We've put up a new database.

On Monday, the House published their Statements of Disbursements online for the first time, giving us a new digital view into how the US House spends public funds.

Today, the Sunlight Foundation is releasing a searchable database of members' expenditures, one dataset within the broader PDF released earlier this week.

Since the expenses were released in a PDF, they're difficult to search or analyze. Large datasets like this are best accessed as data, where sorting and grouping make patterns visible, and alternative visualizations possible.

That's why we've digitized some of the document's contents -- to make them more meaningful and accessible.

To understand what the numbers mean, we recommend consulting the materials presented on disbursements.house.gov, which has been lauded for its completeness.

We'll have much more to share on this data soon, from many different angles.

Update: Here's coverage from Sunlight's Real Time Investigations.

The US House is expected today to release the quarterly Statement of Disbursements online for the first time.

Sunlight has long called for electronic disclosure of the accounts of Members and other offices within the House, and last June Speaker Pelosi announced this new policy.  The US Senate quickly followed, announcing a new policy set to take effect in 2011.

We expect today to be the first time the public will be able to see how their representatives spend their office budgets online, adding a new layer of accountability and trust to the process of representation.  As Paul Blumenthal has detailed before, past decades have seen scandal around Members' expenditures, and the House of Commons in the United Kingdom was recently rocked by a similar scandal, when the public learned how Members of Parliament were spending official funds.

Today's release will mark a proactive stance from the US House, voluntarily creating more effective disclosure, and responding to new expectations that information be available online for it to be truly public. It will also be just a first step.  Since the disclosure will likely take the form of a big PDF, we're going to be hard at work making the information more accessible and meaningful, and we'll have updates here and on future posts explaining what we're up to.

We'll also be pushing, in the medium term, for this disclosure system to be strengthened.  Eventually, this information will be posted in a structured format, in real time, for the public to process and examine online.  Moving from huge books examined by very few people to PDFs posted publicly once a quarter is an enormous step forward.  Moving from those files to a real-time feed of structured data will be a similarly huge step.

For more information on what these reports may contain, the Committee on House Administration is a good place to start.

Update: The House will publish the expenditures here:

http://disbursements.house.gov/

...and the site says they'll go live around 1 PM.

Update 2: The site is up, and you can download the PDFs here:

http://disbursements.house.gov/

We'll be mirroring a copy soon.

Update 3: Eric Mill on the Sunlight Labs blog has some hosted PDFs, and discusses what we'll be working on...

Update 4: Looks like CongressDaily is trying to make this into something it's not.  Their brief coverage (sub only) says this:

The reports posted today reflect activity from July through September. Pelosi made the decision to post the reports after published stories this summer raised questions about how some House members are using their office allowances, which cannot be used for personal benefit. While most spending by lawmakers goes to staff salaries and office expenses, the reports documented how some has gone toward items such as luxury cars and high-end electronics.

The implication is clearly that this is the result of some scandal.  The Wall Street Journal coverage they're presumably referring to doesn't make that case at all:

A spokesman for the speaker said her action wasn't prompted by the articles, which found mostly routine spending on staff salaries, travel and office rent, as well as supplies, printing and mailing. The 2008 reports also showed taxpayer money spent on luxury car leases, big-screen TVs, pricey laptops known as "Toughbooks" and fresh-cut flower arrangements.

House and Senate lawmakers receive annual allowances of $1.3 million to $4.5 million to run their offices. All the expenditures reviewed by the Journal were legal, and the disclosures complied with congressional rules.

Sometimes the sexiest answer isn't the right one.

Update 5: RollCall has an interesting quote from a spokesman for the CAO:

Jeff Ventura, spokesman for House Chief Administrative Officer Dan Beard, said the House doesn’t have any plans to put the information into a more accessible and searchable form. But if there’s a “huge demand” in the future, he said, the chamber may reconsider.

“We’d be disrupting a process that currently exists,” he said, “and we’re very hesitant to mess with that.”

It'll be interesting to see whether that "huge demand" will come to exist.  In the coming weeks, we could see complete silence or scandals, apathy or impassioned debate over House expenditures.  I wonder if local media outlets will look into their own Members' expense records, now that they're more easily accessible?

