Are restrictions in pay for members of Congress and senators really going to happen? Reports this week have it that the House will agree to an increase in the debt limit, but they’re going to condition it on requiring the House and Senate to pass a budget. Paychecks would stop if Congress hasn’t done its budget work.

There’s been a long-running dispute about budgeting, with Republicans claiming that the Senate isn’t passing a budget plan while Senate Democrats claim there’s a budget plan in place.

Should House members’ and senators’ pay be docked if they don’t do their jobs? Should their automatic pay raise be withdrawn? (Believe it or not, current law gives Members of Congress and senators an automatic pay raise if they don’t pass a law rejecting more pay each year.)

Our petition on the subject is called: “No Automatic Pay Raise for Congress!” We’ll be adding some new bills to the petition’s list of related bills. A large number of bills to limit congressional pay have been introduced already in the new, 113th Congress.

Let’s take a look at the bills and what they do. You can vote and comment on each one, tell your friends about the good and bad ones—whatever you want to do! So long as you do something…

Stopping that Automatic Pay Increase, Once of for All Time

H.R. 54 prevents any pay increase happening for representatives in the 113th Congress, but the automatic pay increase would still exist in the law.

H.R. 134 would repeal the law that provides for that automatic pay increase.

H.R. 196 would also eliminate automatic pay adjustments for Members of Congress, full stop.

That’s Enough of Those Retirement Bennies

H.R. 52 would terminate further retirement coverage for Members of Congress, except for the right to participate in the Thrift Savings Plan, which is their version of a 401(k).

H.R. 151 is called the “Termination of Lifelong Pensions for Members of Congress Act.” It’s a sibling of H.R. 52.

H.R. 296 would allow Members of Congress to decline certain retirement benefits and contributions by the Federal Government. Might save a couple bucks that way.

Do Your Job or Don’t Get Paid

Then there are the bills that create incentives for good behavior. (The incentive of getting reelected seems not to be very strong—most everyone gets reelected anyway.)

H.R. 167 does a thing that might be clever. It denies Members of Congress their automatic pay increase “in the year following any fiscal year in which outlays of the United States exceeded receipts of the United States.” That means that their pay stays flat if they let the debt increase.

H.R. 308 would require the salaries of Members of Congress to be held in escrow if all regular appropriation bills for a fiscal year have not been enacted by the beginning of the fiscal year. (It can’t be cut straight away because of the 27th Amendment.

H.R. 310 would deny Members of Congress their pay after October 1 of any fiscal year in which Congress they have not approved a budget and passed the regular appropriations bills.

Added 1/24: S. 30 would prevent the 2013 automatic pay increase for “persons holding senior positions in the Federal Government” and it would prevent pay adjustments for Members of Congress in any year there is a budget deficit.

So, there you have it. If it’s your bag to cut Congress’ pay, more is happening on that front than ever.

It’s a very special time of year in one area of governing you don’t hear about much.

It’s the end of the fiscal year.

What’s so special about the end of the fiscal year?

It’s when the grant programs in the federal government have to move money out the door. If the funds aren’t spent by September 30th, next year’s funds might go away.

And there’s something else special happening right now. Members of Congress and senators are home campaigning, making their pitches for re-election.

Now, let’s do a little political math.

If agencies are spending a lot of grant money, and politicians are campaigning, that makes this a perfect time to link up grant-making and politics!

Just as happened during Republican administrations, bureaucrats in the Obama administration are making sure that Democratic politicians are getting a little “heads-up” about the money coming their way, so those politicians can take some credit for bringing home the bacon.

Now, this whole process of using grants for political gain is one of Washington’s open secrets. You won’t find proof of it, because grant-makers are very careful to keep these practices under the radar. But sometimes the radar beams catch on to things. Earlier this year, for example, the Heritage Foundation put out a report on the relationship between grant-making and votes in Congress.

