In addition to an analysis of who gets paid what, the news reports highlighted the fact that the reports are now provided digitally. These staff salary reports are valuable oversight tools, but they do not include information such as assets, gifts, or travel payment. For top level executive branch staff, that information is available in the staff personal financial disclosures, which are available upon request through an online portal created by the Obama Administration. While lower level staff do submit reports as well, these are not publicly available.

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"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.

Today at 4pm, the White House will host an online chat on how to improve the online experience with Federal websites. Although the event is being framed as a way to cut wasteful websites, it presents an opportunity to give useful feedback on what the government should be doing better online. The right people will be on the other end of the line: White House Director of Digital Strategy Macon Phillips, Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, and Director of the GSA’s Center for Excellence in Digital Government Sheila Campbell.

There are some questions that we'd like answered:

• Why isn't more government data being published online automatically?
• Why aren't there more APIs?
• Why isn't more data available in bulk?
• What's being done to improve the quality of information published online, particularly with datasets?
• Why do so many government websites look like they were designed in the mid-90s, and what's being done to improve the user experience?
• What's next for the Open Government Directive?
• Where's all that lobbying and ethics information the president promised would be online?
• If this effort is about cutting websites, what's being done to make sure that public information isn't taken offline?

You can ask your questions by filling out a form on WhiteHouse.gov, tweeting with the #dotgov hashtag, or going to the WH facebook page.

You can watch the chat at WhiteHouse.gov or using the WH facebook app at 4pm.

Update: Video from the chat is now available here.

Today, the White House announced that Vivek Kundra, the country's first federal Chief Information Officer, is leaving later this summer to serve as a joint fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. We're sad to see him go and urge President Obama to choose a successor who will carry out Vivek's vision of using the Internet to create a more transparent government.

Perhaps Vivek's biggest accomplishment was to strengthen OMB's role as a publisher of government data. While OMB is still largely unwilling to force agencies to share more information, Vivek built Data.gov and the IT Dashboard as tools to aggressively pursue transparency that affects how the government works.

Unfortunately, most of the work he started is also at risk of ending abruptly. With the electronic government fund being cut, and Congress hesitant to codify important transparency requirements, we risk seeing Vivek's successes become temporary gains. That's why we're hoping the White House chooses a successor for his position who shares his belief that technology can be used to change government for the better, by making it more transparent and accountable.

It's been a busy day for transparency initiatives. This morning President Obama issued an executive order which will create an 11-member board led by Vice President Biden to oversee the reporting of all federal spending data. It is modeled on the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and similar in aims to a board proposed in the DATA Act of 2011, also introduced this morning.

We'll have more on this from our policy experts later, but for now you can read the executive order below.

Executive Order--Delivering an Efficient, Effective, And Accountable Government

This morning, Rep. Darrell Issa introduced a major transparency bill that would transform how we track federal spending and identify waste, fraud, and abuse. The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2011 would establish an independent body to track all federal spending on a single website and require the the use of consistent government-wide data standards.

The DATA Act would build upon the successes of USASpending.gov and the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board -- the independent body that reports upon recovery spending -- by creating a board responsible for publishing and monitoring all federal spending, to be known as the Federal Accountability and Spending Transparency Board. The FAST Board would oversee a successor website to USASpending.gov, which currently tracks all federal spending, but contains nearly $1.3 trillion in spending discrepancies that we identified as part of our Clearspending project.

While the creation of the FAST Board will garner the lion’s share of attention, the effort to create government-wide financial data reporting standards should not be overlooked. It will have a tremendous effect on public participation and oversight by empowering the American people to look at the data themselves. Indeed, Sunlight supports legislation, the Public Online Information Act, that promotes the creation of government-wide data standards and sets up an entity with similar responsibilities.

The White House is at least partially in agreement with this new transparency effort. This morning’s Washington Post reported that President Obama will sign an executive order today that will put Vice President Biden in charge of an 11-member oversight board -- very similar to the RAT Board -- to address federal agency waste and fraud. We won’t know until the EO is released whether the president will seek to modernize agency reporting methods by improving data standards as well. UPDATE: here's the EO.

Our executive director Ellen Miller will be testifying tomorrow on federal financial transparency before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which Rep. Issa chairs. While we are still looking at the details of the DATA Act he introduced today, its broad outlines make a lot of sense. Agencies need to be motivated to fix their reporting systems and follow common reporting methods. And there's new funding to support this particular government transparency effort, an ongoing issue that I wrote about here as part of the #savethedata campaign. There’s a lot more to come.

Here’s the legislation.

The DATA Act

We found out yesterday that the White House is considering issuing an Executive Order in response to last year's Citizens United decision.

Presidential action would be an appropriate response to the huge gaps in public disclosure revealed by the Citizens United decision, and the Senate's subsequent blockage of the DISCLOSE Act response.

