- Publishes the Constitution Annotated online as it's updated in XML

-- Reinstates the Office of Technology Assessment

-- Makes reports to Congress available online

-- Publishes House spending information in an appropriate format for the data

Improve Public Access to THOMAS Data

THOMAS was created by Congress to make legislative information freely available to the public, but the Library of Congress has not kept up with best practices. One such practice -- "bulk access" -- would ease the development of new tools and technologies by publishing THOMAS data files online, promoting accurate and timely information dissemination. Congress has expressed its support for bulk data as have many organizations, but the Library continues to stall despite a 2008 memo describing how easy it would be to implement.

At the recent legislative subcommittee hearing, Rep. Honda mentioned that text has been inserted into the committee's report that would in some way address the bulk data question. The last time this happened, the language was watered down sufficiently so that the Library of Congress successfully evaded its obligations over the last half a decade. We hope the bill will contain these two provisions:

(1) Congress directs the Library of Congress to implement bulk access to THOMAS within 120 days of passage

(2) Congress directs the Library of Congress to immediately create an advisory committee on improving public access to legislative information that is composed of people inside and outside of government.

Fully Fund the Office of Congressional Ethics

The Office of Congressional Ethics is the House of Representatives' independent ethics watchdog. It came into existence in March 2008 after a series of corruption scandals prompted congressional leaders to explore creating a transparent, outside enforcement entity. While OCE is not as robust as originally contemplated, it plays a crucial role in ethics oversight. Last year, the office survived a counterproductive effort by nearly 100 members of Congress to significantly reduce its funding. This year's appropriations bill maintains OCE's funding at $1,548,000, which is the same level as last year. We believe that OCE should be strengthened, but at a minimum, its funding should be sustained at least at this level.

Publish CRS Reports Online

Congressional Research Service reports undergird the public's understanding of Congress, but CRS no longer directly releases the reports to the public. As a consequence, while many reports used by citizens, courts, and government employees are on the internet, they are often out-of-date, and a fair number are available only for a fee or not at all. By comparison, sister agencies like CBO and GAO regularly publish reports online. For more than a decade, organizations and members of Congress have urged that CRS reports be publicly available, and CRS concerns have been refuted by a former counsel to the House of Representatives. The reports are already digitized and available on Congress's intranet; it would take a trivial effort to publish them online.

During the markup of the 2012 Appropriations Bill, Rep. Leonard Lance introduced an amendment that would have required the Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate to maintain a website containing CRS Reports and Appropriation products while protecting confidential advice from CRS. Similar legislation has been introduced by Rep. Quigley. We hope that House Appropriators will move to make these reports more readily available to the public.

Release the Constitution Annotated Online

The Constitution Annotated (or CONAN) is a continuously-updated 100-year-old legal treatise that explains the Constitution as it has been interpreted by Supreme Court. Maintained by CRS and printed by GPO, a hard copy is published (and put online) only once a decade, with printed updates every two years. However, CONAN is updated frequently, with those updates available on Congress' internal website. In November 2010 (18 months ago), the Joint Committee on Printing directed that the continuously-updated version of CONAN be made available online as a searchable PDF, but it still is not. Many organizations have asked that the underlying document be published online in its original (XML) format, which is more user friendly than a PDF, and would take minimal effort to release.

This upcoming year, the Constitution Annotated will be up for its once-a-decade print edition. With at least 4,870 statutorily mandated copies, at an estimated cost of $226, the House and Senate will pay over $1.1 million for a document that will go out of date almost immediately. We suggest that some of these costs may be recouped by asking House offices if they wish to receive a print copy, as a continuously updated web version is already made available to all congressional offices. Regardless, we urge that the web version that is already made available to congressional offices also be made available to the American people in its web friendly format. While publishing the document as a PDF would be a small step forward, the best use of taxpayer dollars to maximize usability would be to publish it in XML, the format in which it is prepared.

Other Provisions

Sunlight support additional measures in the Legislative Branch Appropriations bill. Those provisions include:

The reinstatement of the Office of Technology Assessment, as proposed by Rep. Rush Holt last year. OTA provided Congress http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/taxonomy/term/Office-of-Technology-Assessment/ with the “means for securing competent, unbiased information concerning the physical, biological, economic, social, and political effects” of technology.

