Hundreds of members of Congress hold positions at private companies, which they’re allowed to do under federal law and House and Senate ethics rules, but this information is not released by Congress as searchable data. As part of a new report on COVID bailout data, grantees at Sludge combed all 535 members of Congress’ most recent annual disclosures and compiled positions held at private companies and nonprofits, resulting in the first publicly-searchable database of all the affiliations of members of Congress — private companies such as LLCs, investment partnerships, nonprofits, and more.
As part of their investigation, reporters Justin Glawe and Jeremy Borden created the first comprehensive dataset of the COVID bailout money that went to private companies and other affiliated groups of members of Congress. Sludge is making this one-of-a-kind database available to the public to promote transparency about the loans established by the CARES Act, which have been scrutinized from the beginning as mostly benefiting wealthy Americans.
You can read all of the investigation’s findings here.