New LegBranch.com Resource: Committee Sheets

LegBranch.com Resource: Committee Fact Sheets

Who is the ranking member on the House Administration committee? What are the Senate Banking committee’s key issues and what is their yearly authorization? How many staff does the House Armed Services committee employ and what are their salaries?

Even the most knowledgeable of congressional followers often struggle with coming up with some of these answers, and some of these questions haven’t had available answers at all. LegBranch.com wants to fix that.

Using public information and LegiStorm’s private congressional staffer employment histories and salary data, LegBranch.com has developed a new resource that allows all of us who care about Congress to know more about its committees than ever before: Committee Fact Sheets.

For each and every House and Senate committee, these one-pagers provide:

• Background info including the committee’s jurisdiction, leadership, and major legislation;
• Quick stats on the number of subcommittees and party breakdown of committee members;
• Funding information including the committee’s authorization going back to the 104th Congress;
• Number of committee staff (majority, minority, shared), and the number of former lobbyists now serving as committee aides; Median salaries of committee staffers broken down by position; and
• Tenure lengths of committee staffers, including: tenure in their current position, tenure on the committee, and tenure serving in Congress.

Over the coming months we will release a fact sheet for each of the 20 standing House committees and 16 standing Senate committees. Each will offer quick and digestible information regarding each committee in Congress in an effort to investigate important questions of congressional capacity like, ‘How much do staffers on each committee make?’ And ‘How long have they served on the committee and in Congress?’

View the sheets online at LegBranch.com.

Finally, let us know what you think. Is the information helpful? What are we missing? What else would you like to know? Please submit any and all questions or comments regarding the data or methodologies to cburgat@rstreet.org or on Twitter @CaseyBurgat.