Sunlight Foundation

The News Without Transparency: Military Defense Contractors, Lobbyists Support Mrs. McKeon

Military defense contractors and lobbyists are rushing to support the wife of Congressional House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon in her bid for California state assembly, according to a Salon article earlier this month.

The article reports that in the first few months of fundraising, Patricia McKeon was able to collect $19,200 from defense contractors or their lobbyists. This includes $3,000 from Lockheed Martin - a company currently locked in a battle to maintain funding for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet.  It also includes donations from lobbying firm Beau Boulter LLC, which lobbies on behalf of Proxy Aviations, and Bruce Leftwich, a DC-based government affairs specialist.

The California Secretary of State's website provides campaign finance data for all candidates running for public office, including Patricia McKeon's. The data can be searched by contributions received or made, expenditures made, late and high dollar contributions, and late independent expenditures. The contributions listed on Mrs. McKeon's disclosure page include:

  • $3,000 given to Mrs. McKeon's campaign on Oct. 28, 2011 from Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin.
  • $1,500 given to the campaign by the Arlington, VA lobby shop Beau Boulter on Dec. 29, 2011. The Center for Responsive Politics' lobbying firm look up tool shows that in 2011 Beau Boulter LLC earned over $1.5 million from lobbying on behalf of several companies from the sea and air transport and defense industries.
  • $500 donated to Mrs. McKeon on Nov. 15, 2011 from DC lobbyist Bruce Leftwich. A search using Sunlight's Influence Explorer indicates that in 2011-2012 Leftwich lobbied on veterans affairs and education issues along with the federal budget and appropriations. He also donated $2,000 to Mrs. McKeon's husband, Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA), in 2007-2008.
  • The campaign finance data provided by the Secretary of State does not indicate the industry associated with the donations (where applicable), so the $19,200 from the defense industry reported by Salon was likely the result of manual research into the names of employers on Mrs. McKeon's donation list. The National Institute on Money in State Politics and the Center for Responsive Politics both provide research tools that associate individuals and corporations with an industry.
The article also reports that Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA) has been the number one beneficiary of military industry campaign donations for 49 years. A search using Sunlight's Influence Explorer shows the following:
  • The top industries supporting Rep. McKeon financially across all years include Defense Aerospace, Misc Defense, Defense Electronics, Lobbyists, and General Contractors.
  • Rep. McKeon was the number one beneficiary of the Defense Aerospace industry in 2011-2012.
  • He was also the number one recipient for campaign contributions from Beau Boulter LLC in 2011-2012. The other top beneficiaries of the lobby shop during the 2011-2012 election cycle were also all Republican members of the House Armed Services Committee.

"The News Without Transparency" shows you what the news would look like without public access to information. Laws and regulations that force the government to make the data it has publicly available are absolutely vital, along with services that take that raw data and make it easy for reporters to write sentences like the ones we've redacted in the piece above. If you have an article you'd like us to put through the redaction machine, please send us an email at mbuck@sunlightfoundation.com.

Defense Conference Report Contains more than 2,000 Earmarks

A source on the Hill emails about the just released conference report for Defense Appropriations, saying that it "contains a massive number of earmarks – 2,049 to be exact." I'm going to round the figures somewhat (they were calculated on the fly) but total cost of the earmarks is $4.9 billion. Included are 24 new earmarks costing about $59 million that were “airdropped” into the conference report. "These earmarks were considered by neither the House nor the Senate and were immaculately conceived in the conference report," he says.

I've started skimming the report, and not everything is going up. According to EarmarkWatch, for example, Rep. James Moran had sponsored or co-sponsored 29 House Defense earmarks totalling $47,000,000 in the House bill; after conference, his name was still attached to 29 earmarks, but the amount budgeted for them will be $40 million.

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A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words

One of Sunlight's resident creative geniuses (yes, there are many of them) have taken all the Defense Appropriations Earmarks and made them available for viewing within Google Earth. (You can only view this using Google Earth which you can download from this page.) The regular Google Maps version is available here.

And as they say: a picture really is worth a 1,000 words. One of our policy wonks loved the flight simulator that allows you to fly over earmark locations. It allows you to fly your choice of two aircraft anywhere around the globe, with custom layers visible from the aircraft. The simulator is hidden within the latest version of the program, and takes some getting used to controlling, but is certainly an entertaining way to experience the Earth's actual geography-and to educate yourself politically at the same time.

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Earmarks Now a Danger to Troops

In what must be the most bizarre tale of earmarking I've ever heard the Oregonian is reporting that the T-shirts purchased for Marines through a $2 million earmark have been banned because they "can melt, causing severe burns." Rep. David Wu, the member who inserted the earmark is "horrified". This information has come out due to the excellent database set up by the Seattle Times.

Wu also is "horrified" that journalists and others would connect the earmarks he distributed to the campaign contributions he received. Now perhaps, if given a huge benefit of the doubt, Wu was attempting to get a contract to a district based business to do this kind of work. You know, the typical "help out the district" work that members of Congress are supposed to do. Even if we assume that, this example clearly shows that earmarking is not an efficient way of doling out important contracts. Maybe if there was some kind of competitive bidding or review process we wouldn't have Marines getting "severe burns" from their own melting clothes.

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