Senate Staff Salaries

I love it when we shine transparency on the legislative process but I have to admit even I was a bit uncomfortable with the new site Legistorm making Legislative Staff salaries public for the first time on the Internet. (hat tip to Hugh Hewitt who had the Legistorm founder on his show the other day)

To date, you could walk into the clerk's office and ask for the information but now you're a click away from the vital information that the Mail Clerk for Senator David Vitter rakes in about $26,000 a year.

Pithy stuff right? Of course, if you're the Mail Manager in Senator Burns office only pulling in $24,000 you may have a sit down with the Senator.

Talking to a few friends of mine on the Hill, this has been the pastime favorite for the last two weeks. Many staffers that I talked to laughed out loud when I mentioned it. As I understand it, there has been a bit of consternation over the info.

I pulled down a decent sample of the data (concentrating on Senators) and came up with some fun stuff.

Republicans make (on average) about $1000 less than Democrats. No big deal here, it actually might be a sample anomaly.

I'll be sampling the data over the next few days. For now here's a chart breaking down the salaries by position. The biggest surprise I had is how much they actually DO make. I really didn't expect the highest paid people to be bringing in that much money. On the whole, of course, most of the staffers do not make a lot of money (average is about $40,000/year).

Click on the chart below for a larger view: