Taxpayers complaining about a do-nothing Congress should take note that free travel junkets by lawmakers and their staffs are on the rise. House members are doing something. Last year, they took more free trips financed by special interests than were taken in any other year since Jack Abramoff, the legendary Republican uber-lobbyist, was sentenced to prison in 2006 for corrupt schemes that gave congressional junketeering a bad name.

The privately paid vacations are legal and eminently defensible in the view of lawmakers who accept these trips in the name of fact finding. In an interesting twist that went unnoticed until The National Journal reported it this week, the House ethics committee had quietly ended the Watergate-era reform requiring that privately financed travels be made public in the personal financial statements lawmakers must file each year. After this was reported, the committee’s leaders on Thursday sheepishly agreed to reverse the decision.

Defenders of the change had earlier cited the need to “reduce duplicative paperwork” as the only motive, not evasion of disclosure of expensive flights and stays at four-star hotels. They argued that the disclosure could be found elsewhere, in a separate office of the House clerk.

Disclosed readily or not, junketeering has been on the increase. There were almost 1,900 trips taken in 2013 by Congress, staff aides and spouses last year at a cost of more than $6 million, paid from the pockets of private groups with legislative agendas, according to LegiStorm, the online database that tracks congressional lobbying. Some of the trip underwriters are in nonprofit organizations created as a way around post-Abramoff restrictions on lobbyists’ free spending on Congress.