If the White House is going to pursue remedies through an Executive Order, though, the public should be included in that process as well. Campaign finance disclosure should be designed to serve the public, so some public scrutiny and discussion of any CU EO should precede its issuance. (Yesterday's release is insufficient.)

Sunlight is calling for at least 72 hours for the public to examine and review any EO in response to CU.

It's likely that the opposition to this EO will paint it as motivated by partisanship and not transparency, and posting the draft online would demonstrate some good faith in preparing an executive response.

Sunlight certainly has specific issues we'd like to see addressed in the response, as we're sure others do as well. (Timely disclosure of contribution and expenditures comes immediately to mind) But for right now we'd like for everyone to have a chance to evaluate an official proposal before it is released.

Executive Order: Disclosure of Political Spending by Government Contractors

The White House blog recently wrote about Obama's trip to India and mentioned that US-based organizations could learn from Indian organizations using technology to improve accountability and transparency. I agreed. Now is a great time for the US government to recognize that there are  transparency policies all over the world that we Americans could implement or, at a bare minimum, learn from. Here are just a few foreign governments that have policies we wish would improve what we have state-side:

You get a dataset! And you get a dataset! Everyone gets a dataset!

There is always progress to be made and the presumption to make data public and online (with teeth!) is an important cultural shift we hope to see soon. Just last week the United Kingdom took an unprecedented step to publicize all government spending over 25,0000 pounds. As governments around the world tighten their belts we think making the books fully transparent will allow citizens to be better informed about where their tax dollars go and how to move forward. Here in the US there is the Data.gov site (which could be greatly improved) and we are encouraged that the culture is shifting as we see folks like the United Nations, the World Bank, Russia, Spain, Finland, Australia and many others hopping on board.

Publicly Funded Research Papers Available to the Public

The Congressional Research Service, often referred to as 'Congress' think tank', is a well-respected non-partisan branch of the Library of Congress that regularly publishes reports exclusively for members of Congress and their staff at a budget over $100 million. The Sunlight Foundation and others have long advocated for these reports to be public (meaning online), but they remain inaccessible to the general public.

Many foreign governments have publicly-funded think tanks similar to CRS, but they make the reports free to the public and accessible online. The United Kingdom has the House of Commons Library Research Papers, Canada has a nice list with categories on the site of their Library of Parliament Research Publications, and Australia publishes their reports (going back to 1993!) on the Parliament of Australia's Parliamentary Library website. Australia even has official research reports published on the state level by the websites of Victoria and New South Wales.

Imagine that.

Creating Better Disclosure Surrounding Resource Management

The US could learn a thing or two from other resource-rich countries about disclosing online searchable production, leases, costs, audits, and safety reports. This important non-proprietary information keeps the public informed about the safety and financial status of our natural resources. We hope the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) that replaced the Minerals Management Service (MMS) will take the necessary steps that many countries have already taken to improve online reporting in this sector.

The Revenue Watch Institute and Transparency International recently rated the top 41 oil, gas and mineral producing countries countries in terms of their government disclosure record [pdf link]. The United States came in at 11th place, behind Russia, Mexico, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Ecuador and others. This ranking assessed revenue transparency more than safety records, but it is an important metric to recognize how much the US government could continue to learn. Let's see less of this and more online disclosure like Angola.

Expanding and Enriching Visitor Logs

The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has a portion of the official website dedicated to transparency initiatives including some substantive items that we would love to see in the US. We appreciate what the White House has done with releasing visitor logs, but a glance across the pond shows that Number 10 is posting details of meetings, hospitality, gifts and overseas travel across all departments and high level staff. Impressive stuff when you compare it to the White House offerings.

Online Disclosure Forms

The Australian equivalent of the Federal Election Commission, known down under as the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), has a great online system to research financial documents relating to the elections.  It includes a nice financial disclosure and donor search function that is quite similar to the FEC version (both obviously don't hold a candle to Sunlight's illuminative version), but after some more research I discovered that they allow those who have to file* to do so through disclosure forms online!  We didn't venture beyond the sleek registration page, but it gave us goosebumps to see other countries approaching our vision of real-time online disclosure. We would like to see this type of online filing possible for lobbying, elections or even meetings - it would certainly ease the eyes of our reporters who often have to dig through .pdf image files.

• In Australia the political system requires candidates and Senate groups, registered political parties and their associated entities, and donors and third parties to lodge disclosure returns. Swoon!

It would be impossible to ignore that each country listed in the items above has a unique political system, but these examples serve as great starting points for policies that could work here, now. The Sunlight Foundation will continue to encourage dialogue on these important issues and hope that the US government learns from non-profits and governments all over the world.

President Obama recently attended an Expo on Democracy and Open Government on his trip to India and announced the creation of a US-India Dialogue on Open Government, a partnership that the White House blog declared to be "built on shared values." It is very exciting to see the President's renewed commitment to this issue, particularly with one of the world's great democracies and a country for which I have a personal fondness.

