As part of Sunshine week, I had the opportunity to testify at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing to share a few of Sunlight's ideas about making the executive branch more transparent. Video and text of my opening statement are below. It almost goes without saying that we're very interested in the transparency bills the Oversight Committee will be marking up this Wednesday.
How transparent has President Barack Obama's administration been? While the first term seemed to start with several bold initiatives, members of the transparency community have been disappointed with the apparent lack of initiative since then. Panelists gave the administration mixed reviews at the Dec. 3, 2012 Advisory Committee on Transparency event examining what's happened over the past four years and what in store for the next four.
Participants in the panel discussion, moderated by Daniel Schuman, policy counsel at the Sunlight Foundation and director of the Advisory Committee on Transparency, had a hard time listing the Obama administration's accomplishments without mentioning caveats in the same breath. Anne Weismann, chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said the administration's efforts may have been well intended but were not always well executed. The decision to release the White House visitor logs, for example, resulted in more transparency about who is trying to influence the executive branch, but also resulted in some staff taking meetings to coffee shops.
Regardless of who wins the presidential election, the next administration will have enormous power to say how open our government will be. We have organized our priorities for the next administration below, to share where we think our work on executive branch issues will be focused, in advance of the election results. From money in politics to open data, spending, and freedom of information, we'll be working to open up the Executive Branch.
We'd love to hear any suggestions you might have for Sunlight's Executive Branch work, please leave additional ideas in the comments below.
(We'll also be sharing other recommendations soon, including a legislative agenda for the 113th Congress, and a suite of reform proposals for the House and Senate rules packages.)
Sunlight Reform Agenda for the Next Administration:
An in-depth analysis of Obama's 2008 campaign contributors conducted by iWatch
News in 2011 determined that in certain circumstances major bundlers ended up receiving appointments to key White House positions, invitations to White House events, and stimulus money awarded through contracts. This analysis required a high level of investigative journalism skill and a significant amount of time. It would not have been possible, however, without access to a number of data sources.
The iWatch analysis frequently returns to the story of Donald H. Gips, a Colorado businessman and bundler for Obama. His story provides a useful frame for illustrating the data sources that provided essential information for this piece.
Accessing Campaign Finance Data Regarding Bundlers
The article states that Gips bundled over $500,000 for Obama in 2008. Presidential candidates are not required to report their bundlers, but both Obama and McCain chose to do so in 2008. The Center for Responsive Politics makes available the list from 2008 as well as a list of 2012 bundlers for those candidates who have chosen to disclose. While the candidate usually only discloses the name of the bundler, CRP adds value by including additional information such as the total amount contributed, the name of the bundler, the city and state, and employer. The information also contains the total amount the bundler has contributed him or herself to the specified candidate since 1990. Bundlers are additionally broken down by industry. A search for Gips shows that he bundled over $500,000 in 2008 and has individually donated $32,391 since 1990.
While presidential candidates only disclose bundlers voluntarily, bundler information for candidate committees, leadership PACs, and political party committees is required to be disclosed by the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007. Bundler information for these entities can be found using the Federal Election Commission website. In addition, Sunlight's Influence Explorer also provides bundler information for registered lobbyists and lobbying firms in a searchable and user-friendly format.
Monitoring Staff Changes in the White House
After Obama won the election, the article states that Gips was put in charge of hiring in the White House and subsequently appointed as the U.S. ambassador to South Africa. The White House provides a searchable database of nominations and appointments that indicates the name of the nominee, the position and agency, the formal nomination date, and the date and result of the confirmation vote. Gips does not appear in that list, as his position did not require him to be appointed. A press release from Change.gov, Obama's transition website, however, lists Gips among several other staff announcements. The U.S. Department of State provides a list of embassies, which can be used to find information about American consulates around the world, including the name of the current ambassador.
Tracking Stimulus Funds
The article points out that Level 3 Communications LLC, where Gips was formerly vice president, was later the recipient of $13.8 million in stimulus funds. Information regarding the recipients of stimulus funds is available from three places:
Viewing White House Visitors
The article also discusses bundlers receiving access to the White House, such as invitations to events or meetings. The Obama White House has voluntarily chosen to disclose the security records that detail those who enter the White House. These Visitor Logs have been criticized for a lack of accuracy and completeness, but can be valuable for use in analyses such as the iWatch report. The records show 18 visits by Gips to the White House between August 17, 2009 and April 1, 2011. Among the 18 are two trips to see the president and various trips to other White House staff such as Jenny Cizner, who works in the Office of Presidential Personnel, and Valerie Jarrett, a senior advisor to the president.
