Now that we've seen the final Rules package that the House will pass later today, we can talk about what's changing with a little more certainty.

Late this summer, we released a detailed set of recommendations for Rules changes, and we're delighted by how many of those changes will be incorporated into the House Rules.

Final Bill Availability: As Lisa noted yesterday, the public will have a much better chance of being able to read bills before they're considered on the floor. While House Rules are waivable, and this one is by no means ironclad, we have probably, finally, moved beyond the dispiriting spectacle of voting on bills which haven't been posted online first.

Sunlight has long been the leading force behind the ReadtheBill movement.

New Committee Responsibility for Electronic Publication: The new Rules give the Committee on House Administration (CHA) responsibility for setting standards for how documents are made available online. This dovetails nicely with the new bill publishing that will now be happening, and it's heartening that someone will be specifically responsible for how information is posted online. Today's Rules have a number of first steps, and CHA will have its work cut out for it in working through online publication for the House.

This closely echoes chapter 12 of our 2007 Open House Project report.

Committee Hearing Notice: Sunlight has long called for structured, online advanced notice of committee hearings. The new rules require a week's notice before hearings, and three days notice before meetings. This notice is required to be "publicly available in electronic form."

Markup Text: Committees are now required to post copies of legislation to be "publicly available in electronic form" at least 24 hours before markups.

Committee Votes Online: Maybe this perennial fight can now end -- the new Rules require committees to post all recorded votes online. This was in the 2007 Open House Project report, and in our recent Rules package.

Committee Amendments Online: Amendments adopted in committee must now be posted online within 24 hours.

New Disclosure for Testimony: Anyone testifying in the House will now not only submit disclosures to the House, but those will be posted online as well. This provision was in our Rules package.

Committee Rules: Committees must now post their committee rules online, another Sunlight recommendation.

Committee Coverage: The House Rules now require committees to broadcast their proceedings, with the caveat that is the phrase "to the maximum extent practicable." The wording implies both live and archived access to proceedings.

Votes in the Rules Committee: The Rules Committee will no longer enjoy an exemption to the requirement that they put their recorded votes into committee reports. (Another Sunlight recommendation.)

Electronic Devices on the Floor: Electronic devices are now allowed on the House floor, as long as they don't impair decorum.

Press Treatment: Provisions that singled out specific media organizations or types of media organziations for access to official proceedings have been broadened. (Another Sunlight recommendation.)

Oversight Plans: The House started posting committees' oversight plans more reliably during the 111th Congress, after our urging, and the 112th House Rules broaden committees' required activity reports, and also increase their frequency.

Interim Online Posting: Until the House Admin Committee determines a central location, bills will be posted online on the Rules Committee site, or on majority committee sites.

Office of Congressional Ethics: The Office of Congressional Ethics will continue to function in the 112th Congress, as Daniel recently noted, and Sunlight pushed for.

Exercise Facilities: Lobbyists (or former Members married to lobbyists) are now further restricted from the House exercise facilities.

This is great news. Over the weekend, the Obama–Biden Transition team switched the copyright policy for their Web site, Change.gov, from the old fashioned "copyright protected model" to the most  open Creative Commons license. Lots of folks had noticed this oddity and there had been a low buzz of conversation about it. It's really terrific to see the Transition team catch this early on and free the information. So we can now mix and remix the content there. It will be interesting to see what we can do with it.

Today, President-Elect Barack Obama named the key members of economic team including Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary and Larry Summers as head of the National Economic Council. Notably, many in Obama's economic circle are acolytes of former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the subject of much talk in the wake of the bailout of Citigroup. Rubin, a revolving door spinner between Wall Street and Washington, began his career at Goldman Sachs, moved to the National Economic Council, then Treasury, and in 1999, left government and joined Citigroup. Rubin's story provides a telling story about the conflicts of interest that can occur when a high-ranking official moves so seemlessly between the public and private sector.