Inclusion of the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act, which would would gather together all reports to Congress from federal agencies in one place. It requires that they be published online by GPO in bulk, in open formats, and in a timely fashion, so that people can easily learn about the work of the federal government. The legislation would not require any additional appropriation, and would bring much needed transparency and coordination. It has already passed the Committee on Oversight and Government reform, was introduced in the Senate, and is awaiting action by the House.

Avoiding decreasing funding levels for the House of Representatives and certain legislative support agencies below the subcommittee proposal. Funding for the House has already diminished by at least 10% over the last two years. This raises the concern that congressional staff may become more susceptible to influence from lobbyists, and that support entities (like GPO, the Clerk, and the Library of Congress) that have transparency roles will be less able to fulfill their missions.

Publishing the House Expenditure Reports in a data-friendly format such as CSV. The quarterly reports contain all spending by the House of Representatives, and are currently published online as a PDF. Starting in 2009, then Speaker-Pelosi began publishing House Expenditure Reports online, which was a significant step forward in making them available, as they had only been published in giant books. Unfortunately, publishing columns of data in a PDF does not allow for the data to be analyzed. Simply put, we're only halfway to House spending transparency. The Sunlight Foundation goes through significant effort to scrape the data from the PDFs and put them into spreadsheets, but this should really be done by the House. It would increase accuracy and timeliness -- and so long as the House releases the information, it should do so in the most useful way possible.

When the House returns to work today, it will be a slightly leaner, slightly less technologically cutting-edge body than it was a year ago.

Last January, the House voted 410-13 to slash its operating budget by 5% (or $35 million). A Sunlight Foundation analysis of House disbursement data shows some immediate effects: a loss almost 1,000 salaried staff positions and major cutbacks in computers and office supplies.

House offices will have to do it all over again this year. The 2012 Legislative Branch Appropriations Act cuts funding for the House by another 6.4%. Since compensation accounts for more than half of all House expenditures, expect cuts in both staff and salaries.

These cuts are part of a longer-term decline in congressional staffing and personnel spending. Already, congressional salaries and benefits lag behind their private sector competitors, meaning that offices often have a hard time retaining and attracting top talent. Instead, they must rely increasingly on special interests to help them to do their work. As Congress continues to curtail its own capacity, there is good reason to expect even greater reliance on the 12,242 registered lobbyists in Washington.

To see how the budget cuts have affected House offices so far, we compared House disbursement data for the third quarters of 2009, 2010 and 2011. Here are some key changes since 2009:

• Overall, House offices have cut the number of salaried staff positions by 7.4%, shedding 948 between 2009 and 2011. (This includes both legislative and non-legislative positions.)
• Overall spending on total personnel compensation is down 1.7%. (In the private sector, total compensation has increased by 4.1% during this same period.)
• Offices have cut spending most steeply on office supplies (down 30.7%), equipment (down 46.4%, particularly computers, which are down 62.5%) and franked mail (down 25.8%).
• One area of growth, however, is in public relations. House offices added 32 new “Communications Director” positions between 2009 and 2011.

In 2011, offices did the relatively easy stuff: skimping on office supplies and new computers, and letting some staff go. That leaves the harder stuff: more serious cutting of salaries and staff.

According to a Congressional Management Foundation survey, “the consensus is that the cumulative two-year cut of 11.4% will require the large majority of offices to make painful cuts that will be felt by virtually all staff."

This will have consequences. With each cut to salary and staff, and each reduction in office resource budgets, it becomes that much more challenging for the House to do its job. As staff struggle with declining resources and scramble to work harder to compensate for lost positions, they become that much more dependent on outside lobbyists to help them.

Table 1. Changes in aggregate House expenditures (arranged by 2009 expenditure size)

STAFF REDUCTIONS IN FORCE

Breaking down the salaries by title, we can see where on the totem pole offices are cutting. Among the 20 unique position titles that account for the most combined expenses, “staff assistants” suffered most significant reduction, a loss of more than 200 positions, from 1,245 to 1,038 (down 16.6%). The number of “professional staff member” positions also declined at almost the same rate, from 205 to 176 between 2009 and 2011, down 14.1%. “Part Time Employees” are also down substantially, from 506 to 427 (down 15.6%).

