LegiStorm.Com Can Find Capitol Hill Staffers' Salaries and Earmarks

The founder of LegiStorm.com — a searchable database of Capitol Hill staff’s salaries — may want to run for the Hill.

A former Capitol Hill investigative reporter, Jock Friedly, just launched a website that allows users to look up the annual salaries of congressional staffers. The site also makes it simple to track a person’s trips, financial disclosures, the gifts they received and the explosive growth of legislative earmarks.

"Earmarks have been at the center of several congressional scandals in the past few years, and openness in the process can help combat potential abuses of the earmark system," said Friedly, founder and president of LegiStorm. "LegiStorm is proud to integrate earmarks data with our other data sets in order to bring deeper insight and increased transparency to congressional and executive spending."

The data helps users to make important connections between otherwise unconnected facts — such as between earmarks, which totaled $18.3 billion last year, and the corporate-sponsored travel or personal financial holdings of members of Congress and their staff.

LegiStorm’s new data were provided by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a group that tracks earmarks in detail. These "earmarks" are often directed back to the sponsoring congressman’s home district.

While you may call Friedly a real genius, all the information is open to the public. He’s just made it a lot easier for us, the taxpayers, who may be too far from Washington to trek to an office building inside the House and seek the folder with all the juicy details.


Source: wowowow.com