NEWS:

• As questions grow about why the U.S. Department of Justice secretly obtained two months of phone records from AP journalists, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said he was not the one to authorize the seizure. (The Hill)
• The SEC is considering whether publicly-traded corporations should have to disclose their political spending to shareholders. (The Hill)
• Senior executive, legislative, and judicial branch officials will have to fill out  personal finance reports by May 15. (Roll Call)
• Documents show it wasn't just staff in the IRS Cincinnati office who knew conservative groups were targeted for scrutiny -- details of the actions appear to have reached higher-ups in the agency by mid-2012. (Washington Post)

As part of our recent procurement initiative, I've been playing around with the data present in FedBizOpps, ( or FBO.gov) -- it’s the single point of entry for posting all government solicitations, award notices, and various other informational notices regarding government contracts. In short, all contracts awarded must be reported here. What is immediately striking is that the number of awards posted to FedBizOpps does not come even remotely close to the number of awards in USASpending.gov -- the database that tracks contract spending. FedBizOpps reports a mere 8,138 contracts awarded for 2012, while USASpending reports 178,375 contract awards for that same year.

Common sense tells us that the number of contracts in each database should match. The fact that they don’t is a mystery at the moment, but the problem could be due to broadly defined exceptions, or even poor reporting and oversight as we've seen in other cases involving government reporting. In order to see specifics in the data and run an analysis, I extracted the data into a postgresql database. The data source I used is an XML file on fbo.gov's FTP server, which seems to include data from the last 13 years.

The White House's new Open Data Policy has received many accolades, but its ability to be sustained long term will depend on support from the legislative branch. Fortunately, Congress has been working on these issues for the last several years.

NEWS:

• Responding to Friday's news that the IRS targeted conservative groups for more scrutiny, President Obama called for those responsible to be held accountable for the "outrageous" action. (Washington Post)
• House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi used the recent news about the IRS to make a point about her desire to overturn the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision and change the campaign finance system. (Roll Call)
• Obama's advocacy group Organizing for Action has so far, despite nearly $5 million in fundraising and ties to the White House, failed to make a significant mark on federal policy. (Washington Post)

Lost in the widening scandal over the IRS targeting of conservative political groups: The fact that most of them were not the big political players of 2012.

The IRS’s admission that it targeted groups with conservative sounding names for scrutiny will no doubt be held up by some as “proof” that the agency can’t be trusted with determining whether organizations claiming to be “social welfare” organizations are actually political organizations in disguise. In fact, just the opposite is true. The agency needs to apply clear and unequivocally neutral rules to its determinations about whether a group is in fact a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization, entitled to tax exempt status but not required to disclose its donors, or whether it is a political organization, also entitled to tax exempt status but not allowed to keep its donors secret. Using a shortcut, like whether a group had the word “tea party” or “patriot” in its name to aid in making that determination is dead wrong for an agency that must be scrupulously nonpartisan.

As many as 600 individuals appear to have exceeded the $117,000 that they were legally allowed to give directly to federal candidates, political parties and political committees in the last election cycle, records examined by the Sunlight Foundation suggest. But our most troubling finding may how difficult it is determine with legal certainty exactly how many campaign scofflaws there are, or how much over the limit they gave.

Like our former Sunlight colleagues, Paul Blumenthal and Aaron Bycoffe of the Huffington Post, we have been curious about the number of donors who appear to have exceeded campaign spending limits, in an era when the Supreme Court has made it possible for wealthy individuals to give in unlimited amounts via super PACs.

In addition to those who violated the overall limit for giving to federal campaigns, we identified as many as 1,478 individuals who may have given more than the legal limit of $70,800 to parties and committees and 507 who appear to have given more than the $46,200 legal aggregate limit to individual candidates.

NEWS:

• An audit shows the IRS gave more scrutiny to conservative groups or groups that criticized the government. The high-level decisions were made out of a Cincinnati field office. (Washington Post)
• Sheldon Adelson, who poured money into the 2012 elections, may be preparing to spend millions of dollars on the 2014 elections if his recent transfer of money from a super PAC to a non-profit is any indicator. (Roll Call)
• A user-friendly and restriction-free version of Maryland's code of Public Laws is available online and ready to be worked on by developers. (TechPresident)

The White House’s new Executive Order may be significantly different than the open data policies that have come before it on the federal level, but where does it stand in a global -- and local -- context?

Many folks have already jumped at the chance to compare this new US executive order and the new policies that accompany it to a similar public letter issued by UK Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010, but little attention has been paid to one of the new policy’s most substantial provisions: the creation of a public listing of agency data based on an internal audits of information holdings. As administrative as this provision might sound, the creation of this listing (and the accompanying scoping of what information isn’t yet public, but could be released) is part of the next evolution of open data policies (and something Sunlight has long called for as a best practice).

So does this policy put the U.S. on the leading edge?

As often happens, Washington’s big story of the moment--that the Internal Revenue Service targeted dark money groups that filed for nonprofit status if they had the words "tea party" or "patriot" in their monikers--misses the big point.

Of course the IRS should never be used for political purposes; it should apologize for giving an extra scrutiny to groups requesting non-profit status if they appeared to be Tea Party affiliates. Our question is: Why did they pick on the little guys when they’ve got so many larger, more legitimate targets for scrutiny?