On August 11, 2009, Guam delegate Madeleine Z. Bordallo spent $6,090 on food and beverages by using taxpayer funds to host a party for members of Congress from the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee who were visiting her home district.

Watchdog, a news website, reports that, "it's just one facet of $145 million spent by House of Representative members revealed in the Statement and Disbursements. One small charge to taxpayers was $8.80 for laundry, and the largest single recipient was the U.S. Postal Service at almost $6 million."

A Guam Chamber of Commerce newsletter, and a U.S. Navy news report disclosed that Bordalo toured Guam on Aug. 10-12, 2009 with other members from the U.S. House, which includes committee chair Nick Rahal (D.-W.V.-3), Eni F.H. Fateomavaega (Delegate, American Samoa), Donna Christensen (Delegate, Virgin Islands), Henry Brown (R-S.C.), and Gregorio Hilili Sablan (Delegate, Northern Marian Islands).

According to Watchdog, "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-Ca.-8) ordered web publication last month and kept a pledge she made in June. These online documents make information available without visiting the Clerk of the House in Washington D.C., visiting a Federal Depository Library or buying the heavy documents from the Government Printing Office."

Publication of the 3,400 pages of documents had been the first step in shedding more light on the expenditures, yet the PDF file could not be directly studied with computer analysis tools.

The non-partisan, non-profit Washington D.C. organization, the Sunlight Foundation, published a searchable database after extracting the information from the PDF. The foundation gave raw data files, which could be downloaded and analyzed.

Nearly 100,000 records of $145 million in expenditures expose a vast array of purchases with taxpayer dollars.

To read the entire article from Watchdog, link here:

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