Congressional reforms passed nearly 20 years ago were supposed to severely restrict the role of lobbyists in congressional trips. Reporters for the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland and at Boston University spent nine months examining privately funded travel by members of the U.S. House of Representatives and their staffs. The investigation showed the reforms aren’t working.
To conduct the analysis of privately financed travel, the Howard Center obtained year-by-year filings and metadata from the House. This information, which dated to 2017, was supplemented by earlier filings from data maintained by ProPublica that extended the data to 2012, and from sites such as archive.org. For verification purposes, the Howard Center also purchased data on congressional trips from LegiStorm, a provider of congressional information and data.
The metadata on trips provided by the House covered the basics of a trip: who traveled, the destination, the start and end of the trip, and the names of sponsors. Howard Center journalists standardized the names of destinations and sponsors, and confirmed the identity of the lawmakers who traveled (or who had staff travel), fixing several mistakes in the House data. The Howard Center further augmented that data by performing high-quality optical character recognition (OCR) on the PDF filings, using the extracted text to build a searchable database of trips and the contents of the filings.
Reporters for the Howard Center and investigative and data students at Boston University then analyzed the data looking for patterns. They produced six stories detailing the role of lobbyists in privately paid travel. The stories showed who benefited from the system by gaining access to lawmakers, their staffs and even their families.
This project was supported by generous donations from the Scripps Howard Fund and Park Foundation.
CREDITS:
University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism
Data: Aidan Hughes, Taylor Nichols, Paul Kiefer, Adrianna Navarro, Sasha Allen, Laura Charleston, Apurva Mahajan, Khushboo Rathore, Theo Rose, Victoria Stavish, Matthew Watson, Hannah Ziegler,
Reporters: Sasha Allen, Daranee Balachandar, Shifra Dayak, Andrea Duran, Aidan Hughes, Menna Ibrahim, Cait Kelley, Paul Kiefer, Adrianna Navarro, Taylor Nichols, Daryl Perry, April Quevedo, Stephanie Quinn, Caley Fox Shannon
Editors: Derek Willis, lecturer in data and computational journalism; Sean Mussenden, principal lecturer and Howard Center data editor; Deborah Nelson, professor of investigative reporting and Howard Center Director Kathy Best
Copy Editors: Josh Land, Kaitlyn Wilson
Design: Adam Marton
Boston University
Data: Phil Randazzo, Haiyi Bi, Akanksha Goyal, Irene Anastasiadis, Safiya Chagani, Suryatapa Chakraborty, Clara Cho, Ella Corrao, Julia Deal, Mingkun Gao, Daniel Gibbons, Gioia Guarino, Faith Imadon, Zichang Liu, Amber Tai, Laura Tickey, Xinyi Yang and Ziyue Zhu
Reporters: Phil Randazzo, Haiyi Bi, Akanksha Goyal, Irene Anastasiadis, Safiya Chagani, Suryatapa Chakraborty, Clara Cho, Ella Corrao, Julia Deal, Mingkun Gao, Daniel Gibbons, Gioia Guarino, Faith Imadon, Zichang Liu, Amber Tai, Laura Tickey, Xinyi Yang, Ziyue Zhu, Andrea Macho, Eliana Marcu, Maya Mitchell, Deidre Montague, Mackenzie Li, Amber Tai, Ella Willis, Sicheng Che, Danny Gibbons, Akanksha Goyal, Caitlin Reidy
Editors: Shannon Dooling, Associate Chair, Journalism Department and Associate Professor of the Practice, Investigative Journalism; Maggie Mulvihill, Associate Professor of the Practice, Computational Journalism