In this New York Times article addressing Citigroup's economic troubles, Rubin appears as a key player, in both the deregulation that allowed the bank to become so large and unwieldy and as an adviser to the bank urging riskier behavior:

The bank’s downfall was years in the making and involved many in its hierarchy, particularly Mr. Prince and Robert E. Rubin, an influential director and senior adviser.

Citigroup insiders and analysts say that Mr. Prince and Mr. Rubin played pivotal roles in the bank’s current woes, by drafting and blessing a strategy that involved taking greater trading risks to expand its business and reap higher profits. Mr. Prince and Mr. Rubin both declined to comment for this article.

When he was Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration, Mr. Rubin helped loosen Depression-era banking regulations that made the creation of Citigroup possible by allowing banks to expand far beyond their traditional role as lenders and permitting them to profit from a variety of financial activities. During the same period he helped beat back tighter oversight of exotic financial products, a development he had previously said he was helpless to prevent.

...

But while Mr. Rubin certainly did not have direct responsibility for a Citigroup unit, he was an architect of the bank’s strategy.

In 2005, as Citigroup began its effort to expand from within, Mr. Rubin peppered his colleagues with questions as they formulated the plan. According to current and former colleagues, he believed that Citigroup was falling behind rivals like Morgan Stanley and Goldman, and he pushed to bulk up the bank’s high-growth fixed-income trading, including the C.D.O. business.

Former colleagues said Mr. Rubin also encouraged Mr. Prince to broaden the bank’s appetite for risk, provided that it also upgraded oversight — though the Federal Reserve later would conclude that the bank’s oversight remained inadequate.

Once the strategy was outlined, Mr. Rubin helped Mr. Prince gain the board’s confidence that it would work.

The conflict of interest line is often easy to draw when involving revolving door moves from Washington to K Street. When high-powered officials move into other parts of the private sector they still maintain large amounts of influence in Washington, and have just as much of a need to influence officials as lobbyists. (Citigroup's lobbying expenses are close to $6 million for the year.)

In Rubin's case, the industry into which he went has fallen into complete turmoil roiling not only economic markets but politics in Washington. Yet, Rubin remains a top transition adviser to President-Elect Obama and, as noted above, his proteges are among Obama's top picks for economic positions.

Despite Rubin's hand in the current crisis and his revolving door tale, the line between his work and the new Obama appointments is not so clear. While Rubin came from the private sector, Geithner, Obama's Treasury pick, does not. Geithner has spent nearly his entire career in the public sector from positions in the Treasury Department, the IMF, and the New York Federal Reserve. This is quite a change of pace from the recent history of Treasury Secretaries. All three of President Bush's Treasury Secretaries were CEOs, with the current occupant Hank Paulson, like Rubin, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs. Going back more than 30 years, only George Schultz, Treasury Secretary under Nixon, and Larry Summers came into the job without a stint in the private sector. (They both came from acadamia.)

As Rubin's revolving door tale shows, conflicts of interest can pop up during government service and for years to come afterwords. The importance of controling these kind of situations is seen in the types of appointments like Geithner's and the revolving door restrictions that Obama has said he will implement.

For more discussion of revolving door policies, see this Sunlight Policy Review post from last week.

In the winter of 2007, in between the two sessions of the 110^th Congress, Sen. Trent Lott, an institution in Congress since the 1980s, suddenly announced his impending retirement from the Senate. Lott had an illustrious career as a legislator rising all the way to the top of the Senate, serving as Senate Majority Leader from 1996 to 2001, until a misfired compliment led his party to toss him as leader. Lott’s luck continued to run a shore as Hurricane Katrina demolished his gulf coast home leaving the senator to wage a battle with insurers claiming that there was no evidence that his home was destroyed by a hurricane because there was no home left. These reasons may have been enough to drive Sen. Lott to retire from the Senate when he did, but it was actually the implementation of a simple ethics requirement that pushed him to give up the trappings of the Senate and embrace the cash cow that is K Street.

