"Transparency's Sidekick"

There's a great piece on Legistorm's founder, Jock Friedly in today's Washington Post. Legistorm is an online aggregator of congressional staff salaries. All this stuff is a matter of public record, mind you, it's just that it's published quarterly in a large dusty volume that a handful of people used to read. Friedly just made the public information more available:

"A lot of people have said there are no secrets in Washington -- I beg to differ," he said. "The stuff that's buried in documents in this town is incredible."

Legistorm is a longtime companion during my years of government employment, but I can't say it provided much comfort. There is something insidious about having your pay known to your colleagues, and it presents real challenges for setting compensation when everyone knows what everyone makes. But Congress in its wisdom has determined that this level of public scrutiny is a fair trade-off for the unique responsibility held by its members and their staffs. After all, power corrupts, or as Friedly puts it in the Post piece:

"Washington dirties people," he said. "They come to Capitol Hill wide-eyed and wanting to do the public good. Washington changes them."

FatCratz has a lot in common with Legistorm, most fundamentally in the shared non-partisan premise that the tiniest bits of power in conjunction with insufficient accountability has a corrupting influence. And in the conviction that there are many, many untold secrets in Washington, many of them hiding in plain view.

Our approach, however, is quite different, if complementary. While we welcome data-driven submissions that rely on the public record, FatCratz recognizes that data is most powerful in the context of a story. The story behind the data is compelling, and sticks with us.

Regarding congressional salaries, I know many hill staffers that are underpaid at $150,000. And a lot that are over-paid making $55,000. The interesting thing is what they're doing while they're making that money.