Pelosi Calls For Online Expenditure Docs
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has asked the chamber's Chief Administration Officer Dan Beard to enforce a new level of disclosure for official expenditures from the offices of House members and to post the documents online as soon as possible. She announced the expansion of House rules, which is part of her larger effort to increase transparency and accountability on Capitol Hill, on her blog Wednesday. Member's expenses are currently collected and published as bound paper volumes called the "Statements of Expenditures" but Congress has not made this public information available in an online format, the Sunlight Foundation's John Wonderlich said on his group's blog. The watchdog group called for online disclosure of the expense records in December 2008 and again last Wednesday, he pointed out.
Transparency watchdogs have argued that failing to make disbursement reports available online gives them an air of secrecy that is largely unwarranted given the uncontroversial content of the reports. As Sunlight advocates in its model Transparency in Government Act, a transparent 111th Congress will open up its books for review by the public, "and will find that this painless endeavor helps to begin to restore the public's trust in the accountability of the institution," Wonderlich said. By instructing the CAO to place the expenditures on the Internet, Pelosi is opening lawmakers' expenditures to unprecedented public scrutiny, he added. The move follows a recent scandal in the United Kingdom where Members of Parliament faced scrutiny for expensing personal items on the public dime. Read more here.
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