Congressional Travel Explorer

Example searches: Kevin McCarthy, Ankara, Turkey or American Israel Education Foundation | About this project

About

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.

The Howard Center obtained year-by-year findings and metadata from the U.S. 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.

Data about House trips generated by the Clerk of the House’s office in some cases contained inconsistent or incorrect information about travelers, sponsors and destinations, and the Howard Center has corrected those details where it was able to positively identify them. It also standardized the names of sponsors and destinations to make it easier to calculate accurate totals. In some filings, organizations and individuals that directly contributed to covering the costs of a trip were included in the filing, but that is not the case for every trip. Where those records were present, the Howard Center included them as sponsors.

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

Web Application Design and Development: Apurva Mahajan, Hannah Ziegler, Victoria Stavish, Matthew Watson, Laura Charleston and Theo Rose.

Database Development: Aidan Hughes, Taylor Nichols, Paul Kiefer, Adrianna Navarro, Sasha Allen and Khushboo Rathore.

Editors: Derek Willis, lecturer in data and computational journalism, and Sean Mussenden, principal lecturer in data and computational journalism and Howard Center data editor.