Kansas’ members of Congress spent $800,000 to more than $1 million so far this year on running their offices, according to a new Web database.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ordered new transparency for House members’ expenditures, and Tuesday she kept her promise.

A new web site, http://disbursements.house.gov/, was put online revealing these expenditures to the public.

In the past, this information was available at the Legislative Resource Center in Washington, DC, or through a Federal Depository Library (such as the regional one at the University of Kansas), or by buying volumes from the Government Printing Office.

A 9.4 MB file can be downloaded from the new site with all the information that was published in a 3-volume set in the past. A separate PDF for each volume is also available.

This file contains all the disbursements by the Clerk of the U.S. House to pay the bills for members of the House for the period July 1, 2009 through Sept 30, 2009.

In the past, the printed volumes were published within 60 days of the end of a calendar quarter. The Chief Administrative Officer of the House has published these volumes on paper since 1964.  The figures in these volumes have not been independently audited.

The Kansas Watchdog extracted the information for the Kansas representatives in Congress and summarized their spending for the third quarter, and the year-to-date spending in the tables below. Links at the bottom are provided for easy access to the information for any individual member.

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Third Quarter Expenditures by Members of Congress from Kansas

District-Congressperson	1 Moran	2 Jenkins	3 Moore	4 Tiahrt
Franked Mail	2,804.72	47,750.22	7,846.81	19,107.10
Personnel Compensation	255,754.18	197,108.35	266,149.98	272,998.08
Personnel Benefits	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00
Travel	41,999.09	14,821.04	7,749.31	18,044.34
Rent, Communication, Utilities	20,454.97	18,221.87	24,627.09	23,243.20
Printing And Reproduction	1,458.19	16,577.50	1,298.88	16,963.32
Other Services	14,501.98	9,254.16	8,316.65	11,586.91
Supplies And Materials	14,818.67	2,411.88	18,066.90	3,716.95
Equipment	1,020.15	7,599.87	2,721.66	726.75
Official Expenses Of Members Totals:	352,811.95	313,744.89	336,777.28	366,386.65

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Year-to-Date Expenditures by Members of Congress from Kansas

District-Congressperson	1 Moran	2 Jenkins	3 Moore	4 Tiahrt
Franked Mail	7,495.36	60,264.56	21,477.23	32,219.52
Personnel Compensation	768,640.19	515,998.38	792,756.09	807,118.91
Personnel Benefits	553.61	325.24	2,763.15	936.35
Travel	100,441.56	40,097.49	21,461.11	47,959.12
Rent, Communication, Utilities	52,162.60	51,192.64	71,298.34	64,969.00
Printing And Reproduction	3,032.45	64,208.15	16,326.73	42,193.54
Other Services	38,143.14	39,022.32	25,182.63	31,905.28
Supplies And Materials	23,618.11	10,844.71	35,803.24	18,154.41
Equipment	4,055.45	14,815.99	8,030.39	3,455.84
Official Expenses Of Members Totals:	998,142.47	796,769.48	995,098.91	1,048,911.97

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Understanding all the differences requires a study of fiscal years, legislative years, and calendar years.  Such information can be found in the Glossary of Terms and the Frequency Asked Questions (FAQ) list about the Statement of Disbursements.

Without a lot of historical data, or ready access to similar information for all members of of the House, comparions among house members is still somewhat difficult.  We hope our readers can can post insightful comments from this data.

Somewhat surprisingly, each member of Congress has a slightly different budget allowance. The computation of this allowance can be found on p. 3329 of the newly released document.

The following table summarizes the allowances by members of Congress from Kansas.  At the high end Congressman Dennis Moore receives $25,482 more than Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins, who is at the low end.

Members’ Representational Allowance

Congressperson	District	Allowance
Moran, Jerry	KS 01	$1,457,691
Jenkins, Lynn	KS 02	$1,455,690
Moore, Dennis	KS 03	$1,481,172
Tiahrt, Todd	KS 04	$1,465,533

While Speaker Pelosi should be commended for putting this information online, the format of the material is far from optimal for analysis. The Sunlight Labs recently published an article about how PDFs are “Bad for Open Government”:

Here at the Sunlight Foundation, we spend a lot of time with Adobe’s products– mainly trying to reverse the damage that these technologies create when government discloses information. The PDF file format, for instance, isn’t particularly easily parsed. As ubiquitous as a PDF file is, often times they’re non-parsable by software, unfindable by search engines, and unreliable if text is extracted.

When will the U.S. Senate join the U.S. House in letting the public easily access their expenditure information?

Related

• Links to DocStoc copies of PDFs for each Kansas Congressperson with the expenditure report (View using “Full Screen” at DocStor or download the PDF):

1 Jerry Moran
2 Lynn Jenkins
3 Dennis Moore
4 Todd Tiahrt

• Statement of Disbursements: Glossary of terms
• FAQs for Statement of Disbursements
• Adobe is Bad for Open Government, Sunlight Labs, Oct 28, 2009. 
• Speaker Pelosi orders new transparency for House members’ expenditures, Kansas Meadowlark, June 3, 2009.
• Open Records at the Legislative Resource Center in DC, Kansas Meadowlark, May 11, 2009.