![\"congress\"](\"https:\/\/www.businesspundit.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/congress.jpg\" "\\"congress\\"")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
LegiStorm<\/a> is a sweet website that does wonders for government transparency.<\/strong> How? By making it easy to find congressional staffers’ salaries, bonuses, and other financial information. More from the Washington Post<\/a>:<\/p>\n All this stuff is public information, mind you. But it used to be a pain to find: Hike up to Capitol Hill, descend into the bowels of a House office building and thumb through books filled with tiny type.<\/p>\n The site offers a trove to keep the snoopiest snoop occupied for hours — bank accounts, investment portfolios, trust funds, even information about spouses. Wondering why so-and-so cruises to work in a Beemer? Aha, that’s why: His wife’s a big-shot partner at a law firm. It’s all there in the reports.<\/p>\n Often, the site is one of the first things that pops up in a Google search of a staffer. It’s enough to make many of them — especially the most senior and highest-paid — supremely cranky. There was such a clamor over LegiStorm that Mississippi Republican Rep. Roger Wicker — who is now a senator — made a failed attempt to pass a bill that would remove congressional salaries from publicly disclosed reports.<\/p>\n “Having your salary bandied about the world is an intrusion that doesn’t serve a public purpose,” Wicker, who now earns the standard $174,000 congressional salary, said, according to the Associated Press. <\/em><\/p>\n I looked up Colorado’s senators, who each make $174,000. That looked reasonable enough, but the earmarks were a little more frightening. $1,000,000 for the Contextual Arabic Blog and Slang Analysis Program, for example. <\/p>\n Anyone else find exotic salaries, earmarks, travel, or other spending by representatives?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" LegiStorm is a sweet website that does wonders for government transparency. How? By making it easy to find congressional staffers’ salaries, bonuses, and other financial information. More from the Washington Post: All this stuff is public information, mind you. But it used to be a pain to find: Hike up to Capitol Hill, descend into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":9720,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7845],"tags":[2477,2479],"class_list":{"0":"post-9719","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics","8":"tag-legistorm","9":"tag-legistorm-com"},"acf":[],"wps_subtitle":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businesspundit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businesspundit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businesspundit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businesspundit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businesspundit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9719"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.businesspundit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9719\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75054,"href":"https:\/\/www.businesspundit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9719\/revisions\/75054"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businesspundit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businesspundit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businesspundit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businesspundit.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}