by Jacob Hutt, Policy Intern

The government's point person for Recovery Act transparency and accountability called for an online “universal one-stop shop” in federal financial data reporting at a hearing on Tuesday. Expanding on his comments, Chairman Earl Devaney of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board announced a new report, “Accountability and Transparency: Template for the Future,” which identifies lessons learned from the Board's oversight of Recovery spending.

The report highlighted three important lessons:

• “The most identifiable obstacle to transparency and accountability of federal funds” is the “lack of a uniform award ID number” for contracts and other forms of financial assistance. Thus,  a single agency be responsible for distributing award ID numbers “across the entire government,” providing coherence and efficiency to a confusing system of identification.
• Agencies and inspector generals should have equal access to transparency and accountability tools.  Although IGs are thought to be more inclined towards fraud detection, both agencies and IGs have a common goal of fraud prevention.
• The Board's accountability and transparency tools are interdependent and should not be split into separate divisions.

The report also explained key achievements of RATB and how they should guide the next step in government transparency and accountability, with a particular emphasis on fraud prevention. The Board used software to analyze “potential problems” in federal fund recipients by drawing on criminal records, lawsuits, bankruptcy information, etc.

Ultimately, the report calls for the creation of a successor Board to oversee federal spending generally. It should be independent, and maintain a website that centralizes how data is reported, how it is displayed to the public, and how programs are held accountable. All federal financial data would be available to the public in one central site.

NextGov reports on positive side-effects of the stimulus' disclosure and transparency provisions:

Technology that states have deployed to report how they spent federal stimulus funds is likely to permanently change information exchange across the public and private sector, despite controversy over figures on the number of jobs created and saved, said New York officials, academics and federal leaders.

I think that, even in the face of criticism over data problems in stimulus reporting, almost everyone agrees that the creation of Recovery.gov has been a huge transparency victory. The disclosure requirements look even better after seeing the transparency success trickle down to the states.

The creation of jobs is a main part of the stimulus legislation. Seeing how many jobs were created and maintained in local areas is key to evaluating the effectiveness of funds and the taxpayer investment. Tom Cusak from Oregon Housing blog, decided to see what his local community looked like after the funds were released and since the Recovery Web site doesn't let you find the answers in one easy place, he created his own excel spreadsheet with the information.

By now most have seen the headlines saying that Recovery Act funding recipients (Grants, Loans, or Contracts) have reported creating or saving 640,000+ jobs by September 30th. Various news accounts have reported some state or recipient specific jobs data, but getting a comprehensive picture by locality, recipient, or by program has not been possible. That just changed. Using data from Recovery.gov I created an Excel workbook that allows users to explore down to the zip code level, 156,000 recipient records that provide the details that add up to the 640,000+ jobs, or the 1,900+ Oregon records that contain the details that add up to 9,600 Recovery Act funded jobs. This Excel 2007 workbook contains ALL Recovery jobs (and spending) data for the US, for Oregon, and for HUD and includes jobs as reported by recipients of Recovery Act grants, AND loans, AND contracts. Using filters or pivot tables, the workbook will help answer many questions down to the zip code, city, and state level (inexplicably, a county level data field is not included in the Recovery Act funding data). 1. How much money are recipients reporting they have spent? 2. How many and what specific kinds of jobs are recipients reporting they have created? 3. How many jobs are being created by HUD Recovery Act funding, and by which programs?

Read the rest here.

Lobbyists are in midst of a bonanza in Washington. With the Obama administration pursuing so many goals at once, the influence industry is booming. One area that has lobbyists salivating like cats surrounding a mouse is the $787 billion stimulus package (only about $400 billion of this was actually spending-related) signed into law earlier this year by President Obama. That was the reason that the administration crafted rules for stimulus lobbyists designed to limit their ability to influence spending decisions and make transparent their actions. The rules, smartly summarized by my colleague Daniel Schuman here, included a requirement for agency officials to disclose all contacts made by lobbyists in regards to the stimulus. The Associated Press looked at these disclosures and found little disclosure occurring with wide discrepancies in the format of disclosure among those few reports filed:

President Obama ordered federal officials to disclose their contacts with lobbyists trying to influence how the government doles out money to jump-start the economy. Yet few such communications have been reported even though lobbyists say they are busier than ever with the multibillion-dollar stimulus.

Since the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed in February, federal agencies have reported 197 contacts with lobbyists about stimulus grants.

In August, the entire government reported only eight such lobbying contacts. The Pentagon, which controls about $7.4 billion in stimulus spending, reported just one lobbying contact so far this year. The Homeland Security Department, with at least $3 billion to spend, reported none.

Forgive me for not believing that the Pentagon has only been contacted by ONE lobbyist and the Homeland Security Department has had ZERO contact with lobbyists over stimulus spending. Other agencies are no better. Of particular concern is the lack of a standardized format for disclosure. According to the AP, "The Education Department described 19 encounters, including Secretary Arne Duncan's meetings with the NAACP and other groups, some with detailed descriptions of the discussions. Energy Department reports include barely legible scrawls as well as 159 pages of public comments on a transmission infrastructure program."