“An examination of ‘administrative earmarks,’” the report said, “suggests the White House used its power to fund local projects as a means to ‘buy’ votes for major legislative efforts.” (Heritage is generally allied with Republicans. It’s very likely a Democrat-oriented group would find the same during Republican administrations.)

Outraged? Well, you should be. Or maybe you shouldn’t be, instead channeling your energy toward productive change.

For example, you could contact your legislators expressing support for the DATA Act. It’s a bill that would standardize government spending data, so that sites like ours could report better information to you. That means that it would be harder to play politics with grants—harder to play politics in general! (Have you signed our transparency petition yet? That would help, too.)

There are several versions of the DATA Act. It doesn’t really matter which one you ask your representatives to support. The most recent is S. 3600, introduced last week by Senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and Rob Portman (R-OH). H.R. 2146 (Darrel Issa (R-CA)) was the original—it has passed the House and gone to the Senate. Another version of the bill, also introduced Senator Warner, is S. 1222.

We’ve written about the DATA Act before. Here, and here’s a little primer on who it’s most important to contact.

So what are you waiting for? If you’re not getting one of those grants, you should be working to make sure you know who does.

When we prompted the WashingtonWatch.com community to sign the Whitehouse.gov petition on the TSA last week, we gave short shrift to many other petitions, so let’s give them some equal time. (The TSA petition expired without reaching the required 25,000 signatures mid-week last week. Toooo bad.)

There are plenty of others—right here on our site!

For example, there’s a petition called “SSI SAVERS Act & The Disabled Citizen.”

The petition page argues that asset limits in the federal Supplemental Security Income are too restrictive, requiring people to spend down their savings before they are eligible for SSI assistance. The SSI Savers Act of 2011 (H.R. 2103) would modify how resources and income are counted in the Supplemental Security Income program.

The petition links to the bill, which is something special that petitions do. When you create a petition, you can link your petition to the bills that affect it, and tell people what they should think about the bills. Then a link appears on the bill that will bring people to your petition! Get it?

One of our newest petitions calls for the government to Legalize Marijuana. That’s been a popular issue here before, and maybe it will be again.

Some current bills (that should probably be linked to the petition) include: H.R. 1983, the States’ Medical Marijuana Patient Protection Act; H.R. 2306, the Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act of 2011; and H.R. 6335, the States’ Medical Marijuana Property Rights Protection Act.

The largest petition—and the most active this past week—is called “Equal Medical Rights for the Fort McClellan Toxic Exposure Veterans.”

That petition helps illustrate a benefit we created for petition signers and petition administrators: comments.

On bills, commenting is wide open, but on petitions only people who have signed can comment. So a petition is a good place to organize your campaign to pass (or stop) a bill. (If anyone gets unruly, the petition’s administrator can remove comment privileges from that person in the petition’s administration page.)

Some of our favorite petitions are “We Want a Transparent and Orderly Congress” and “No Automatic Pay Raise for Congress!”

Why are they our favorites? We started ‘em!

We welcome your signature to them, and hope that over time we’ll see more attention to these issues.

A petition doesn’t do a lot, but it does signal to other people that something is important—including to our political leaders. So sign a petition! Doing something is better than doing nothing. And if you want to be a leader on an issue, create a petition. We’ve put information about how to do that in a post from a while back called “Announcing: Petitions!“

A petition entitled, “Equal Medical Rights for the Fort McClellan Toxic Exposure Veterans,” got its start here yesterday, and it already has over 75 signers.

Its purpose is to seek passage of a medical and disability bill for service veterans of Fort McClellan, Alabama. That’s H.R. 2052, The Fort McClellan Health Registry Act.

That bill has plenty of votes and comments, including a fair amount of “trolling” from one or more people who don’t want to see the bill succeed. We’re big on free speech around here, but you don’t have to listen, so we’ve created comment controls for logged-in users.

Here’s a benefit of petitioning: On petition pages, only petition signers can comment, and the petition creator can exclude commenters who try to be disruptive.

