Sunlight Foundation

WASHINGTON, DC – This past Friday, both the U.S. House of Representatives and the White House delivered on their promise to release more information online. The House posted its quarterly Statement of Disbursements, which tracks how members of Congress use their official budget, and the Obama administration released a new set of White House visitor logs online. The Sunlight Foundation added both these data sets to previously existing databases.

The Sunlight Foundation maintains an online searchable database of congressional expenditures (http://sunlightfoundation.com/projects/expenditures/) that allows you to track how lawmakers spent their funds. The database gives you an opportunity to see how much House members are spending on staff salaries, official travel, administration and office supplies, while allowing you to compare those expenses with other members of Congress. Sunlight’s database of White House visitor logs (http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/WhiteHouseVisitors/) is a powerful tool that can cross-reference visitor logs with each visitor’s campaign contribution history, biographical information and other data sets in order to provide a broader context about who is visiting the White House and why.

"By posting these reports online, our government has increased the public's ability to hold elected officials accountable for the tax dollars they spend and the meetings they have," said Ellen Miller, executive director and co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation. "For truly effective disclosure to happen, though, Congress and the White House should be urged to provide these reports in a format that is machine-readable and structured."

The Sunlight Foundation continues to maintain these databases to make the information more valuable and accessible. For example, the House expenditure reports are posted online as a PDF (at http://disbursements.house.gov), a format which does not easily lend itself to be searched, sorted or otherwise analyzed.

The Sunlight Foundation is a non-partisan, non-profit that uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable. Visit SunlightFoundation.com to learn more about Sunlight’s projects, including Transparency Corps and Party Time.