For the first time, the public will be able to examine online House of Representatives records to see what their Congress men and women have been spending with the potential of greatly increasing trust and accountability. -DB
November 30, 2009
By John Wonderlich
Sunlight has long called for electronic disclosure of the accounts of Members and other offices within the House, and last June Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced this new policy. The U.S. 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 U.S. House, voluntarily creating more effective disclosure, and responding to new expectations that information be available onlinefor 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 2: The site is up, and you can download the PDFs here:
http://disbursements.house.gov/
Copyright 2009 Sunlight Foundation