You can learn more about petitions. The Fort McClellan toxic exposure veterans’ petition has plenty of information about their side of the issue.

What did you expect when you gave control of huge piles of money to a small number of people, and you made it your practice to stop in and check on them just once every two years?

A pair of news items in the Washington Post last week illustrate what might be called “the corruption in government.” That’s not corruption in government—an infection of illegal behavior making its way into an otherwise clean system. The corruption in government is the idea that having political leaders take control of wealth is naturally going to cause abuse. Abuse that’s 100% legal, even.

For the first story, the Post did an investigation turning up where members of Congress have directed aid to their home districts in ways that have benefited themselves personally. The story features Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL), who directed funds to downtown Tuscaloosa, Alabama, directly adjacent to property he owns.

In addition, the Post looked into whether politicians’ relatives were benefiting from the aid they were sending home. Sure enough, members of Congress are sending federal dollars to organizations where their spouses and children work. Norm Dicks (D-WA) ranks atop this story, having delivered a $1.8 million earmark to the Washington state environmental agency where his son worked as executive director.

We’ve done so much work on earmarks here. It’s a shame to see them still having their corrosive effects.

What to do about all this?

Get mad? Waste of time and energy.

Campaign to get the baddies out of office? You could, but that’s a lot of work without much reward.

Around here, we think the way to fix this problem is to increase transparency. Make this kind of thing easier to figure out for more people and it will be harder for members of Congress to do themselves and their kin favors like this.

A report out of the Cato Institute last September (written by yours truly) discussed the things that Congress and the rest of the federal government to make information about their doings more available. It’s called “Publication Practices for Transparent Government.” Cato has also graded how well Congress publishes information (summary: poorly) and how well the government publishes information about budgeting, appropriating and spending (summary: also poorly).

Reading up on this will help you understand what transparency can do in this area, and we think it can do a lot.

Here on WashingtonWatch.com, we have a petition supporting transparency called “We Want an Orderly and Transparent Congress. Logged-in users can comment on the petition page, where we will begin organizing people when the time is right. The more people signed on to that petition, the better! Tell your friends! Once we reach critical mass, we’ll go to work on pressing Congress to change itself so that the corruption in government is at least minimized.

We’ve added H.R. 3835 to the list of bills that people should support if they have signed the “No Automatic Pay Raise for Congress!” petition.

The bill would extend the current limitation on the automatic pay-raise for Congress that is still in the law…

Here’s the current vote on H.R. 3835. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki article on the bill.

And here’s the current number of signers onto the petition.

The introduction of a new transparency bill in Congress (H.R. 3262) is a nice reminder of our petition favoring an orderly and transparent Congress.

That petition doesn’t have the signatures it needs yet. Have you signed?

When there are enough signatures, people will pay attention, and we’ll use the comment board on that page to organize some real change in Washington, D.C.

Do you appreciate this website? Like to find out what Congress is doing in our weekly email newsletter?

Would you like better information about Congress than you’re getting now? We’d certainly like to provide better to you.

But we need better information from Congress, and it’s up to you to make that happen. We need you to ask Congress to be more transparent.

This Friday morning (9/23/2011), yours truly will be speaking at a Capitol Hill briefing entitled: “Publication Practices for Transparent Government: Rating the Congress.” We’ll be releasing a paper on how government should publish data for transparency; a “model” of the legislative process as data; and a report card reflecting Congress’ current transparency record. (Disclosure: The event and the paper are both produced by my day-job employer, the Cato Institute. Cato and WashingtonWatch.com are not affiliated.)

This event, and transparency generally, are only important if your representatives in Congress think it’s important. And your representatives in Congress will only think it’s important if you tell them it’s important.

So here’s what you need to do:

1. Contact your member of Congress. (Find your representative in the House here, including phone numbers and links to their home pages. A list of senators is here.) You can submit an email, of course, but you’ll be taken more seriously if you call.

