Big Picture

1/ There’s big gaps in the data story

2/ Even when there’s data, it may not tell the whole story

• Info about Congress isn’t entire reliable, even when it is official, e.g., the Congressional Record (“revise and extend”)
• Congress historically is a paper-based institution, driven by people with agendas, and it has inconsistent archival practices, e.g. GPO established in 1860, National Archives created in 1934
• Its institutions are built to solve a particular problem, not work for all time. Plus there’s a lot of turf wars, e.g., the former THOMAS.gov
• Analyses, even by experts, can be unreliable because of the source data or unexpected actions. See, e.g. CRS report on the number of staff in an office (done by counting phone numbers) or the various supplementals

3/ The people who dogfood the data, such as Josh Tauberer at GovTrack, Derek Willis formerly of ProPublica, and OpenSecrets, are often forced to build additional reliability and usability into the data than that available from official sources.

4/ This presentation is idiosyncratic and focuses on particular use cases. Major topics include:

• Federal spending information
• Oversight and accountability
• Legislation
• Congressional committees
• Information about Congress
• Money in politics and ethics
• Other interesting and important stuff

In advance of the start of the 118th Congress, the House of Representatives published resources on members of the House on the Clerk’s webpage on December 30, 2022. The resources include:

• An unofficial list of members organized by state, published as a PDF
• An unofficial member telephone directory, published as a PDF, which includes phone numbers and room numbers
• Unofficial member data, published as XML, which includes member names, bioguide IDs, room numbers, phone numbers, and state/district number

To download the information, go to the Clerk’s page > Member Information > look to the column on the far right entitled “Additional Resources.” I’ve included a screenshot below.