The Center for Public Integrity

In the next few days, the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct is expected to recommend changes to the chamber's rules on privately sponsored travel, including measures that could strengthen disclosure requirements and close loopholes used by lobbyists.

However, the Center for Public Integrity has found that the current members of the committee are no strangers to taking privately funded trips.

More than half of that figure was spent on the lawmakers. The members took roughly 180 trips over the 5½-year study period, reporting expenses in excess of $550,000. Among the sponsors were corporations, trade groups and nonprofit organizations.From January 2000 through June 2005, the members — five Republicans and five Democrats — and their aides accepted about 400 such trips valued at nearly $1 million, according to a Center review of disclosure records.

The office of Rep. Howard L. Berman, D-Calif., the committee's ranking member, accepted about 80 trips worth more than $240,000 — the highest total among the 10 offices.

The Aspen Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit that hosts policy seminars attended by lawmakers from both parties, paid for 14 of his trips, spending more than $110,000. The total included a 2005 China trip to Shanghai and Beijing that cost more than $18,000, and a $14,000 trip to Beijing in 2002. Berman's wife, Janis, went on both trips.

Gene Smith, Berman's chief of staff, said that the bulk of the congressman's foreign travel can be attributed to his being a senior member on the House Committee on International Relations.

"He's an international relations specialist," Smith said. "Part of the nature of that is to travel abroad."

It's a cardinal rule in Congress: Lawmakers and their staffers may not take travel paid by registered lobbyists or lobbying firms. The intention is to keep professional influence-peddlers from gaining special access to lawmakers.

Filings for travel from January 2000 through June 2005 show that lawmakers and aides accepted at least 90 trips for which the original reported sponsors or co-sponsors match the names of firms registered with the Senate Office of Public Records to lobby the federal government. The total cost of the travel listed on the original forms was roughly $145,000.However, a review of travel disclosure forms by the Center for Public Integrity found that dozens of congressional travelers appear to have violated this ethics rule in recent years.

As of April 21, the Center found that about 20 percent of those forms had been amended to indicate that a different set of sponsors paid for the trips.

"After the Abramoff scandal, you would think that every member of Congress or staff who took a trip would go back and look at their forms to see if they also took a trip from a lobbyist," said Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. "[Not doing so] shows a real insensitivity to the implications of the rules and laws."

Ornstein was referring to trips lobbyist Jack Abramoff reportedly financed for former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, and Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio. DeLay, who traveled with Abramoff to Scotland in 2000, resigned from Congress on June 9. Ney, who traveled to Scotland with Abramoff in 2002, is under investigation by federal authorities for alleged favors he performed for Abramoff and his colleagues.

The Center's Power Trips project has sparked feedback and reaction. Below is a selection of the comments and questions.

June 12, 2006 – Reform groups including the Campaign Legal Center, Democracy 21, the League of Women Voters, Public Citizen and U.S. PIRG cited the Power Tripsproject in a letter to the House Ethics Committee complaining about the proposed new travel rules and calling for an end to abuses of privately sponsored travel. The letter said: "Our organizations strongly urge the House Ethics Committee not to establish a system of pre-approval for privately funded travel by Members, and in particular with the most powerful members of the House." Read the full letter on Democracy21.org.

June 12, 2006 – Power Trips has inspired a flurry of editorials about privately sponsored travel in Congress. Here is a partial list: The New York Times, The Washington Post,The Boston Herald, The Denver Post, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The New York Sun.

Seven times in the last nine years, the Faith and Politics Institute has taken a congressional contingent on what it calls a "civil rights pilgrimage" to Alabama.

The institute, a nonprofit organization with its headquarters on Capitol Hill, takes participants to Birmingham, Montgomery and Selma. Guided by Lewis, a central figure in the 1960s civil rights movement, members of Congress and their aides gain perspective by visiting museums and memorials, taking part in silent processions and attending interfaith services. Congressional travelers are required to pay part of their expenses."It's a place to learn, to study and to be inspired," said the leader of the event, Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga.

