I mentioned last post that Sunlight Foundation extracted some statistics out of the House’s recently released electronic 3,300-page report on disbursements. Their statistics showed a wide range of salaries for the different types of staff jobs in Congress. I did some further analysis on whether staff salaries are correlated with the congressman’s tenure in office, with some surprising results.

The Sunlight team had to go through a bit of roundabout effort to get these statistics. As I wrote elsewhere, the House did not really do this in a way that supports analysis. Granted, they have a lot of procedures in place and getting out data in a good way isn’t alway trivial. But this is Congress and we hold them to a high standard. That being said, I took Sunlight’s work and massaged the data a bit more to get what I wanted.

The District Director position had a salary that started at $81k for freshman congressmen and went up $580 for each year the congressman was in office. The two other senior positions of Chief of Staff (mean $126k) and Legislative Director (mean $75k) didn’t appear to change with the congressman’s seniority. For the jobs that multiple people could fill, I didn’t divide it by person, so for these we can see the total spend on Legislative Assistants started at $76k for freshman congressmen and went up $880 for each year the congressmen has held office, and for Staff Assistants a total of $48k freshman + $2,500/year. (These all reached high statistical significance.). Like Chief of Staff, Legislative Correspondent (mean $42k) had no variation by time in office.

Also reported is the yearly expense on franked mail. This interestingly decreased by $1,300 per year in office. Similarly, “printing and reproduction” decreased by $2,000 per year in office.

I think it is interesting that the Chief of Staff salary is so stable. It might mean that congressmen make sure they are on an equal footing by all hiring from the same pool of experienced candidates, and also that chiefs of staffs don’t consider it a perk (i.e. willing to take a pay cut) or a detriment (i.e. wanting more pay) to work for new or older congressmen either. Not that we should take the numbers too seriously without more research. Elder congressmen get access to committee staff, for instance. That might change how they make use of their office staff. On the other hand, the data is very messy and there are a lot of outliers that I haven’t cleaned up.

This week the House posted for the first time an electronic version of their master expense report. The report details the pay of everyone employed by Congress, from the Members of Congress to their staff, and other staff in Congress.

The folks over at Sunlight Foundation have extracted some statistics out of the House’s 3,300-page report. We can now see average salaries for different types of staff. Chiefs of staff top off at an average approximate salary of $120,052, with legislative correspondents — the staff members that read constituent mail — coming in near the bottom at $31,951.

The fact that the House has posted this document online at all is a great step forward for transparency, and signals that House leadership (i.e. Speaker Pelosi) understands that a big part of government transparency is putting the raw numbers up online for anyone to read. This is an important example of how to do transparency through technology, though it is not a perfect case. I’ve written an analysis of this case this over on my personal blog.

A new site, Filibusted.us, sheds some new light into the filibustering process in the Senate. Actually it’s not filibustering so much as group action to obstruct progress. Filibusted.us was the well-deserved winner of Sunlight Foundation’s Apps for America contest and draws data from GovTrack.us to show which Members of Congress are obstructing progress. I’m going to take this opportunity to talk about the state of the filibuster and cloture vote, below the fold. [Update: Fixed link.] Read it all..

As a politically active citizen, you may have noticed that GovTrack seems to be missing the usual one-click Contact Your Congressperson tool, instead referring you from people pages here to the home pages of official websites at the House and Senate. Yesterday, I (Josh) attended a conference in D.C. on Communicating with Congress. (I was pretty sick yesterday, esp. by the end of the conference, and was probably fairly incoherent to those I talked to after…)

Two things that I learned stood out, and this goes to why I don’t provide such a tool here.

Twin Daggers dvd

Mighty Aphrodite trailer

First, congressional offices are ridiculously overloaded with communication with the public. 313 million emails came into Congress in 2006 (iirc), which if you do the math (because I forget if anyone gave the exact number) is in the ballpark of 300-2000 emails per office per day. And given the current office budgets allowing for just a few people (in the House) to be dedicated to dealing with communications like that, there is no way, as passionate as they are about it (which also became quite evidence both from the staffer panelists and those that were in the audience), for them to respond to all communications. As a result, what we see on the outside — web forms, sometimes CAPTCHAs, limiting communication to constituents, and other barriers, are a means for them to triage the bombardment of letters they get. If they can’t deal with it all, they prioritize the letters that the writer took the most effort to create — e.g. personally written letters. That’s a very reasonable technique to me. (Though perhaps they should pass a resolution to up their office budgets?)

The second thing was that, as panelist Alan Rosenblatt presented, the method of triage has unintended ramifications. He put the point quite well: Members of Congress rely on their staffers to do research and craft public statements, and in the same way, Americans rely on advocacy groups to do research and craft letters to politicians. There’s nothing wrong, he said, with sending a pre-written letter, and it shouldn’t be discounted as it is today. And as another panelist showed, less than 10% (he later said 20%+ as a guess, but the numbers on the slide indicated otherwise) of those who participate in a letter-writing campaign modify a pre-written letter.

• Silver Bullet divx

I got in under the wire with the last question of the day, which went effectively unanswered. I should have started with this: There seem to be three ways to deal with the problem of overloaded communications staffers (”LC”s?). One way is to increase the barriers to communication so they get fewer letters, eliminating the least important ones (as they see it). Another way is to streamline the process, which goes along the lines of what Rob Pierson suggested for a computerized, standardized (XML) letter submission format. But there is a third way, which is what I suggested, which is looking at other forms of communication entirely, to complement individual letter writing, that deal with more constituents at once. Clearly, to the extent that it makes any sense at all, dealing with communications that are sent collectively by citizens is more efficient than dealing with the same letter sent individually. There are many forms of many-to-one, aggregated communication, and I would sincerely like to know more about what Members think of those methods and whether the problems with those methods are technologically addressable.

Trapped dvdrip Charlie & Me Legends of the Fall movie download

Bulletproof movie full

How to Be a Sailor dvdrip Does it seem like Congress is getting less done than usual this year? Well, it’s true. Congress has enacted fewer bills in the last six months than in any first-six-months period after an election going back at least to 1993. I don’t have bill data going further back than that, so I don’t know just how “do-nothing” our Congress is. We’ve had 42 enacted bills so far this year, compared to the average of 94 for the similar time periods in the previous seven Congresses — so about half as much.

Gorillas in the Mist: The Story of Dian Fossey download

• Pufnstuf movie full

download From Dusk Till Dawn

Excluding bills that designate the names of post offices and other buildings and bills that recognize birthdays and such, 25 bills were passed this year compared to the average of 71 for the seven previous comparable time periods back to 1993 — about a third as much. 40% of bills passed this year were designations/recognitions, whereas the average previously was only 23%. (Small caveat- It’s possible that a decade ago the throw-away bills weren’t post office designations and recognitions but something else I haven’t thought to filter out, so these numbers may overestimate the change.)

Heavy Metal 2000 download download Godzillas Revenge movie

Now, granted, after the last major power shift in 1994, the productivity of Congress also dropped off, from 104 bills enacted at the start of 1993 to 77 at the start of 1995 (just after the Republicans took power), and then 56 two years later in 1997. But still the relevant comparison is 77 to 42, and that’s a big difference.

Legend download

(As another caveat, it’s possible the drop in productivity isn’t Congress’s fault. For instance, Bush might be more reluctant to sign bills than Clinton was, or you could say that the Iraq issue reasonably needed more time than whatever was the leading issue in 1994 (I wouldn’t know, I was 12).)

Lawrence Lessig, someone I admire greatly, and someone I would really love to meet one day, is a lawyer and professor that over the last ten years has advocated and fought for sane copyright laws in the public’s interest, in the face of the media industry’s constant push for extensions of copyright terms, etc. If you’re not familiar with the issue it might seem academic and theoretical, but it goes to very deep free-speech concerns. I actually got involved in politics, and made this site, in response to my curiosity about the issues that I learned Lessig was interested in.

Sleuth

So I just read Lessig’s latest blog post

describing how he wants to shift his focus from IP law to public corruption, by which I think he means the unbalanced control that commercial interests have over the content of the debates held by government officials (i.e. in Congress, etc.), and I’m so excited. Having Lessig, an unmatched public speaker and expositor (if that’s a word), working on these problems is going to be incredible.

download Parked dvd Sahara release

• Heavy Metal 2000 film Fifty Pills video
  
  The Fan hd

buy From Dusk Till Dawn

He writes:

• Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen movie

The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D ipod

“I don’t mean corruption in the simple sense of bribery. I mean “corruption” in the sense that the system is so queered by the influence of money that it can’t even get an issue as simple and clear as [copyright] term extension right. Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide. In the US, listening to money is the only way to secure reelection. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars.”

Double Dagger hd

Now, I don’t by any means mean to keep touting my own horn or anything, but as a matter of keeping readers up to date about news related to GovTrack, it happens that I keep having to point out where a bit of credit is due to GovTrack.

David Pogue of the New York Times writes a positive review of MAPLight.org’s new money-meets-votes interface for the U.S. Congress. (They have been doing California state data up till now.) Pogue writes:

“It’s a new Web site with a very simple mission: to correlate lawmakers’ voting records with the money they’ve accepted from special-interest groups . . . [N]obody has ever revealed the relationship between money given and votes cast to quite such a startling effect.”

The Hunting Party the movie

1408 download

• Four Brothers the movie
  Final Destination 3 move

MAPLight gets its voting records and legislation database from GovTrack. So when Pogue writes:

“On the other hand, it’s painstakingly non-partisan. And it uses very good data”

Fifty Pills dvd Sleepwalking trailer I’ll just pretend he knows MAPLight uses some data from GovTrack, and knows about GovTrack, and will take it as a compliment. (Actually he was referring to OpenSecrets.org.)

I like MAPLight, in principle. Unfortunately, I think their presentation is highly misleading, grossly misrepresenting the impact of money in votes, and enough so to trick Pogue into thinking that there was a big causal

relation, or even a noteworthy correlational relation implicated on the page he viewed. Economists and political scientists study these things carefully, and from what (little) I’ve read about it, it would seem that when carefully studied, the relationship between money and congressmen’s votes is fairly small, in that it is actually difficult to find and not something you can see from a simple bar graph, although indeed the relationship probably exists.

• Alien Raiders film

Slipstream rip

From Ellen Miller’s blog at Sunlight, a note about OpenMass:

Sleepwalking dvd

download The Sum of All Fears dvd

“We are delighted to point you to OpenMass Cinderella II: Dreams Come True move

For Your Consideration movie

— a new website that takes our OpenCongress.org open source framework and applies it to Massachusetts legislation, legislators and news about issues in the state. As they say, imitation is the highest form of flattery. Forty-nine more states to go.”

The Hunting Party dvdrip Memoirs of an Invisible Man movie

(I guess I get a second-level imitation effect?)

• download Legend Trip, The

Four Brothers dvdrip

Tango & Cash dvd

Planet of the Apes divx

It’s a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie dvdrip

Sleuth film

Yesterday OpenCongress.org A Nightmare on Elm Street film

launched It is basically a sister site to GovTrack, but with different parents (i.e. we’re not affiliated). Based on the data

• Daniel’s Daughter trailer

that GovTrack makes available for others to reuse, OpenCongress will be focusing on collaborative analysis of legislation. I think there’s room enough in the world for two sites like this, so it’s great to see another avenue for transparency in government.

Double Dagger dvdrip

• Spy Game dvd

Love in the Time of Cholera dvdrip

Blackbeard rip

Just posted a new figure on the statistics page The Stendhal Syndrome The Stepford Wives trailer

download Once Upon a Forest

Feel the Noise film

• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince movie

showing the increasing reelection rates of incumbents. Do they have a growing advantage over challengers or are we just growing more content with our representatives? Until 1900, incumbents were reelected just 60% of the time. By 1950, it was 80%; and these days it is around 90%.