It is equally exciting to see that the President had an opportunity to meet with many of  the same Open Government groups that I personally visited less than a month ago, including the NGO Janaagraha, that focuses on empowering citizens and actively engaging with government for change. Sound familiar? They have built online tools on exciting ideas like their 'I Paid a Bribe' distributed research project to keep local officials accountable for illegally demanding brides. (Still trying to think of a way to adapt this for the U.S.)

After returning from my trip in India with my colleagues from Omidyar Network I wrote:

Sunlight’s work is certainly far more data centric than many of the organizations I visited. And I didn’t see anything that rivaled some of the tools for digesting and using that data that we’ve built.  But some of the university-based projects and other NGOs have figured out things we haven’t on the engagement front, including excellent online and offline organizing models around government accountability, and thinking way ahead of us on the mobile platform. And while certainly some of the problems are different (real bribery is still prevalent in many places as opposed to the “honest graft” we have in the US), there’s tremendous room for cross-continent collaboration.

I agree with what appears to be the President's take away. These are fascinating developments in India. As Samantha Power on the White House blog wrote:

India is at the vanguard of figuring out how to exploit technology and innovation on behalf of democratic accountability. U.S.-based groups, as well as those throughout the developed and developing world, could learn an enormous amount from these efforts.

Sunlight is happy to already be in dialog with many of the groups that had the opportunity to shake the president's hand in Mumbai. We do have the same goals. And as we continue to advocate for open government here , we encourage the President to lend more of his time and energy to the effort here at home. Perhaps the White House could start by hosting an expo of open government tools built by American organizations for American politics?

Update: Read some of the additional materials that the folks over at TechPreisdent have secured.

Today we learned what we knew all week: White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is leaving the White House to pursue a bid to be the next Mayor of Chicago. Emanuel leaves behind him one of the most powerful positions in national politics, one which his presence made even more important.

The contacts that he made while in the White House won't be leaving him behind. In fact, they're saved on the Internet thanks to the White House's policy of disclosing their visitor logs. Who visited Emanuel and what could that mean for his future--and the White House's?

Chicago Players:

Emanuel is going to need friends in Chicago as he explores a mayoral bid. What better place to start than those who you got into the White House? Some of Emanuel's visitors are big Chicago businessmen, lobbyists and politicians.

These Chicago players include business leaders Sam Zell, The Tribune Company, John Rowe, Exelon, Leo Melamed, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Thomas Lanctot, William Blair & Company, Howard Gottlieb and Patrick Cermak, Wight & Company.

Those in the political realm include Bill Daley, former Commerce Secretary and brother to current Mayor Richard Daley, John Cullerton, President of the Illinois State Senate, Sheila Gutman, major Democratic donor and Emanuel's own former staffer John Borovicka, now with William & Blair.

Congressional contacts:

Prior to joining the White House Emanuel, as a congressman, helped the Democrats win the House of Representatives in 2006 and pad their numbers in 2008. On this wave, Emanuel brought a number of new congressmen with whom he maintained close contact as chief of staff.

Some of the staffers to congressmen that came to visit Emanuel at the White House include Melanie Morris (Rep. Alan Boyd), Jon Selib (Sen. Max Baucus), Mark Powden (Sen. Sherrod Brown), Mariel Schwartz (Rep. Jason Altmire), Cody Lundquist (Rep. Altmire), Katie Hoard (Sen. Blanche Lincoln), Jonathan Beeton (Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz), Coby Dolan (Rep. Wasserman-Schultz), Jeremy Tollefson (Sen. Russ Feingold), Jason Meinenger (Sen. John Kerry), Erika Krennerich (Rep. Marion Berry), Ben Marter (Rep. Betsy Markey) and April Metwalli (Rep. Chris Carney).

Journalists:

Something the White House might not miss was Emanuel's penchant to dish to journalists and play the Washington access game. While most of the behind the scenes access dealing probably went on over the phone some journalists visited Emanuel at the White House.

These journalists include Jonathan Alter, Karen Tumulty, Noam Schieber, Fred Hiatt, Ryan Lizza, Ron Fournier, Candy Crowley, Tom Friedman, Susan Page, David Ignatius, David Wessel, Mark Halperin, Katty Kay and David Leonhardt.

Unexpected:

One meeting that appears in the White House visitor logs that may seem unexpected is a June 9, 2010 meeting with one Keith R. Murdoch. Does the "R" stand for Rupert? In his book The Promise Jonathan Alter revealed that Emanuel kept a back channel open to NewsCorp owner Rupert Murdoch, who's real name is Keith Rupert Murdoch. I have not yet confirmed whether this is actually Rupert Murdoch, but I will let you know when I do.

View all of Rahm Emanuel's visitors here: