Is Congress a Family Business?

Welcome to the Congressional Family Business Project.
This Sunlight Labs project has two goals. First, we want to find out how many members of the House of Representatives hire their spouses to work for their campaigns—paying them a salary from campaign contributions. (We’ll add a version for tracking the Senate soon.) Second, we want to begin developing tools that allow Citizen Journalists to record the results of their research, preserving the connections they find in unrelated collections of data.

So far, Citizen Muckrakers have investigated 22 members of Congress, and tentatively found 3 spouses who were paid by a member's campaign committee-totaling some $28,764 since January 1, 2005.

This is an experiment in distributed research.
It should take you about three minutes to complete the six easy steps and investigate a single member of the House of Representatives. To join in this effort, select a state below and then choose a member of Congress whose "Family Business" you would like to investigate.