The House moved forward with new rules on how lawmakers spend taxpayer dollars on auto mileage, air travel, office decoration and more.
Continue readingTravel in the shadows: House reports omit key spending details
For years, the U.S. House of Representatives has published fewer details about how members spent taxpayer dollars than the law specifies.
Continue readingUnraveling Perry’s air travel using FEC disclosures
Earlier this month the New York Times revealed that Texas Governor and Republican presidential nominee-hopeful Rick Perry often uses the private planes of businesspeople — some long-time donors — to travel the country for free for various political events and even lobbying.
The use of the plane is legal under Texas ethics guidelines but it obviously raised some questions. A Perry spokesman said the governor was trying to save tax dollars. After the stories, Perry disclosed to the Federal Elections Commission some new travel-related campaign expenses — eight of them totaling more than $227,000, all travel costs.
Under FEC guidelines, candidates have ...
House disbursement data for 2010 now online
We’ve released a cleaned up version of the House disbursements data that covers the first quarter of 2010, during which the House spent more than $339 million on salaries, expenses and equipment.
Last month we aggregated and analyzed all the data in the statement of disbursements, which the House started publishing online in a PDF format in December 2009, showing for the first time the private firms that do the most business with the House.
To make this data useful, the Sunlight Labs team had to parse the information in the PDF so it could be searched, sorted and ...
In six months, House offices spent $673 million on salaries, equipment, expenses
In the final month of fiscal year 2009, House committees and offices went on a shopping spree, spending more than $60 million left in their budgets before it disappeared. More than $12 million went towards purchasing computer hardware, which could include new laptops and desktops.
According to a Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group analysis of six months of congressional spending data released by the House Clerk's Office, House members and
various committee offices spent more than $673 million in the last half of 2009 on salaries for staff, travel and outside vendors, who help with everything from tracking constituent information ...
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