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Funder Materials — Congressional Wealth Project
Two artifacts: the short intro (send cold) and the deeper dive (send on reply). Bracketed [OWNER] items need your numbers/decisions before sending. 2026-07-18.

Quick intro (2–3 sentences, send as-is or trim)
Members of Congress must disclose their finances — but the disclosures are designed to be unreadable: vague dollar ranges, scanned handwriting, thousand-page brokerage attachments. The Congressional Wealth Project has turned every House disclosure since 2007 — including the paper-era archive no one else has digitized — into an audited, source-linked record of how much each member's wealth grew in office, and whether that growth can be explained by anything other than the office itself. We deliver the answer where it matters: to the voters of each member's own district.

Deeper dive (send on a warm reply)
The problem
The STOCK Act made congressional financial disclosure mandatory. It did not make it legible. Values are reported in ranges as wide as "$5,000,001 – $25,000,000." A decade of filings exists only as scans, some handwritten. The wealthiest filers routinely bury their holdings in hundreds of pages of attached brokerage statements. The practical effect: the public record of congressional self-enrichment exists, and almost no one can read it. The services that do parse this data (Quiver Quantitative, Capitol Trades) serve investors — "copy Congress's trades" — not voters, and their coverage begins where digital filing begins.

What we built
The complete record, machine-readable. 4,300+ House disclosures (2007–2024) across five generations of forms, parsed into ~170,000 asset records with values, ownership attribution (member / spouse / joint / dependent child), and page-level links back to the source PDFs. The 2007–2012 scanned archive is, to our knowledge, digitized nowhere else.
An accuracy system, not just a parser. Every extraction passes automated integrity gates; anything suspicious is flagged for human review rather than published; human-verified reports become permanent test data that every future change to our software must pass. Wealth figures always carry their disclosed ranges, and years still under review are publicly excluded from our calculations. We treat one debunked number as a project-level failure — the entire architecture exists to prevent it.
Radical cost efficiency. The engineering approach (deterministic parsing for machine-generated documents, benchmarked AI only for scans) means reprocessing the entire corpus costs tens of dollars, not tens of thousands. Marginal cost per district, per year, approaches zero.
What makes it different
Wealth-level, not trade-level. Others publish trade tickers. We compute each member's net-worth trajectory across their entire tenure — and, in our next phase, the excess of that growth over what markets explain, ownership patterns (wealth parked with spouses and dependents), an opacity score (filers who make auditing hard are themselves a signal), and overlap between holdings and committee jurisdiction.
Archival depth. Pre-2013 filings are where many careers' wealth stories begin. We have them; the trade-feed services don't.
District-first distribution. We are not building a national outrage list. The product is a District Report Card — "here is what your representative's disclosures show, with every claim linked to the government document it came from" — delivered through local landing pages, local newsrooms (pre-verified data journalism, free to them), and locally targeted amplification. National lists preach to the converted; district delivery reaches the only voters who can act on it.
Auditability as identity. Every published number links to a PDF page. Our methodology, its limits (exempt primary residences, categorical ranges, unknowable pre-office baselines), and our corrections policy are published alongside the findings.
Where the project stands
Data foundation complete and verified; final pre-publication audit in progress; analytics roadmap (excess growth, committee overlap, live filing alerts) approved and phased; distribution build next. [OWNER: add team/org status — e.g. fiscal sponsorship or 501(c)(3) status, who you are.]

What funding does
[OWNER: fill amounts.] Funding accelerates three things: (1) completion of the analytics layer and District Report Cards for all 435 districts; (2) the local distribution engine — landing pages, newsroom partnerships, and legally reviewed local amplification; (3) sustained operations: each new filing season flows through the system at near-zero marginal cost, so funding buys durable public infrastructure, not one-off reports.

Integrity commitments a funder should hold us to
Nonpartisan by construction (the same math runs on every member of every party); no publication of unverified data; ranges and limitations always disclosed; corrections policy public; election-law review before any paid targeted communication.

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