The U.S. Congress, as a whole, is making $2.95 every second. That's $177 a minute and more than $250,000 a day. And yes, it's still making that during the government shutdown it caused.
When Steve Nowicki learned that congresspeople — the government employees who, after failing to reach a budgetary compromise, triggered the shutdown — would still earn their salaries while more than 800,000 furloughed government workers were sent home without pay, he decided to present the facts in real time to the Internet via CongressStillGetsPaid.com.
Nowicki teamed up with two of his coworkers, Nick Miaritis and Alex Goldstein, to develop CongressStillGetsPaid, a website that calculates exactly how much Congress has been paid since the government shut down at midnight on Oct. 1, Nowicki told Mahsable. (While all three are employed by Saatchi & Saatchi, an advertising agency network, the website is not an official Saatchi project.)
The site took less than three hours to develop, and went live around 6:30 p.m. on Oct. 2. A week later, it had more than 70,000 views, Nowicki said.
On Tuesday, the eighth day of the shutdown, the ticker had reached $1.9 million. The calculator uses simple math, Nowicki explained. Each congressperson has an annual salary of at least $174,000. Some leadership may earn more, but the team used base salary to keep the calculations conservative.
Then, they multiplied the salary by 532 for the number of members — at full-strength, Congress has 535 members (minus the six non-voting delegates), but there are currently three open seats - and divided the lump sum of more than $92 million by the seconds that had passed since the shutdown started.
Congress is paid during the shutdown thanks to the 27th Amendment, which restricts it from changing its pay. Ratified in 1992, the amendment was intended to ensure Congress members didn't increase their salaries. The measure's side effect: Congress also cannot cut or freeze its pay (A more detailed explanation can be found here).
The team debated adding additional features to the simple site, Nowicki said. They thought about investigating how much furloughed workers were losing, but with so many variables, such as different levels of salary, they weren't sure if the extra calculations could be accurate.
"What we liked about this is it's simple, and it's purely fact-based," he said
Nowicki has seen passionate response from people of both parties people who visit the website, mostly "outrage that we continue to pay the very people who caused the problem," he said.
The creators say that since the calculator relies purely on facts, the site does not advocate for a specific outcome and is unbiased toward any party or platform
"At the end of the day, I think we're more successful because we're not trying to be provocative in any certain political direction," he said. "We're just being provocative, period."
Congress Still Gets Paid isn't the only website tracking funds during the shutdown. Shutdowncost.com calculates the cost of work and services the government is unable to perform without its furloughed employees.
As of Tuesday morning, the shutdown had cost more than $2 billion.
Image: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
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