"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.
I testified earlier today before the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. It was a raucous hearing, that covered a lot of ground. The testimony as prepared and submitted is below, along with a summary and my truth in testimony forms.
FINAL John Wonderlich Testimony Visitor Logs
Download document in OTF format.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked a series of questions today based on the Politico story I blogged about earlier.
Carney refuses to answer whether the White House has any guidance on when it's appropriate to schedule meetings that occur outside the reach of the visitor logs records. I doubt there's any formal guidance, but instead that whoever sets up a meeting thinks about the meeting's potential disclosure in the same way you might consider who is invited, how big the meeting might be, or what the agenda should be. In other words, these decisions are probably made as a matter of course.
Rather than engaging with detail in the question, or sidestepping it altogether, Carney attacks the idea that anyone would question the administration's commitment to transparency:
The suggestion that we’re not being transparent is laughable given the unbelievable precedent this administration has set in its -- closing the door, the revolving door, and releasing these records.The tone of this response reads to me like insecurity. If the White House feels vulnerable on lobbying reform, then they should avoid obfuscating on real questions about how the visitor logs policies work. Of course, the fastest way to make these questions go away is to say that the visitor logs release is incidental (not essential) to the lobbying disclosure fight, and that Obama is going to actually push for lobbying reform in Congress. The back and forth in question is below:
Q Given the President’s commitment to transparency, is there any guidance White House officials get about when it’s appropriate to meet off campus with a lobbyist and when a lobbyist meeting should be on campus? MR. CARNEY: This administration has taken extraordinary actions to be transparent. I think this question stems from a story that, frankly, was absurd. We release hundreds of thousands of records voluntarily, a policy instituted by this President because of his desire for transparency -- something no administration had ever done before. The decisions about where -- and those records are available to every American citizen online to be reviewed, and all different types of people come to the White House complex for meetings on issues. And our level of transparency and disclosure is unprecedented because the President believes deeply in it. What I would say is that, as any of you who have walked around this complex know, been in the West Wing -- not like the TV show; very small space, very few meeting rooms. The Old Executive Office Building -- the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a third of which has been under renovation since we’ve been here -- very limited space. Jackson Place is a White House conference center -- so designated -- and therefore when we have large meetings sometimes we use that space if there are no spaces here. So that’s -- Q But would you agree that there’s effectively a transparency loophole here, if the goal is to show when lobbyists, powerful interests, are meeting with White House officials, that right now it’s routine for White House officials to meet off campus with these people and there’s no daylight on that? MR. CARNEY: It is routine for the White House officials to meet with all types of people, including lobbyists, and frequently here. The suggestion that we’re not being transparent is laughable given the unbelievable precedent this administration has set in its -- closing the door, the revolving door, and releasing these records. There are no -- the WAVES system, which is the system that produces the records, operates in certain buildings and not others. And for those decisions, how that operates and why, I refer you to the United States Secret Service. But the principle here is the unprecedented level of transparency that we have provided because we believe deeply in it. Q Would it be inappropriate for a White House official to intentionally arrange a meeting off campus to not be caught by the WAVES records? MR. CARNEY: Look, we have meetings with all sorts of people. We have them here. Those records are available. Q But would it be appropriate if you choose to go off campus because you didn’t want it to show up in the files? It’s yes or no. MR. CARNEY: The guiding principle here is transparency, and we believe that -- nobody is, that I’m aware of, is hiding where they’re meeting. The meetings that happen at Jackson Place, it’s a big meeting place and that’s where -- Q If it’s so big, why not change the policy and release those names -- MR. CARNEY: We do not control where the WAVES is. And I’m not going to -- in terms of -- Q You could release them separately. You could change the policy. MR. CARNEY: Well, Chip, look, I’m not aware what policies might be instituted in the future. But what I think is fundamentally important to remind you of is that we release information that has never been released before. I think you probably remember, you were covering the previous administration. They went to court, to the Supreme Court, to prevent the disclosure of people who were meeting with the Vice President. We voluntarily release the records that are available to us. And we never said that there was a way to get every name in every meeting. The principle is disclosure, and we have gone to extraordinary lengths to make that happen. Q Would you consider changing the policy to increase disclosure? MR. CARNEY: Again, I don’t want to predict about future policies that may be put in place. I just want to remind everybody about what we’ve done and why.