In October 2007, Congress approved new ethics and lobbying reforms, including an extension of the “cooling off” period for Senators. The “cooling off” period refers to the period of time that some government employees are restricted from lobbying the government after they leave office. The new rules mandated a two-year “cooling off” period – extended from one-year – starting at the beginning of the next session in 2008. Trent Lott avoided this new rule by retiring on December 18, 2007.

“Cooling off” periods, or revolving door reforms, do not solely apply to Congress. The executive branch faces similar problems of conflicts of interest arising from appointees leaving to pursue private sector gigs and private sector employees entering government service. This problem has become increasingly acute over the past decade and that’s why the Project on Government Oversight includes revolving door reform as a key plank in their Presidential transition recommendations:

POGO Recommends: The President should issue an Executive Order that executive branch employees, including political appointees, must consider their position a matter of public trust and service, not a stepping stone for personal gain. Once they leave government service, there should be a three year prohibition against public employees and officials working for or representing industries or other private interests that they regulated, contracted with, or otherwise oversaw. Similarly, the President should exercise great caution in appointing individuals with ties to the industry they will oversee. The Office of Government Ethics and agency ethics offices should be given administrative enforcement power over violations of ethics, as well as the necessary resources to execute this new mandate.

These recommendations break down as follows:

1) Extend “cooling off” period from one- to three-years. 2) “[E]xercise great caution in appointing individuals with ties to the industry they will oversee.” 3) Give enforcement power to the Office of Government Ethics.

All of these are welcome recommendations as they will help stop conflict of interest abuses that have become all too common in government. The new restrictions proposed by POGO go a long way to making those employed by government focused more on their current service than the future payout in the private sector.

Of course, there are ways that the lobbying industry and the private sector have of circumventing these rules. By acting as an advisor, a former employee can help clients in their lobbying campaign without making actual contacts with government officials that constitute lobbying. These kinds of loopholes are likely impossible to close.

The brightest side to POGO’s recommendations is that they are incredibly likely to happen, as they have been embraced by President-Elect Barack Obama.

In the case of extending the “cooling off” period and exercising “great caution in appointing individuals with ties to the industry they will oversee,” President-Elect Obama’s plans, as told on Change.gov, are:

Close the Revolving Door on Former and Future Employers: No political appointees in the Obama-Biden administration will be permitted to work on regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years. And no political appointee will be able to lobby the executive branch after leaving government service during the remainder of the administration.

On giving the Office of Government Ethics more enforcement ability:

Enforce Executive Branch Ethics: The Obama-Biden administration will give the Office of Governmental Ethics strong enforcement authority with the ability to make binding regulations, and it will work with inspectors general in all the federal agencies to enforce ethics rules, minimize waste and ensure federal officials are not using their offices for personal gain. The OGE will also be the clearinghouse of all public records relevant to ethics in the Executive Branch and place this information on its website. Finally, the OGE will promulgate rules and procedures to record all oral and in-person "lobbying contacts" between registered lobbyists and political appointees and make those records available to the public in a searchable computerized database.

The key now, for POGO and others supporting their recommendations, will be to make sure that promises like these are enforced.

Starting today, you'll be seeing blog posts three times a week on the Sunlight Foundation blog.

Building on the enthusiastic spirit of reform chronicled by Gabriela in our recently posted Open Letter to the Obama Administration, Sunlight staff will be reviewing and analyzing reform recommendations as prepared by our peers, like OMBWatch, the Constitution Project, or the Sunshine in Government Initiative.

While the recently envigorated world of transition white papers can be dauntingly complex, as even a quick look at our Congresspedia page on transition resources will attest, we believe that policy is at its best when it's developed and discussed in public.

Many of the recommendations we'll be reviewing have been prepared by large communities of experts and stakeholders, and we want to be sure that all of their hard work gets the exposure it deserves.

To make it easier to follow along as the posts are published, all of the policy review posts will be tagged "policyreview," which you can see through this page, or you can just watch for "PolicyReview" in the title of Sunlight blog posts.