The Senate is going to follow the House in posting their office expenditure reports online for the public to view. Yesterday, Sen. Tom Coburn offered an amendment to the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act requiring the Secretary of the Senate to post all expenditure reports online.

Coburn's amendment has elements that are both better and worse than the House's efforts to disclose office expenditures. The better is a lot better: reports will be posted in a searchable, itemized format. (The House plans to only post PDFs.) Unfortunately, we won't get to see those reports until the 2011. Coburn's amendment delays disclosure, likely for the Secretary of the Senate to build infrastructure for disclosure, until the start of the 112th Congress, or 2011. The House will begin disclosing later this year.

Below is the language of the amendment:

SEC. __X. REPORTING REQUIREMENT.

Section 105(a) of the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act 1965 (Public Law 88-454; 2 U.S.C. 104a) is amended--

(1) in the last sentence of paragraph (1), by striking shall'' and insertingmay''; and

(2) by adding at the end the following:

``(6) Beginning with the report covering the first full semiannual period of the 112th Congress, the Secretary of the Senate--

``(1) shall publicly post on-line on the website of the Senate each report in a searchable, itemized format as required under this section;

``(2) shall issue each report required under this section in electronic form; and

``(3) may issue each report required under this section in other forms at the discretion of the Secretary of the Senate.''.

Yesterday, Sen. John Ensign admitted to an affair with a campaign staffer who was also the wife of Ensign's administrative assistant. The couple ensnared in this torrid love triangle is Douglas Hampton, the administrative assistant, and Cynthia Hampton, an employee of Ensign's 2008 campaign and his Battle Born PAC. We know that Ensign revealed the affair because Douglas Hampton essentially blackmailed the senator. But, were the Hamptons receiving excessive pay from Ensign during the affair period? Politico looked at the official office payments to Douglas Hampton and found some numbers that look a bit... odd:

Douglas Hampton was paid about $101,000 in 2008 and $144,000 in 2007 as Ensign’s administrative assistant. But a financial disclosure form he filed in 2007 and 2008 – required for senior congressional staffers - showed only checking and savings account worth a maximum $30,000 combined.

A review of public records shows that the Hamptons in 2006 took out a $1.2 million mortgage on their Las Vegas home, at an interest rate of 8 percent.

Now, you might immediately think that $144,000 for an administrative assistant is an absurd amount, but administrative assistant is often synonymous with chief of staff on the Hill. However, if you look to the reporting period of 4/1/2008 to 5/1/08:

Hampton was paid approximately $20,000 over this one month period. At the same time, Ensign hired a chief of staff, John Lopez, ostensibly to replace Hampton. If we are to assume that Hampton's annual salary is around $144,000 -- the cap on staffer salaries is around $160,000 -- then the $20,000 for one month ($240,000 in a year) would be far higher than his normal rate of pay. Over the four months of 2008 Hampton received $101,000, far more than his rate of pay for all of 2007.

There are a few points to be made here:

1) Staff salary reporting is often not aligned with the dates shown. If you look at Legistorm, you will see dates aligned with amounts. This is often not accurate, or includes bonuses with attribution.

2) Hampton could have collected his vacation pay, sick leave and a bonus at his termination, which would make his salary appear inflated.

3) Hampton could have stayed on to train Lopez in his new job. This would explain the overlap of two employees holding the same job.

(More: While writing this post, Politico released another report showing that the son of Douglas and Cynthia Hampton was on the payroll of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) while Ensign headed the organization. Also, this post about whether the Hamptons were pushed to extort Ensign due to a subprime mortgage on their house is worth a look too.)

Since these questions are integral to whether Hampton was received extra pay while Ensign was sleeping with his wife, there are important disclosure problems that need to be addressed. They are:

• The Senate does not disclose their office expenditures online in any format at all. The House is planning on disclosing online in August. The Senate has no plans.
• We could use better staff salary expenditure information so that the pay doesn't look so confusing. Sorry Hill staffers, I know you hate it, but you work for the government.
• Why is it that Senate campaigns do not disclose expenditures? Yet another failure due to the lack of electronic filing in the Senate. Due to the lack of electronic filing we can't -- easily -- find the precise amounts paid to Cynthia Hampton through Ensign's campaign committee, only his PAC.