How Congress Spends Billions on Itself: About This Series

(July 21) -- The Sunlight Foundation is a nonpartisan nonprofit that uses technology to try to make government more transparent. One way it does that is to release (in cooperation with the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call) massive, searchable databases culled from the House of Representatives' expense reports. There's enough in the data dumps to keep oversight-obsessed numbers junkies busy for weeks.

Being oversight-obsessed numbers junkies, that's just what we have done.

Full Report
How Congress Spent Your $1 Billion
Food Tab: $604K on Bottled Water
Interns and Pages: $4.4 Million
News and Research: $1.2 Million
Travel: $1.4 Million a Month
Congress Is a PC: Just $22K on Apple
About This Series

The Sunlight Foundation's numbers come from the House's "Statement of Disbursements" -- essentially a giant list of all invoices generated by Congress every three months. The disbursements are mostly from the allowances that representatives receive to run offices in both D.C. and their home districts, but also include spending by committees, House leadership offices and similar organizations.

It used to be that this spending info could only be found in cumbersome, 3,000-plus-page books stored at federal depository libraries. Then late last year, thanks to a change put forth by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the House put the spending info online for the first time. (The Senate has said it will release a similar report starting in 2011.)

Following the Sunlight Foundation's latest download, its site now hosts a record of what Congress spent on itself for the last six months of 2009 and the first three months of 2010. It is that period that we scoured for our series.

One last important note: The Sunlight Foundation presents this data in multiple ways. For consistency's sake, we based our infographics on items listed under "House Disbursements Details." We can also tell you that these reports are very granular, making it possible to tell you, for instance, that noted fiscal hawk Rep. Paul Ryan's office spent $2,300 on janitorial services from Housekeeping By Jodi.

We also plan to break the databases down even further in coming weeks, because, whoa, they're a treasure trove!