We expect to learn a great deal by going through all of the detailed recommendations prepared for the incoming administration, and we hope that you will too.

Here's an opportunity for the new Administration. Develop a model system for government transparency in the context of bailout of Wall Street.

ProPublica has been doing an admirable job of providing some transparency for the financial bailout by the federal government, including putting it all in perspective. They are keeping a running tally of the banks that have announced preliminary approval by the Treasury Department for participation in the bailout, along with the dollar amounts to each bank. They are going to update the list as they receive more information. And here's a chart providing some historical perspective, with a bubble chart representing the size of the 13 U.S. government bailouts of corporations (and one city) since 1970, calculated in 2008 dollars. They've also set up another chart listing the results of each bailout.

Others are keeping an eye on what's going on. Bloomberg News is demanding that the Federal Reserve comply with congressional demands for transparency in the $2 trillion bailout of the banking system (BailoutSleuth.com says that it's more like $2.5 trillion). In September, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson promised Congress they would open the books. Currently, Congress and the American people have no idea where their money is going or what securities the banks are pledging in return. Bloomberg has filed both a Freedom of Information Act and a federal lawsuit hoping to force disclosure.  We going to dig a bit deeper into this and see if we can figure out what the requirements for transparency are.

This is a real opportunity for the Obama team. Make reporting on the bailout a model of the transparent government that they have so strongly advocated. Daily reporting, online in usable data formats would be a good place to start.

Update: From Columbia Journalism Review.

As we at the Sunlight Foundation watch the Presidential transition begin in earnest, we're particularly interested in President-elect Obama's history and promise for a more open, transparent and connected government, as articulated throughout his Senate career, Presidential campaign, and now through his newly posted agenda, on change.gov. Obama's disposition toward government reform and transparency makes it a really good time to be an open government advocate.

Throughout his four years in the U.S. Senate, Obama has compiled an impressive record on government openness and transparency. He sponsored the Federal Finance Accounability and Transparency Act, which created USAspending.gov, a database of government grants and contracts developed in the image of FedSpending.org, which OMBWatch created with the support of the Sunlight Foundation. He also sponsored or cosponsored two successful amendments to the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, requiring Senate committees to post transcripts of their public meetings, and to add a fundraising disclosure requirement for lobbists (S.Amdt 41). Other measures that Obama has proposed include a bill to set up an outside ethics commission to receive complaints from the public on alleged ethics violations (S. 2259 ), a bill (S. 2261) to shed light on earmarks, and a bill to radically open conference committee proceedings.

In February 2006, Obama testified before the Senate Rules Committee on his plan to bring good government and reduce the influence of lobbyists. From his testimony:

I hope that this committee will take into consideration these proposals as well as others that can serve as the basis for real and effective lobbying reform. Again, I hope to do this in a bipartisan manner. But I will say this: the true test of bipartisanship is not whether we pass a bill that appeals to a lowest common denominator that we can all agree on, it's whether we pass the strongest bill with the strongest reforms possible that can truly change the way we do business in Washington. That's what the American people will be watching for, and that's what we owe them in the end.

Throughout the Presidential campaign, we've all heard a familiar refrain, and not from just Obama: "Washington is broken," "We need to change the culture in Washington." Obama's test will be in how campaign rhetoric and a "cultural" enthusiasm for reform translate into real policies. If the reform platform articulated on change.gov is any indication, we're in for a significant shift. Change.gov includes transparency reform in two sections, technology and ethics, both worth reading in full, and heavily excerpted below. The technology platform includes the following proposals relevant to open government:

Create a Transparent and Connected Democracy

• Open Up Government to its Citizens: The Bush Administration has been one of the most secretive, closed administrations in American history. Our nation's progress has been stifled by a system corrupted by millions of lobbying dollars contributed to political campaigns, the revolving door between government and industry, and privileged access to inside information-all of which have led to policies that favor the few against the public interest. An Obama presidency will use cutting-edge technologies to reverse this dynamic, creating a new level of transparency, accountability and participation for America's citizens.
• Bring Government into the 21st Century: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will use technology to reform government and improve the exchange of information between the federal government and citizens while ensuring the security of our networks. Obama and Biden believe in the American people and in their intelligence, expertise, and ability and willingness to give and to give back to make government work better. Obama will appoint the nation's first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices.

