Comments on the House's Efforts to Further Modernize Its Publication of the Statements of Disbursements as Data

[DanielSchuman]

Thank you for the opportunity to provide comments on the House’s efforts to further modernize how it publishes Statement of Disbursements data. The House’s efforts over the last decade-and-a-half to move from publishing SOD information as books to PDFs to CSV to CSV’s accompanied by unique identifiers and metadata are incredibly welcome. In addition, I cannot express how much I appreciate your sharing your proposed improvements to the SOD data and inviting public feedback. Thank you.

In preparing these comments, I have reviewed the presentation at the Congressional Data Task Force Force as well as the sample data set published on the Innovation Hub website.

Please allow me to start off by acknowledging the proposed improvements to the SOD dataset. This includes adding the following new fields: fiscal or legislative year, organization code, program code, budget object class and budget object code, and vendor ID.

My comments below will address three issues: (1) improving online documentation, (2) vendor IDs for individuals receiving funding from the House, and (3) Providing more clarity on individual's titles and roles.

Improved documentation I am assuming that the updated statements of disbursements will be published online at the House’s Statement of Disbursements website. In doing so, I would suggest that the accompanying webpages — the FAQ, details, glossary, and transaction terms — be updated to include additional information to provide context to the data published in the SODs. This would include:

• A crosswalk for every organization code and the entity to which they refer, all published as structured data.
• A crosswalk between the budget object class and budget object code and the type of expenditure they refer to. (This can be met by including a link to where the crosswalk is canonically published by another government entity as structured data.)
• A crosswalk between the vendor IDs and all the entities to which they refer.

Vendor IDs for individuals receiving funding from the House I would like to address the issue of Vendor IDs for when the Vendor is an individual receiving funding from the House — in most cases, I think, an employee of the House. The draft SOD does not include a unique identifier for each individual. This creates several issues:

1. There are instances where multiple individuals listed in a single SOD have the same name, for example, John Smith. In those circumstances, it would be impossible using the Vendor Name field to authoritatively disambiguate between the different vendors/individuals. The absence of an unique identifier to disambiguate individuals could inadvertently lead to analytical errors that otherwise could be mitigated through the use of a unique identifier.

2. There may be instances where an individual is listed as a vendor with different vendor names. This can happen in the same SOD or across multiple SODs from different time periods. For example, a staffer could be listed as “John Smith” in the Q3 SOD and “John L. Smith” in the Q2 SOD. The use of a unique identifier would help reduce the likelihood of error because one would authoritatively know that the same individual is being identified in both places. Why does this matter? Here are three examples:

One use case for the SODs is for internal stakeholders as well as academics and congressional experts to track staff pay and retention over time. The inclusion of a unique ID would make it possible to authoritatively use material directly from the House to perform this analysis, which furthers understanding of how Congress operates. Such an analysis has supported efforts to understand and improve staff pay, in the past, for example. Currently, experts either try to disambiguate on their own or must pay a vendor for access to a complete dataset. In doing so, they are reliant on the accuracy of the vendor in making this disambiguation, which may or may not be error free. Regardless, doing so can be quite costly and inhibit efforts to understand Congress.

Another use case for the SODs is to build and update a congressional staff directory. The House now publishes a phonebook, which is well done and quite helpful. However, many entities use the SOD to track when staff join or leave the hill, where they work, and so on. The use of a unique ID would help facilitate the automation of tracking these changes, which are invaluable to stakeholders on and off the hill. It also may reduce the number of calls hill offices receive with requests to update staffer information.

A third use arises from when staff leave Capitol Hill. If they become lobbyists, they are required to avoid becoming a lobbyist for a period of time and then to fill out lobbying disclosure forms afterward. Having a public-facing ID could allow for the inclusion of a new field on the lobbying disclosure form to make it easier to track whether a person was previously employed in a covered position. The GAO has identified a high error rate currently with respect to completion of this field, thus creating an automatic process to confirm that an individual had previously worked on the hill through inclusion of their public-facing unique ID could reduce the error rate and make it easier by the Clerk’s office to assure the accuracy of this data.

Addressing a possible objection around the publication of unique IDs for individuals: The House most likely has unique identifiers for each individual staffer. However, that information may be PII or otherwise has good reasons to not be made publicly available. We are not asking for the internal ID to be made publicly available, but rather that a new unique ID for public use purposes be created and published. This would protect any confidential information keyed to a unique ID while also allowing for disambiguation of individuals.

Providing more clarity on individual's titles and roles I would like to raise an additional issue that may be harder to address. In the description field, the titles for individual staffers are included. When you review these titles, however, there is significant inconsistency. For example, looking at the sample data, one staffer is described as “professional staff communicato.” Another is described as “Director of Communications Sta.” A third one is “Deputy Staff Director and Chie.” Sometimes a director is spelled out as “director,” other times it is as “dir.” or “dir” without the period.

I understand that titles are often a way to provide compensation for staff in a form that is other than monetary, which is why some staff may have more elaborate titles. However, the kinds of roles that most political staff play, whether in personal, committee, or leadership offices, are generally limited to a handful of archetypes: staff assistant, legislative correspondent, legislative assistant, senior legislative assistant, chief of staff, communications director, digital director, staff director, deputy chief of staff, counsel, district director, and a handful of others. Two improvements would be helpful:

1. When a title is used, the full title should be spelled out and not abbreviated. This can help reduce the number of title variants that refer to the same thing: staff assistant, staff asst., etc.

2. Second, there would be value in generally indicating the role that a staffer has in an office to one of a dozen or so archetypes. This would make it easier to compare apples-to-apples with respect to pay, identify pay bands, and so one. In turn, doing so would facilitate the work of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion as well as efforts by outside stakeholders to understand congressional operations. It may require the inclusion of another field — and more work by each individual office in completing their payroll — but it would be intensely valuable.

Thank you for the opportunity to submit these comments. I hope that they are helpful and I would welcome the opportunity to discuss them further.

Daniel Schuman Demand Progress Education Fund

[llaplant]

Thank you, Daniel!

[rbarrett-house]

Daniel, These are very smart and thoughtful comments. My team and I are thrilled to see interest in our work. Please allow us a few weeks to compile answers and responses. I'm hopeful that there will be opportunities to implement at least some of your suggestions.

Thank you,

Bob Barrett Director, Enterprise Applications Office of the CAO

[BillWade-KnowWho]

Daniel: Your proposals for improvements to the Statements of Disbursements are very welcome and well-thought out. For the folks at KnowWho (a congressional online directory) your proposals for a VendorID and a StafferID would be tremendously helpful, especially a StafferID.

One other added idea would be a field designating Location, so that staffers can be assimilated with a capitol office or state/district office.

Please include me on future correspondence. And thanks again for these worthwhile proposals!

Bill Wade Vice President, Editorial Services wwade@quorum.us KnowWho, Inc. | A Quorum company 8198 Terminal Road, Suite 200 Lorton, VA 22079 703.619.1544 office 202.531-7133 cell