The details of privately paid congressional travel for lawmakers and their staffers are finally available for wide public scrutiny, with a new study coming out at a time when some high-profile trips have highlighted abuses of the system.

For this first ever big picture we have to thank a partnership between the Washington bureau of the Medill News Service, run by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, the Center for Public Integrity and American Public Media.

There is a lot to be gleaned from the data, including the reality that private-sector sources underwrite many fact-finding trips and seminars at vacation destinations in France and Italy and that very few private organizations underwrite trips to conflict areas such as Sudan and Haiti.

Another fact of congressional life the data demonstrate is that private travel flows toward House and Senate leaders, committee chairmen and their staffers. That adds some heft to the ethical concern that these trips are used directly or indirectly to influence legislation and gain valuable access to the interests that write the checks.

Medill and the two other partners connected the dots by doing what House and Senate leaders refuse to do for themselves: take information out of the basement and off the shelves, compile it and put it together in an electronic database so that people can make some sense of it, for better or worse. The massive database covers privately funded congressional trips between Jan. 1, 2000, and June 30, 2005.

House members and staffers file reports that end up in a ringed binder in the Cannon basement. Senators submit trip reports to an office in Hart. Neither chamber requires trip documents to be scanned in electronically.

If you think I’m leading toward a manifesto against travel, I’m not. Lawmakers and their staffs in many instances can justify domestic and international travel. The issue here is who pays and if some trips are thinly disguised vacations that indirectly grant lobbyists special access. I’d prefer the taxpayers pay for legitimate business trips and if lawmakers want to bring spouses or another family member along, they should pay the extra expenses from their own pockets.

The new database shows that travel breaks down into roughly these categories: reimbursement from private sources for trips to give a speech, appear on a television show or participate in a seminar staged by a nonprofit organization that does not lobby Congress and, the most troublesome, so-called fact-finding tours that are junkets paid by entities with interests before Congress.

In the wake of the lobbying and ethics scandal triggered by GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff, these trips have been put under a spotlight. The House and Senate, however, declined to ban privately paid travel in the bills each chamber passed earlier this year. The House installed a moratorium until the ethics panel figures out a new policy. The panel, formally known as the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, is leaning toward pre-approving trips.

Who’s watching the ethics watchdogs? The Center for Public Integrity just dipped into its new database and revealed yesterday that between Jan. 1, 2000, and June 30, 2005, the five Republicans and five Democrats on the ethics panel and their staffers accepted about 400 trips, valued all told at about $1 million.

Sweet is the Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it