Search daunting for trip reports

Friday, June 17, 2005 | 5:19 a.m.

SUN WASHINGTON BUREAU

WEEKEND EDITION

June 18-19, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Searching congressional trip reports has never been a convenient exercise, but it is getting easier.

Lawmakers are required to file trip reports with House and Senate clerks within 30 days for travel paid by private groups. Senate reports are now scanned into computer databases and electronic versions of the reports can be searched by trip dates and senator name.

But the House still keeps its trip reports filed in binders. There are thousands of pages of trip reports filed alphabetically by each House member's name for each year. The reports are kept in dozens of binders in a basement office of a House building adjacent to the Capitol, which can make searches daunting.

To find out how many lawmakers and their staffers went to Las Vegas, for example, one would have to thumb through every binder to check trip reports for each lawmaker.

Last year a class of Northwestern University graduate students, working with American Public Media's Marketplace and American RadioWorks, scoured the trip reports dating from Jan. 1, 2000, through June 2004, for a special report called "Power Trips: Congress Hits the Road."

PoliticalMoneyLine, a nonpartisan watchdog group, has created a user-friendly database of the trip report information of congressional members, and kept it up to date by poring through new trip reports every two weeks.

"You have to do it methodically, and you have to stay on top of it," group co-owner Kent Cooper said. "If you fall behind, it's a killer."

Trips for congressional staffers are not on Cooper's Web site. Staffers typically take more trips, dispatched by their bosses to gather information or represent them.