As stated in the note from the Sunlight Foundation′s Board Chair, as of September 2020 the Sunlight Foundation is no longer active. This site is maintained as a static archive only.

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When It Comes to Pay, All Feds Aren’t Created Equal

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By Daniel Schuman and Alisha Green  It comes as little surprise to hill watchers that House staff are underpaid compared to their Senate equivalents, let alone executive branch and private sector staff, but we decided to dig a bit deeper. Just in time for the holidays (and those non-existent public sector bonuses) here's a comparison of key positions in the House, Senate, and executive branch. We admit that the data is a bit old, like the Ghost of the War on Christmas Past, but it's the best we can do with what’s available. House-Senate-Exec-pay-chart-updated The shaded areas in the bars for the executive branch staff show a range of potential pay.

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House Rules Changes: Sunlight’s Proposals for the 113th Congress

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Congress runs on rules. With the upcoming changeover from the 112th to the 113th Congress, the House of Representatives will adopt new regulations that innervate every aspect of legislative life. The last time it did this, in 2010, the House set the stage for greater openness and transparency in the lower chamber. At that time, Sunlight issued a series of recommendations, some of which were adopted. The House of Representatives made significant progress toward ensuring the people's house belongs to the people, from the new transparency portal docs.house.gov to expanded video coverage of House proceedings to retaining the Office of Congressional Ethics. In advance of the 113th Congress, we're issuing an updated set of transparency recommendations, each of which would mark a significant step towards increased transparency.

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Keeping Congress Competent: The Senate’s Brain Drain

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By Daniel Schuman and Alisha Green One of the foundations of democracy is a legislature that functions well. The ability to assess whether a legislature is functioning properly depends on the public's ability to see what it is doing. Observing what the U.S. Senate is doing, unfortunately, is a difficult task, and one that is unnecessarily hard. Have special interests become increasingly powerful in the Senate because the upper chamber has diminished its capacity to legislate? To evaluate this question, we gathered data about congressional staff numbers, pay, and retention from a number of difficult-to-access (and often non-public) sources. While the U.S. Senate is often seen as the wiser and more seasoned counterpart to the House, we believe it is suffering from the same affliction that has robbed the lower chamber of some of its ability to engage in reasoned decision making, placing it at the mercy of special interests. Over the past thirty years, the Senate weakened its institutional knowledge base and diminished its capacity to understand current events through a dramatic reduction of one of its most valuable resources: experienced staff.

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Testers wanted: Beta Website for US Code Now Online

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The House's Office of Law Revision Counsel, which we're written about before, has released a beta version of a new website that houses the US Code. They're asking for feedback. Here's the announcement. A little over a year ago, the Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the United States House of Representatives released beta version 1 of a new website for the Office and the United States Code. Beta version 2 is now being released for testing and feedback. It is available at http://uscodebeta.house.gov. You are invited to test version 2 and give us your comments about its features, content, and ease of use.

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Finland Experiments With Citizen-Introduced Legislation

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The online magazine Slate reports that Finland recently launched an open-source web platform called Open Ministry to allow citizens to propose legislation, which must be voted upon by Parliament if it receives the online attention of 50,000 citizens. "Each suggested law gets six months to gather traction. Whether the majority is in favor or not doesn’t matter, as anything with 50,000 total shares (likes or dislikes) moves on to the next, official round of voting. Two weeks ago, a proposal to ban the practice of farming animals for the fur trade became the first Open Ministry idea to pass the threshold for Parliament[ary] consideration. Out of the roughly 340 pitches currently on the site, the fur-trade idea is far and away the most popular, having collected more than 56,000 shares with the majority in favor of the ban."

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