On the side of growth, the fastest growing position in the House is “Communications Director.” Despite the cuts, the House actually added 32 new communications directors between third quarter of 2009 and third quarter of 2011, going from 232 to 264 positions (an increase of 13.8%). It is, however, worth noting that the number of press secretaries decreased at the same time by 12 (down 6.6%, from 183 to 171 positions), so some of the new communications directors may be press secretaries who got a new title.

Other big increases were in the position of “Scheduler” (up 12.6%, from 143 to 161 positions), “District Director” (up 8.2%, from 291 to 315 positions) and “Legislative Director” (up 7.4%, from 309 to 332 positions). Interestingly, the number of “Constituent Services Representatives” is up 6.8% (from 205 to 219) while the number of “Caseworkers” is down 5.5% (from 307 to 290).

Table 2. Changes in staffing force, by position (for 20 most expensive positions by total expenditures, arranged from biggest decline to biggest gain)

STAFF PAY

For those who managed to keep their jobs on the Hill, the average salary actually increased by 3.7% since 2009.

Chiefs of staff are doing quite well. Their average compensation rose 5.8%, from $120,276 to $127,280 a year (estimated from third quarter compensation), topped only by individuals in the somewhat ambiguous role of “special assistant,” who have seen their compensation rise by 8.5% during this period (from $42,464 a year to $46,084 a year).

Major positions where the average salary declined more than five percent are “Counsel” (down 5.8%), “Deputy District Director” (down 5.7%), and “Legislative Correspondent” (down 5.4%).

Where salaries declined, it may likely be as a result of new, less experienced staffers who will work for less replacing older, more experienced staffers who commanded more money.

Table 3. Changes in salary, by position (for 20 most expensive positions by total expenditures, arranged from biggest decline to biggest gain)

It is worth noting, however, that personnel benefits were up 5.8% between 2009 and 2011, from $64 million to $68 million. Most of the growth there, however, is in health insurance costs (up 12%) and retirement costs (up 4%). These are costs that congressional offices typically have less control over.

SUPPLIES AND EQUIPMENT

The biggest cuts came from spending on equipment (down 46.4%), supplies (down 30.3%) and franked mail (down 25.8%). The decrease in spending on franked mail is probably not cause for concern. Members are using more and more e-mail and social networking to reach out to constituents anyway.

More than half of the equipment budget goes to computers, and  this is where offices have really skimped. The computer budget is down 62.5% from 2009, from $14.1 million to $5.3 million. At a time when so much work is conducted electronically, increasingly out-of-date equipment will put staff at an ever-increasing disadvantage.

In the category of “supplies and materials,” the top three expenses are office supplies, medical supplies and publications and reference materials. Office supply budgets are down 20% (from $6.5 million to $5.3 million), publication and reference material budgets are down 25% (from $2.2 million to $1.7 million). Medical supplies are down slightly (from $2.8 million to $2.7 million).

Table 4. Changes in expenditures on equipment and supplies and materials, major categories

While these may be reasonable areas to cut, these reductions are not necessarily sustainable. At some point, House staffers are going to need new computers and some office supplies. Yet with more cuts still ahead, it’s unclear where the money will come from.

Most offices could weather a lean year on supplies and equipment. But as anybody who has worked on the Hill knows, offices are far from luxurious. In a world in which more and more activity is conducted electronically, to fall behind technologically puts congressional staff behind the curve. Furthermore, with another round of cuts coming, it’s going to be hard for the House to catch up.

Now House offices have to cut another 6.4%. That will likely mean fewer staff, less support, probably lower salaries and more outmoded technology. Congress will likely be forced to rely more on interns, and almost certainly more on lobbyists.

A NOTE ON THE DATA

Our data come from the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer of the U.S. House of Representatives. That means we are dependent on what the House reports. The biggest challenge in aggregating the data is that different House offices classify expenses in different ways. This is most obvious with job titles. Even when we standardized the title names by collapsing all synonymous abbreviations, we still wound up with 2,600 unique position titles over the three years. Though we are confident that our data captures the larger patterns, we must in good faith disclose that the underlying data are messy. At best, the data reveal general trends, and higher levels of confidence in it can only come when the House of Representatives makes a better effort with respect to how it normalizes and releases the data to the public. To dig through the data yourself, visit our House Expenditure Reports Database.