An examination of records by the Center for Public Integrity, however, has found that a significant number of lobbyists also have taken the tour — gaining access to lawmakers in the process.

A review of attendance records of the last Congressional Civil Rights Pilgrimage, held in March 2005, showed that about a dozen lobbyists representing tobacco, telecommunications, automobile, home mortgage and other companies went along — about one registered lobbyist for every three members of Congress signed up for the trip.

Representatives of the institute's major corporate donors are invited along on the tours. Wal-Mart, Pfizer, Altria and Freddie Mac are among those that have helped finance the trips.

"If you give $25,000, you get a seat on the bus," said Sara Fritz, executive director of the Faith and Politics Institute.

However, lobbyists don't know in advance which members of Congress will be present on the trips, according to Fritz.

"If this is the way they are seeking access," she said, "they are wasting their money."

Still, there are skeptics.

As chief of staff to then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, Susan Hirschmann spent months away from Capitol Hill, visiting exotic international locales while conferring with heads of state and staying at oceanside resorts — most of the time with her lobbyist husband in tow.

The travel wasn't cheap, but it cost her hardly a dime.

Before leaving the Texas Republican's office to join the lobbying firm of Williams & Jensen, Hirschmann accepted privately funded travel worth more than $85,000 from a host of corporations, associations and private interest groups, according to disclosure records for travel taken from January 2000 to June 2005 reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity, American Public Media and Northwestern University's Medill News Service.

Among congressional staffers, the only comparable total was the more than $87,000 in trips accepted by Brian Gaston, who worked for two Republicans, then-Rep. Dick Armey of Texas and later Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri, during the 5½-year period studied.

Gaston's total for airfare, lodging, meals and other expenses is tallied from his filings for 39 trips taken over five years — from early February 2000 to late February 2005.What makes Hirschmann's travel figures notable is not just cost, but the time frame.

Hirschmann's filings show that her $85,000 total was incurred on 18 trips taken from February 2000 to April 2002 — fewer than half the number of trips taken by Gaston, in less than half the time. (See Hirschmann's travel disclosure documents.)

And along the way, she also might have violated House ethics rules:

Among the top corporate sponsors of congressional trips is a little-known California defense contractor that far outspent its industry competitors on travel for more than five years — and that in 2005 landed promises of billions of dollars in federal business.

San Diego-based General Atomics largely targeted congressional staff members, spending roughly $660,000 on 86 trips for legislators, aides and their spouses from 2000 to mid-2005, according to an analysis of travel disclosure records by the Center for Public Integrity, American Public Media and Northwestern University's Medill News Service.

While on trips to Turkey in 2004 and Australia in 2005 — some valued at more than $25,000 — staffers attended meetings with officials of foreign governments being solicited to buy the company's unmanned spy plane, the Predator.

"[It's] useful and very helpful, in fact, when you go down and talk to the government officials to have congressional people go along and discuss the capabilities of [the plane] with them," said Tom Cassidy, chief executive officer of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, the company's aircraft-manufacturing subsidiary.

Dennis Thompson, a Harvard professor of public policy and founding director of the university's Center for Ethics, called the arrangement "a corruption of the system."

"There are legitimate reasons for members of Congress and staffers to travel," Thompson said, "but I find it almost impossible to find any justification of staffers participating in sales meetings."

According to a company spokesman, General Atomics has about 4,000 employees worldwide — small in comparison to the roughly 120,000 employees of Northrop Grumman Corp. and the 150,000 of Boeing. But political ties have been a key ingredient in General Atomics' success.

Members of Congress and their aides accept millions of dollars in privately sponsored travel each year. While most trips do not violate ethics rules, experts assert that some are used by sponsors to curry favor and to further the interests of corporations and others. These are some often-asked questions about such travel:

What constitutes a privately sponsored congressional trip?

