NEWS:

• Former New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg (R) locked down a gig in the private sector. He will serve as CEO of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, a major Wall Street trade group. (The Hill)
• Florida released a new smart phone app to coincide with the current session of its legislature. The app, which has been downloaded nearly 3,500 times, allows users to find and share bill summaries, meeting notices, information about their legislators, and more. (Government Technology)
• Former Montana governor Brian Schweitzer (D) is rumored to be considering a Senate run, but he hasn't let that stop him from taking a new job in the mining industry. Schweitzer is going to chair the board of the Stillwater Mining Company. He was first elected to Stillwater's board only three weeks ago. (Washington Post)
• In an effort to investigate information leaks about North Korea the Justice Department delved deeply into the life of Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen. The DoJ obtained his telephone records, tracked his movements through State Department security badge records, obtained a search warrant for his personal email account. (Washington Post)
• An investigation of subsidies given by the DC government to property developments over the past decade shows that more than a third of the $1.7 billion in breaks doled out by the city went to ten developers that donated huge amounts of campaign cash during the period. (WAMU)
• Russia is stepping back from it's 2012 "letter of intent" to join the Open Government Partnership, instead saying that it will pursue open government "on its own terms". Russia's questionable record on corruption, press freedom, and more had made its interest in the OGP slightly quizzical to begin with. (Open Government Partnership)
• State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company is officially jumping into the political arena with a new PAC. While the company has a long history of giving from it's employees, it had previously been one of only nine companies in the Fortune 75 without a federal PAC.(Roll Call)

NEWS:

• Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) is reintroducing the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act this week. The legislation unanimously passed the House last year only to die in the Senate. (FCW)
• Bipartisan legislation has been introduced to require a court order for federal agencies before the seizure of phone records. (The Hill)
• Hearings started Friday as the House looks into why the IRS targeted certain groups for extra scrutiny. The hearing, in front of the House Ways and Means Committee, was the first of several scheduled on the topic. (Washington Post)

The controversy over the Internal Revenue Service's handling of applications for non-profit status from Tea Party groups has put a spotlight on a subject with which we at the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group are all too painfully familiar: The migraine-producing complexity of the nation's campaign finance system. To shed some light on the ongoing debate, we've decided to share what we know.

As often is the case with systems worthy of Rube Goldberg, it's easier to draw than to describe.

Earlier this week I wrote about a discrepancy between the data in FedBizOpps  and the data in USASpending.gov.  It was my understanding that all contracts awarded by the government (worth over $25,000) and their solicitations would be reported to FedBizOpps and that the number of the contracts awarded would be in the same neighborhood as the number of contracts that the government reports to USASpending.gov.

Instead, I discovered that in 2012 there were only 8,138 award notices and 18,546 solicitation notices in FedBizzOpps, while there were 178,375 contracts reported on in USASpending.gov. At the time of writing that post I was still waiting on a definitive response from the Office of Management and Budget or the General Services Administration.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.

Szelena Gray is the Executive Director of Rootstrikers, a new generation of activists founded by Lawrence Lessig to take a stand against the corrupting influence of money in politics. Found a good story about corruption? Use #Rootstrikers.

There are many ways to define smart consumerism — including being budget, GMO, organic, or fairtrade conscious. Why not add corruption to the list?

For companies whose products we buy every day, it's business as usual to spend millions of dollars to influence public elections. Yet most Americans don’t shop according to their views on money in politics, and if they would, might not know where to begin. On May 19th, Rootstrikers in fourteen cities across the country will aim to change that with a public education campaign about the money that flows into politics from some of our favorite brands.

Here's the plan: Rootstrikers will head to local consumer haunts and, with the help of a radical new app called BizVizz -- an iPhone app that provides people with data on corporate accountability including taxes, government subsidies and federal campaign contributions -- will shine a light on the connection between our shopping carts and congressional coffers.

BizVizz is powered by Sunlight’s Influence Explorer API with public data from Federal Election Commission filings, IRS filings and other government records.

NEWS:

• A new discussion draft of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act was released this week, and a bill is expected to follow soon. (FedScoop)
• Project Open Data is already fielding submissions ranging from fixing broken links to policy suggestions. (FedScoop)
• The U.S. CIO said there are anecdotal examples of the economic benefits of open data, but  there is no definite tally of open data's impact. (FCW)

The controversy over the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of Tea Party groups has put a spotlight on the non-profit groups that played such a prominent role in the 2012 campaign. The groups have become popular conduits for political funds because, unlike political action committees, they do not have to disclose donors to the Federal Election Commission.

While most of the groups whose applications the IRS slow-walked were relatively small givers, many groups that did land non-profit status gave big. Check out this page to see the "social welfare" non-profits who made political expenditures in the 2012 election cycle.

Because of the interest, the Sunlight Foundation has decided to update the Return on Investment feature we first published the day after the election. This analysis looks at more than 100,000 lines of itemized expenditures made by outside spending groups (super PACS as well as 501(c) non profits) and calculates the amount of money that went toward the desired result on Election Day. Our update accounts for updated filings and amendments at the Federal Election Commission and our own data cleanup.

For more details on each group listed below click on the “see ROI breakdown” button. You can sort by general election spending, candidate, support or oppose, and election result.

News that individuals at the IRS improperly targeted certain groups for scrutiny thrust DC’s “House Cleaners” into high gear. Indignant talking points have been drafted, hearings have been announced, and heads will roll. (Already, Acting IRS Commissioner Steve Miller was forced to hand in his resignation).

But what happens after the dust settles and is swept away? In terms of public policy about campaign finance transparency, there could be a silver lining, but only if the outrage is channeled into reform efforts. So far, hearings have been scheduled by Representatives Issa and Cummings of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee (who would do well not to lose sight of the “reform” mission embedded in the name of the committee) Representatives Camp and Levin of the House Ways and Means Committee, Senators Baucus and Hatch of the Senate Finance Committee, and by Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation’s Levin and McCain—the latter the “maverick” reformer who hasn’t put his name on a significant piece of reform legislation since the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. Each of those Members should acknowledge—during their hearings and beyond—that underlying the IRS actions is the real and dangerous problem of political organizations masquerading as social welfare organizations, impacting elections with hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money expenditures.