If the administration is going to undertake a serious effort to reduce influence around and bring transparency to stimulus spending they are going to need to reconsider how they are requiring these disclosures. In the recent OMB memo on stimulus lobbying rules, the administration stated its intent on creating a web tool to “facilitate disclosure of lobbyist contacts concerning the Recovery Act.” The development of this tool should also coincide with the creation of standardized disclosure. Beyond that, they need to empower some official at each agency to enforce the disclosure rule.

For right now, this is both not-too-surprising and very disappointing. Maybe we just need a law requiring lobbyists to disclose their contacts. Perhaps the administration, which campaigned on transparency and curtailing the power of lobbyists, could consider putting their weight behind a legislative effort to increase transparency in the influence industry.

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) reviewed all 50 state formulas for disclosing stimulus contracts and found that New Hampshire gets it right. "A POGO review of the procurement websites from all 50 states (plus DC) found that one state—New Hampshire—has been posting original scanned Recovery Act contracts. This provides taxpayers with unprecedented access to important details regarding government spending."

Michael Scherer at the Time blog Swampland writes about Howard Dean's public disclosures about his non-lobbyist consulting work when he appears on television in contrast to the non-disclosure by Tom Daschle, who appears on Sunday shows to discuss health care without revealing that he holds UnitedHealth Corp. in his portfolio at the law firm Alston & Bird.

Sunlight's Bill Allison uses the newly minted FARA database to explore lobbying by the Cayman Islands to keep their tax safe haven safe.

At Open Congress, Donny Shaw notes a comment left on the bill page for H.R. 1207 , the audit the Federal Reserve bill, that suggests the recommended GAO audit be released to the public. The bill only requires the GAO to release the audit to members of Congress.

You're going to want to go over to the Sunlight Labs blog for this one. Labs Director Clay Johnson announced that the Sunlight Foundation -- with your help -- is going to bid on the reboot of Recovery.gov:

We've decided to do something crazy. On Tuesday afternoon, someone handed us a copy of the Recovery.gov 2.0 RFP and we thought: what if we try something truly radical here. What if we opened up the process of government contracting by bidding on this thing? We together-- not just we meaning The Sunlight Foundation-- are going to bid on redoing Recovery.gov to learn more about the process of government contracting, and to try and build what is perhaps the biggest federal transparency-related website.

...

We need your help bidding on this and building a credible document. This is a short turnaround RFP -- it is due Friday, June 26th-- and together I think we can do something amazing. Let's write our response together, figure out what the best solution is, and give the Recovery board our ideal response.

Together (and that's the only way it is going to happen) we can make something amazing happen. We're taking our bid and opening it up for anyone to edit on the Sunlight Labs wiki.

Seriously. This is for real. Get involved now, we only have until Friday the 26th to submit this proposal.

That was fast. The administration is already seeking a new IT firm to redesign Recovery.gov, the transparency site for stimulus funds. According to Washington Business Journal, the administration will post on June 15 a call for IT contractors to "make improvements to the site by redesigning, implementing and hosting the 2.0 version." This will include:

[U]pdates and changes to the site’s user interface, information architecture and design engineering. According to GSA’s pre-solicitation, the contractor needs expertise in project management, and the ability to “deliver a website with interactive data-visualization, and web-application level functionality.”

The solicitation also states that the Recovery and Accountability Board, RATB, which oversees stimulus rules and regulations, is open to “recommendations for technology improvements for version 2.0 and beyond, including the hosting platform, database technology, CMS, programming languages, etc.”

(via ProPublica)

By now, you may have seen that the White House has updated the stimulus lobbying rules to expand the communications ban to all parties, not just registered lobbyists, and has instituted a more focused approach to the ban on communications. You can read about it at the White House's blog or in John Wonderlich's post from Friday.

Michael Stern wrote about whether the stimulus lobbying rules will now apply to lawmakers as well as lobbyists and others attempting to influence to stimulus spending and grant awarding process.

The Washington Examiner denounced the new rules as an attack on political speech in an Editorial.

The American League of Lobbyists praised the updates to the rules in a statement from President David Wenhold.

The Open House Project Google Group hosts an interesting conversation between Michael Stern, Gary Bass, and Mark Tapscott about the new rules.

Today marks the end of the 60-day review process for the stimulus lobbying rules imposed by President Obama. On March 20, the President issued memorandum ordering agency employees in charge of stimulus funding to only accept written communications from registered lobbyists when in consultation about funding of projects and to disclose online those written communications along with any oral communications that related to the stimulus generally. In response, a coalition of organizations, led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and the American League of Lobbyists (ALL), opposed the new rules and have threatened a lawsuit.

