A New Congressional Staff Directory

Earlier this year, we rounded up some Duke databases which can help identify Congressional staff members, and asked the question: “Do any free Internet sources stack up to CQ and the Yellow Book?”

Last week, a new online resource entered the fray when the Sunlight Foundation, a government transparency organization, released a beta directory of all employees from the U.S. House of Representatives. Sunlight's House Staff Directory contains data from the third quarter of 2009 to present. The data can be searched by staff title, political party, quarter and/or state, and results can be downloaded to a spreadsheet.

The Sunlight Foundation explains the development of the directory in its blog post. The staff information is drawn from the House Clerk’s office and the Statement of Disbursements (a quarterly breakdown of House expenditures). The makers caution that some data may be up to six months out of date, due to the distribution schedules of their source material. The new directory also does not include salary information, which is provided by another free source called Legistorm.

Sunlight calls its new directory a “work in progress,” and invites comments and suggestions for improvement. Take a look at the new directory as well as the resources from our earlier blog post, and see for yourself how they compare.