This is a trip taken by a federal lawmaker or staffer that is not financed by the government or by the traveler. Examples of sponsors include corporations, trade associations, universities and nonprofit organizations.

Under what conditions may a member or staffer take such a trip?

Privately funded trips are supposed to be educational or investigative in nature, not subsidized vacations. A trip to Iraq or hurricane-damaged parts of Louisiana would clearly qualify, for example. Giving a speech also is an acceptable reason to take a trip, but, to quote House rules, travel "may not be longer than the time reasonably necessary to accomplish the trip's officially connected purpose."

Is any sort of privately sponsored trip forbidden by ethics rules?

No lawmaker or staffer may take a trip paid for by a registered lobbyist, lobbying firm or registered foreign agent.

What are some of the other rules?

No gift of $50 or more (in the form of entertainment or recreation, for example) may be accepted on a trip. No local meals, lodging or transportation — with "local" defined by the House as being within a 35-mile radius of Capitol Hill — are allowed.

Excluding travel time, House domestic trips may not exceed four days; in the Senate, the limit is three days. Both allow foreign trips of up to seven days, excluding travel time.

Lodging, meals and airfare may be accepted, but must be accounted for on a disclosure form due within 30 days of a trip.

Nine months of work, dozens of researchers, more than 26,000 documents and 7 million characters of data entry.

That's what it took to answer the question: Who is taking Congress for a ride?

Along the way, researchers from the Center for Public Integrity, American Public Media (producer of Marketplace) and Northwestern University's Medill News Service encountered all manners of misfiled, misreported and mystifying travel disclosures.

When a citizen, political action committee or lobbyist makes a contribution to an election fund, that information is reported to an independent federal agency, posted on the Internet and made available to reporters, researchers and the public.

But when the same people or groups pay for a "fact-finding mission," that information is put on paper forms, then filed in three-ring binders or input into a computer system, and made available only in the office buildings where the records are stored.

The House of Representatives' forms are kept in a sub-basement of the Cannon House Office Building, where the public copies were often hard to read, torn and misfiled. Researchers were told it was against House rules to digitally scan the documents — they had to make photocopies instead.

The Senate travel disclosure documents are stored in a computer system in the Hart Senate Office Building, and can be searched by the name of the traveler or the senator approving the travel. But those records are not available online. So researchers went to the building and printed them out.

Thus began an odyssey through the minutiae of congressional ethics rules, database software and company financial information.

Along the way, we discovered trips for which no sponsor was listed; trips paid for by the federal government (not included in the totals of this report); trips for which no cost was listed — or with a reported $0 value, despite the fact that such trips do not require disclosure.

Over a 5½-year period ending in 2005, members of Congress and their aides took at least 23,000 trips — valued at almost $50 million — financed by private sponsors, many of them corporations, trade associations and nonprofit groups with business on Capitol Hill.

Congressional travelers gave speeches in Scotland, attended meetings in Australia and toured nuclear facilities in Spain. They pondered welfare reform in Scottsdale, Ariz., and the future of Social Security at a Colorado ski resort, according to the forms.
A nine-month analysis of congressional disclosure forms for travel from January 2000 through June 2005 done by the Center for Public Integrity, American Public Media and Northwestern University's Medill News Service turned up thousands of costly excursions — at least 200 trips to Paris, 150 to Hawaii and 140 to Italy. While some of these trips might qualify as legitimate fact-finding missions, the purpose of others is less clear.

Some trips seem to have been little more than pricey vacations — often taken in the company of spouses or other relatives — wrapped around speeches or seminars.

In many instances, trip sponsors appeared to be buying access to elected officials or their advisers. Some — such as the Nuclear Energy Institute, Microsoft, Time Warner and The Walt Disney Co. — clearly have products to sell or programs to promote. The motives of others — the Congressional Institute or the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, for example — are less obvious.