It only took 15 years, but senators must now electronically file their campaign finance reports directly to the Federal Elections Committee (FEC) as part of a provision tacked onto a larger appropriations bill that Trump signed on September 21.

The provision is only one sentence long in the Energy and Water, Legislative Branch, and Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Act, but it has accomplished what several previous attempts to transition from paper to electronic filings since the early 2000s could not.

For one, this new system means that information could become immediately available to the public once filed, as is the case with House of Representative and presidential candidates, which have electronically filed their disclosures directly to the FEC since 2001. The previous process took weeks and sometimes months to complete.

It also is estimated to save nearly a million dollars annually in taxpayer money by eliminating the old system, which relied on Senators submitting paper reports to the Secretary of the Senate, who would then process those thousands of paper reports before submitting them to the FEC, which would have to turn those […]

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