...and change.gov's ethics platform contains the following:

The Problem

Lobbyists Write National Policies: For example, Vice President Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force of oil and gas lobbyists met secretly to develop national energy policy. Secrecy Dominates Government Actions: The Bush administration has ignored public disclosure rules and has invoked a legal tool known as the "state secrets" privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court. Wasteful Spending is Out of Control: The current administration has abused its power by handing out contracts without competition to its politically connected friends and supporters. These abuses cost taxpayers billions of dollars each year. Barack Obama and Joe Biden's Plan

Shine the Light on Washington Lobbying

• Centralize Ethics and Lobbying Information for Voters: Obama and Biden will create a centralized Internet database of lobbying reports, ethics records, and campaign finance filings in a searchable, sortable and downloadable format.
• Require Independent Monitoring of Lobbying Laws and Ethics Rules: Obama and Biden will use the power of the presidency to fight for an independent watchdog agency to oversee the investigation of congressional ethics violations so that the public can be assured that ethics complaints will be investigated.

Shine the Light on Federal Contracts, Tax Breaks and Earmarks

• Create a Public "Contracts and Influence" Database: As president, Obama will create a "contracts and influence" database that will disclose how much federal contractors spend on lobbying, and what contracts they are getting and how well they complete them.
• Expose Special Interest Tax Breaks to Public Scrutiny: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will ensure that any tax breaks for corporate recipients - or tax earmarks - are also publicly available on the Internet in an easily searchable format.
• End Abuse of No-Bid Contracts: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will end abuse of no-bid contracts by requiring that nearly all contract orders over $25,000 be competitively awarded.
• Sunlight Before Signing: Too often bills are rushed through Congress and to the president before the public has the opportunity to review them. As president, Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days.
• Shine Light on Earmarks and Pork Barrel Spending: Obama's Transparency and Integrity in Earmarks Act will shed light on all earmarks by disclosing the name of the legislator who asked for each earmark, along with a written justification, 72 hours before they can be approved by the full Senate.

Bring Americans Back into their Government

• Hold 21st Century Fireside Chats: Obama will bring democracy and policy directly to the people by requiring his Cabinet officials to have periodic national broadband townhall meetings to discuss issues before their agencies.
• Make White House Communications Public: Obama will amend executive orders to ensure that communications about regulatory policymaking between persons outside government and all White House staff are disclosed to the public.
• Conduct Regulatory Agency Business in Public: Obama will require his appointees who lead the executive branch departments and rulemaking agencies to conduct the significant business of the agency in public, so that any citizen can see in person or watch on the Internet these debates.
• Release Presidential Records: Obama and Biden will nullify the Bush attempts to make the timely release of presidential records more difficult.

Free the Executive Branch from Special Interest Influence

• Close the Revolving Door on Former and Future Employers: No political appointees in an Obama-Biden administration will be permitted to work on regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years. And no political appointee will be able to lobby the executive branch after leaving government service during the remainder of the administration.
• Free Career Officials from the Influence of Politics: Obama will issue an executive order asking all new hires at the agencies to sign a form affirming that no political appointee offered them the job solely on the basis of political affiliation or contribution.
• Reform the Political Appointee Process: FEMA Director Michael Brown was not qualified to head the agency, and the result was a disaster for the people of the Gulf Coast. But in an Obama-Biden administration, every official will have to rise to the standard of proven excellence in the agency's mission.

It's good for us to remember these promises as this transition begins. All of us in the transparency community should lend a hand in helping the new Administration make these provision, and others, a reality. The times demand nothing less.