According to Roll Call, it does not look like the administration will change the rules and the opposition coalition is up in arms. One of the arguments that I've heard repeatedly in opposition to the stimulus rules is that lobbyists, in their work, simply provide education to government officials and lawmakers. The specter of corruption scandal -- Jack Abramoff, Duke Cunningham -- is often used as an example of aberration, rather than common thread. However, education is often in the eye of the beholder. What one company may deem education, the public may see as a deliberate effort to deceive or bias officials.

In one recent case, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), for nine years, relied on "education" from chemical industry lobbyists supporting Bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical that was included in baby bottles, while failing to receive similar "education" from scientists opposed to the inclusion of BPA in baby bottles. According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal, FDA's "deputy director sought information from the BPA industry's chief lobbyist to discredit a Japanese study that found it caused miscarriages in workers who were exposed to it." This was before government scientists were given a chance to review the Japanese study.

According to the Journal-Sentinal, BPA "has been linked to neurological defects, diabetes, breast and prostate cancer and heart disease." Despite these scientific views on BPA, FDA officials, working with industry lobbyists, blocked any attempt to regulate the chemical or ban it from use. E-mails showed that FDA officials relied on the lobbyists to do much of their work on the issue.

Now, a position that we've heard before is that these were not the actions of lobbyists per se. Rather, government officials, the individuals making the decisions, are to blame. They hold the authority to choose which way the policy will go and so they ought to be the ones we focus our attention to, not the lobbyists. What do lobbyists have to do with anything, anyway?

And this is a partially valid argument: government officials need to be prevented from making biased decisions. Attempts to regulate lobbyists should have as their cause the reduction of biased and ill-informed actions by officials. Government officials do make decisions, often in consultation with -- or in the case of the aforementioned FDA officials, in cahoots with -- lobbyists and industry officials. The revelation of these consultations provides a needed check on the potential for agency bias.

Clearly, a system of real time disclosure of the chemical industry lobbying contacts with the FDA would have prevented this instance of bias by exposing them to the public or pressuring officials to actually meet with those with differing opinions. Disclosure and transparency should be designed to prevent bad outcomes at the hands of all parties, government officials and lobbyists alike.

And this gets to the heart of the Obama stimulus lobbying rules. The lobbying rules require agency officials to report written and oral communications with lobbyists. The lobbying rules forbid agency officials from engaging in oral communications with lobbyists about stimulus funding decisions. The rules target agency officials to protect their independence.

While lobbyists may state that their sole cause is to educate the government for their clients, they can do so in ways that are either honest or deceitful, changing outcomes by providing information that may be wrong, but still positive for their client. This is their job and is not necessarily corrupt, but it is often corrosive to a functioning government and to public trust. Making lobbyist communcations transparent, as the stimulus lobbying rules do, could prevent deceptive lobbying overtures and protect agency officials from making biased actions.

Yesterday, John Wonderlich wrote an important post here about Sunlight's meeting with the White House (with a bunch of other organizations) regarding the stimulus lobbying rules. The most important thing that John wrote is this:

To me, this looks like an imperfect law (the Lobbying Disclosure Act) being used as a foundation for imperfect lobbying restrictions, in the face of enormous and unprecedented stimulus spending. Whether the restrictions are proportional to the sudden need for competent spending is certainly up for debate. There seems to be little debate, however over whether the LDA is a sufficient vehicle for lobbying regulation. It isn’t. The LDA requirements are easily skirted, enforcement is lax, and many terms are insufficiently defined. (It’s probably fair to say that position was the consensus of the groups present, but certainly not presented as administration policy.)

The justification being given by the administration for these rules is that they do not want the stimulus funding process to be mucked up by lobbyists seeking bits and pieces of the $700+ billion bill for unworthy projects. However, as John notes, we are seeing unregistered influencers go to lobby for stimulus funds. We are also seeing this happen in other large pots of money. Take for example the $700+ billion bailout handled by the Treasury Department:

Stress-test results showing major banks need to raise new capital were finalized after intense negotiation between the government and the banks, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told Charlie Rose in an interview taped on Wednesday.

Despite the Treasury Department's rules prohibiting lobbyist influence in the awarding and distribution of bailout funds, bank executives and lawyers can still meet with an influence Treasury's decision as it relates to their bailout status. This similarly highlights what John says above: the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) is a poor measure by which to grade and regulate influence.

The LDA does not cover many paid influencers that go to executive branch agencies or Capitol Hill, does not require the disclosure of contacts, and has loose and diffuse enforcement mechanisms. As the debate over influence increases in Washington, there will likely be a need to revisit this Act and consider many of the proposals that were left on the cutting room floor when the bill was adopted in 1995. Proposals that were dropped included disclosure of contacts, widened registration net, and better, more professional enforcement and oversight. It's about time to consider these ideas, as they appear to be the real meat for real reform.