Expenditures Database

[John Wonderlich]

We've just finished making a database out of part of the expenditures data:

http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/projects/2009/expenditures/

We've got a lot to share about this, here is Real Time:

http://realtime.sunlightprojects.org/2009/12/02/sunlight-puts-house-office-disbursements-in-database-form/

[Daniel Schuman]

I've had a chance to play with the data a little bit and came up with average salaries for (personal office) House staff. Take a look: 

http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/2009/12/02/whats-the-average-salary-of-house-staff/

There's a lot of interesting things we can do with this data.

Daniel

Daniel Schuman
Policy Counsel | Sunlight Foundation
Twitter: danielschuman | 202-713-5795

← Movement on Building an Online TARP Database

What’s The Average Salary of House Staff?

December 2nd, 2009 by Daniel Schuman · No Comments

Ever wonder how much congressional staff earn? It’s possible to look up individual staff on Legistorm, but what I’m interested in is whether staff compensation match the roles that staffers play, particularly when compared to private sector employment.

Fortunately, with the help of Sunlight Lab’s team, I’ve been able to examine the staff compensation question by playing with data from the recently released House of Representative’s Statement of Disbursements of the House, July 1, 2009 through September 30, 2009.

These numbers aren’t perfect.* But, they represent a good first approximation of House staffer salaries.

Title	Average Annual Salary	No. of Staff with this title
CHIEF OF STAFF	$120,051.55	399
DISTRICT DIRECTOR	$84,346.63	291
DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF	$84,121.66	85
LEGISLATIVE DIRECTOR	$72,137.79	306
DEPUTY DISTRICT DIRECTOR	$61,389.93	73
COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR	$58,359.05	207
SENIOR LEGISLATIVE ASSISTANT	$57,133.94	101
LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL	$51,814.67	53
EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT	$51,339.82	136
PRESS SECRETARY	$50,524.05	164
DISTRICT REPRESENTATIVE	$45,758.97	142
LEGISLATIVE ASSISTANT	$43,189.28	773
SCHEDULER	$41,344.56	140
CASEWORKER	$40,898.49	307
FIELD REPRESENTATIVE	$40,138.49	266
CONGRESSIONAL AIDE	$39,906.24	123
CONSTITUENT SERVICES REPRESENT	$38,872.48	145
LEGISLATIVE CORRESPONDENT	$31,951.03	347
STAFF ASSISTANT	$29,890.54	1072

Part of what struck me is how nearly all congressional staff pay is squeezed between $30-$60k annually. The people who are working on issues worth billions of dollars and overseeing all federal agencies earn less than entry level pay for an executive branch employee with a professional degree (or a master’s degree with one year’s experience).

It would be interesting to compare the pay for these positions against their private sector or executive branch equivalents, taking into account Washington D.C.’s higher-than-average cost of living. Keep in mind that most U.S. Representatives earn $174,000 annually.

* The numbers below represent educated guesses drawn from that data. My summary is error prone in many ways: I’ve multiplied quarterly earnings by 4 to obtain annual salaries, thereby omitting bonuses and including people who didn’t work the entire quarter; not everyone uses the same title to describe the same job; some people change jobs during the quarter; this does not include committee office staff; and I’ve omitted a number of job titles that I couldn’t easily classify or did not have at least 50 people with that title. Another possible problem is that I cannot disambiguate staff who live in the DC metropolitan area, and those who live elsewhere in the country.

This page turner is available in PDF format from the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer, and the underlying data on Members of Congress’s personal offices has been arduously pulled from that report and is available from Sunlight. (There still more information that needs to be scraped, such as from committees, non-legislative offices, etc.)

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Open House Project" group.
To post to this group, send email to openhous...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to openhouseproje...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/openhouseproject?hl=en.

[Mark Tapscott]

Great work, Daniel. I just linked to you on our Beltway Confidential.

--
Mark Tapscott
Editorial Page Editor
The Washington Examiner
1015 15th Street NW
Suite 500
Washington, D.C. 20007
202-459-4968 (Newsroom)
301-275-6645 (Cell)
mark.t...@gmail.com
mtap...@dcexaminer.com
http://www.dcexaminer.com/
Proprietor,
Tapscott's Copy Desk blog
http://www.dcexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/TapscottsCopyDesk/
"Tether the state in the morning and by noon it knows the full length of its tether." ---John Cotton (Paraphrased, actually)

[Josh Tauberer]

That's great. It's a double-edged sword for us, though. On the one hand
it's a relief to be able to get numbers out of the 3,300 pages, and
interesting numbers no less. I've always wondered about mean salaries
for the different jobs and it's nice to see this computed in an open way.

Of course the flip side is that it turned out the data was released in a
machine-processable format after all. By accident. Everyone got lucky,
and now we're going to have to be careful to not portray this as a
shining example of open government data, even though everyone got more
or less what they wanted (putting aside the issue of whether they are
reporting less now than they were in the past).

- Josh Tauberer
- CivicImpulse / GovTrack.us

http://razor.occams.info | www.govtrack.us | civicimpulse.com

"Members of both sides are reminded not to use guests of the
House as props."

On 12/02/2009 04:39 PM, Daniel Schuman wrote:
> I've had a chance to play with the data a little bit and came up with
> average salaries for (personal office) House staff. Take a look:
>
> http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/2009/12/02/whats-the-average-salary-of-house-staff/
>
> There's a lot of interesting things we can do with this data.
>
> Daniel
>
> Daniel Schuman
> Policy Counsel | Sunlight Foundation
> Twitter: danielschuman | 202-713-5795
>
> ← Movement on Building an Online TARP Database

> <http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/2009/12/02/movement-on-building-an-online-tarp-database/>

>
>
> What’s The Average Salary of House Staff?
>
>
> December 2nd, 2009 by Daniel Schuman · No Comments
>
> Ever wonder how much congressional staff earn? It’s possible to look up

> individual staff on Legistorm <http://www.legistorm.com/>, but what I’m

> interested in is whether staff compensation match the roles that
> staffers play, particularly when compared to private sector employment.
>
> Fortunately, with the help of Sunlight Lab’s team, I’ve been able to
> examine the staff compensation question by playing with data

> <http://blog.sunlightfoundation.com/2009/12/02/sunlight-creates-database-of-members-expenditures/> from

> Administrative Officer <http://disbursements.house.gov/>, and the

> underlying data on Members of Congress’s personal offices has been
> arduously pulled from that report and is available from Sunlight. (There
> still more information that needs to be scraped, such as from
> committees, non-legislative offices, etc.)
>
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 4:33 PM, John Wonderlich
> <johnwon...@gmail.com <mailto:johnwon...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> We've just finished making a database out of part of the
> expenditures data:
>
> http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/projects/2009/expenditures/
>
> We've got a lot to share about this, here is Real Time:
>
> http://realtime.sunlightprojects.org/2009/12/02/sunlight-puts-house-office-disbursements-in-database-form/
>
>
> --
>
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "Open House Project" group.
> To post to this group, send email to
> openhous...@googlegroups.com

> <mailto:openhous...@googlegroups.com>.

> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> openhouseproje...@googlegroups.com

> <mailto:openhouseproject%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com>.

[Josh Tauberer]

Continuing from Daniel's post, I compared staff salaries to the time in
office of their boss. For instance, would chiefs of staff make more
working for long-tenured congressmen?

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.

http://www.govtrack.us/blog/2009/12/04/congressional-staff-salary-analysis/

- Josh Tauberer
- CivicImpulse / GovTrack.us

http://razor.occams.info | www.govtrack.us | civicimpulse.com

"Members of both sides are reminded not to use guests of the
House as props."

[Josh Tauberer]

Oh and I meant to add-

While linking up the records from Sunlight's SOD database to my database
of members of congress, I found that the SOD report had three errors:

There are two congressmen named Mike Rogers and... I don't think you can
tell which is which in the SOD without knowing who's on their staff.

Rep. Frank Kratovil's name was misspelled Kravotil.

Del. Madeleine Bordallo's name was misspelled Madeline.

I point this out not to be picky, but because in order to analyze the
data one has to deal with each of these errors by hand to figure out
what is going on. This is to add to the list of reasons (i.e. what
Sunlight already had to go through) why it is a real PITA to analyze
data that isn't provided in a sensible format.

- Josh Tauberer
- CivicImpulse / GovTrack.us

http://razor.occams.info | www.govtrack.us | civicimpulse.com

"Members of both sides are reminded not to use guests of the
House as props."

[John Wonderlich]

Thanks Josh --

I'm told that we were able to fix the SOD's disambiguation errors, and
that the Socrata versions of the database will reflect the fix within
a few hours.