House Speaker Nancy Pelosi deserves praise for directing Dan Beard, the chief administrative officer of the House of Representatives, to begin posting online on a quarterly basis expense reports for each House member’s office account, as well as those of House committees and House leaders.
This is a significant move forward in the effort to bring greater transparency and thus accountability to Congress. You can read Pelosi’s letter to Beard here.I’ve not had much by way of praise to offer for the Speaker, but she deserves high praise for this decision. Of course, it would be better to have those accounts posted in real-time, as if they are checking accounts, but at least getting them online is a major step forward.
As things currently stand, the only way to get those reports is either to navigate to the one obscure office in the Capitol where they are kept as hard copies, or to buy them. To then get them online is a tremendously cumbersome and expensive proposition. Pelosi’s decision shortens this process and makes the reports available on a vastly wider basis.
The Examiner has frequently called on congressional leaders to put all of their records online and make them accessible to anybody with Internet access. We’re not there yet, but progress is being made.
Of course, the fact that the British Parliament is currently embroiled in a nasty scandal as a result of revelations in the media about extremely controversial expenditures by Members of Parliament probably has nothing to do with Pelosi’s decision. John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation, which has often joined with the Examiner in calls for greater transparency, has more details.
