Sunlight Foundation

As ProPublica just pointed out on Twitter, the White House today released staff salaries, as they do each year.

Since 1995, the White House has been required to deliver a report to Congress listing the title and salary of every White House Office employee.

What’s unique about this year’s report is the data that accompanies it, helpfully presented in a sortable chart, which is itself downloadable.

Using Google Spreadsheets, I made the following chart, to see whether my first impression was correct: that many White House staffers were concentrated at either $30 – 40,000 per year, or around $160,000. Turns out my first impression was wrong, and that there’s a fairly even distribution.

This is a step in the right direction, where a simple explanation, accessible chart, and exposed data all combine to give a useful look at something that’s required to be made public.

(Note — please interpret this chart as a stab at making sense by an amateur, and should not represent Sunlight’s visualization work, which far, far exceeds my own.)