In today's Politico, Chris Frates reports on how some lobbyists now apparently feel like they're being shuttled there instead of the White House complex itself in order to avoid their meetings showing up on the visitor logs.
They're probably right.
Without laws requiring real-time, online disclosure of lobbying activity, we're going to be left with piecemeal policies, and transparency rhetoric that reaches beyond reality.
And meetings with lobbyists will sometimes be scheduled to avoid disclosure.
Now, not all meetings are scheduled at these rooms in order to be hidden, of course. I've probably been to 10 meetings in the conference center in question (and I'm a lobbyist), and these of meetings are often meetings where the administration is trying to maximize disclosure.
But, of course, the White House plans some meetings in order to gain (or avoid) the public eye. Everything the White House does is done with public exposure as a primary consideration. As the article notes, the decision to have a phone call or have an email exchange is often done with an eye to FOIA laws -- emails create a record trail, and phone calls do not. As long as we don't ban phone calls, administration officials will continue to gravitate toward them for more sensitive, or frank communications. Given that context, I'd be shocked if administration officials weren't planning meetings' locations based on whether the meetings will be disclosed.
The problem, though, is that the White House has sold the visitor logs' release as an accountability mechanism.
Whenever the administration talks about taking on special interests, and taking on lobbying, they're giving one side of the story. Their comments should be annotated with the reality of Washington influence.
The visitor logs do provide an unprecedented view into the work and influence of the White House (as Paul Blumenthal's research shows), but it's also a system that's easily (and quite often) evaded. It wasn't designed as an accountability mechanism, but for managing White House security. And releasing the records wasn't designed to affirmatively take on lobbyists, but as a response to a CREW lawsuit.
Somehow, in time since the logs were first released, this has become a hallmark transparency achievement of the administration. It's certainly a transformative development, but Obama has started to hang his hat on it. He shouldn't. The visitor logs are a security system retooled as a disclosure system, and aren't a replacement for real lobbying laws.
As we get a clearer picture of what the visitor logs do, and what they don't do, we should focus harder on what we need to ask for: real-time, online disclosure of lobbying. And we should take the visitor logs for what they are, not what we're told they might be.
Roll Call reports that House Republican leadership met with approximately 100 lobbyists to hash out strategy to defeat financial regulatory reform:
In a call to arms, House Republican leaders met with more than 100 lobbyists at the Capitol Visitors Center on Tuesday afternoon to try to fight back against financial regulatory overhaul legislation. ... “The message was [House Financial Services Chairman Barney] Frank and the Democratic majority are ruining America, ruining capitalism, and stand up for yourselves,” said a lobbyist who attended the meeting. “They said, ‘Look, you all oppose this bill, but only a few of you have come out publicly.’”
Does anyone on Capitol Hill have any interest in releasing these types of visitor logs? Over 100 lobbyists go to meet with House Republicans. House Republicans number one-hundred ninety-eight. Not all of them were likely in this meeting, so in all likelihood we had a 1:1 or greater ratio of lobbyists to lawmakers. Who knows who these lobbyists are?
Of course, this doesn't just apply to this particular meeting between Republicans and their allies, but also to Democratic lawmakers and their lobbyist sit-downs. The White House has a policy of releasing their visitor logs to the public. Congress should consider letting the public know what lobbyists and industry executives they are sitting down with when they discuss legislation.
In case anyone was wondering, the health care lobbyists and executives listed as having visited the White House to discuss health care reform are not big donors to President Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. Of the fourteen visitors, only one, Jay Gellert, CEO of Health Net, contributed money to the President's 2008 campaign. Gellert contributed a small amount, $500, in 2008. The only other notable contribution from visitors to the White House include Wellpoint CEO Angela Braly's $2,300 contribution to Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign.
The White House made public a list of health care lobbyists and executives who have visited the White House one day after it was reported that requests had been denied for the visitor logs. Those listed as attending include PhRMA lobbyist Billy Tauzin, America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) CEO Karen Ignani and American Hospital Association (AHA) CEO Richard Umbdenstock. This is pretty good turnaround after the hit the White House took yesterday on their initial refusal to release the visitor logs.
For the full list of health care visitors, see here.
Get news, videos, tips and more from Sunlight.