2. Ask for the staff member who works on government transparency. (They might have to figure out who that is.) Write down that person’s name—you’re going to talk to him or her again in the future.

3. Tell the person you speak with that you would like the Congress to be more transparent and that you would like him or her to attend or monitor the Cato Institute’s transparency event. (Again, info here. Plans are to stream it over the Internet, and you can watch too, at 9:00 am Eastern.) Ask to learn what your representatives’ plans are for making Congress more transparent, and that you would like a letter or a call describing and explaining those plans.

4. When you’ve contacted your representative and both your senators, take one more moment to send this blog post to friends and colleagues who might be interested in having a more transparent federal government.

We’ll let you know how it goes!—here on the blog, and also on the “We Want a Transparent and Orderly Congress” petition page.

If you do your part, we’ll get the attendance and interest we need. And ultimately you’ll get the information you need to keep watch over Washington, D.C.

Unbelievable. With Congress failing to reach a deal that raises the debt ceiling and brings federal spending under control, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance reported this past week that members of Congress receive pay and benefits far in excess of what average working Americans receive.

Along with their $174,000 per year salary, members of Congress also receive generous fringe benefits that brings total compensation to around $285,000 per year. With the average full-time employee in the United States earning $50,875 annually, Members of Congress make 3.4 times more than the average American. Only one country—Japan—pays legislators such high salaries relative to the earnings of the people.

How do salaries get so high?

Well, in the United States, at least, they get so high because the people have failed to oversee the government. Over decades, a large and opaque government has concealed its workings from the people. Maintaining a government that is well-run and responsive to the people has fallen off the priority list. Wealthy, entitled politicians do a singularly bad job of managing the sprawling government they’ve built, and they reward themselves handsomely for the job they do.

There are no quick fixes, and there’s no use in getting mad about it. The people that are going to bring this problem under control are playing the long game. That means learning about government and politics. It means devoting a little time each week to following what is going on. It means organizing with others and contacting representatives regularly with informed opinions.

Here at WashingtonWatch.com, you may notice that we don’t really focus on the day-to-day in budget battles that have been playing out in recent weeks. If you’ve arrived at your interest in public policy just in time to watch a disaster like the debt ceiling debate going on in Washington now, you’ve already lost. There’s nothing you can do about it but scream and cry. And that’s not doing anything about it.

We’ve tried to create some tools to help players of the long game win. We have a free weekly newsletter that highlights what’s going on in Congress every week. We report regularly on the annual spending bills that are moving through Congress right now (see here, here, and here). Communications with your representatives about these bills and what you think of them might change a vote. If your representative isn’t good at responding to your comments and questions, then you know you’re not being served well. You can communicate this to your friends and neighbors, and you can support a different candidate in the next election.

It’s hard to do a good job of even these things, given the lack of good information available. That’s why we started a petition seeking a transparent and orderly Congress. Such a thing will make it easier for the American people to follow along. With a little over 140 signers at this point, that’s not enough interest to start a movement. Nobody except your humble webmaster has commented on the petition. So it awaits the day when 1,000—or 10,000 people—have called for a well-run Congress.

If the subject of this blog post interests you, the petition to prevent Congress getting automatic pay raises has just 35 signers at this point. Maybe the American people don’t care. When 1,000 or more people have signed that one, a campaign to actually do something in this area may actually be worth doing.

For all the anger in the country, we don’t see a lot of the work being done to actually change things. Congress has got your attention. Congress has got you angry. But Congress hasn’t got you committed to playing the long game, the game that will actually change things. And that’s just where they want you to be.

S. 1411 would require the Public Printer to establish and maintain a website accessible to the public that allows the public to obtain electronic copies of all congressionally mandated reports in one place.

We’ve added it to the list of bills that signers to our transparency petition should support.

Thank you in advance for supporting this bill and for signing the petition.