Sunlight Foundation

Thirty organizations from across the political spectrum joined together to ask Congress to improve public access to legislative information. Our joint letters to congressional appropriators and rulemakers urges Congress to direct that the THOMAS legislative database be published online and to establish an advisory committee on further improvements.

March 8, 2012

Re: FINRA Requests Comment on Ways to Facilitate and Increase Investor Use of BrokerCheck Information

We are commenting on FINRA’s February 2012 proposal on “Ways to Facilitate and Increase Investor Use of BrokerCheck Information.” As advocates for open data, we are disturbed that the proposal lacks any mention of making the data underlying FINRA’s BrokerCheck website search available for download in electronic, machine readable format.

Click here to read the full text of these comments.

The Sunlight Foundation submitted testimony regarding improving bulk access to THOMAS legislative information to the House Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch for a hearing scheduled on February 6, 2012.

The Sunlight Foundation submitted testimony regarding improving bulk access to THOMAS legislative information to the Senate Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch for a hearing scheduled on March 1, 2012.

These remarks were delivered by Sunlight's Policy Counsel, Daniel Schuman, at the House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference on February 2, 2012.

Thank you to Matt Lira and Steve Dwyer for the introduction, and to the House of Representatives for holding such an important and timely conference. This kind of event has been a long time in coming.

I must acknowledge the excellent panels that have been happening all day. And I would be remiss if I didn't commend the Committee on House Administration for adopting "standards for the electronic posting of house and committee documents and data," which are already transforming the House in a very positive way.

Because I'm limited to 10 minutes, let me briefly commend three documents to all of you which lay out a transparency vision in greater breath and detail than is possible here. They are the Open House Project Report, the Ten Principles for Opening Up Government Data, and the report from the Congressional Facebook Hackathon.

I've been asked to speak about benchmarks for measuring success in making legislative data available online. I feel like a kid in a candy store, but I will try to restrain myself. When I speak about the House, please construe my remarks as applying to the Senate and the legislative support agencies as well.

Click here to read the full text of these comments.

Access to government spending information is a fundamental pillar of an accountable government. It provides a basis for citizen participation, promotes government integrity, and encourages greater efficiency.

Current reporting systems do not cover all aspects of government budgeting and spending. In short, people in the government cannot track where every penny goes from the time when money is appropriated to when it is spent. And to the extent this information is tracked and reported to the public, those reports are often difficult to obtain, lack sufficient depth and granularity, and are made available in difficult to use formats.

The following are Sunlight Foundation policy proposals to improve transparency for federal government budget and spending information.

A coalition of organizations wrote to the House and Senate Leadership on August 8, 2011, to urge the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction to operate openly to the greatest extent possible in order to earn the confidence of the American people.

On August 3, 2011, the Sunlight Foundation sent a letter to the House and Senate Leadership that urged that the new Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction operate in a transparent and accountable manner.

Policy Director John Wonderlich testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations regarding the white house visitor logs as a tool for transparency. He begins with, "This disclosure loophole should be fixed, but the visitor logs only capture visitors to the White House complex. Visitor log records will probably never encompass off-site meetings, phone calls, or emails. The most serious limitation of the visitor logs is that they only cover visitors. For comprehensive disclosure of who is influencing the White House, the visitor logs are not the best tool for the job, even if they are the primary tool at our disposal."

Executive Director Ellen Miller testifies before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations, and Procurement Reform. She explains the importance of acknowledging the inherent value of government transparency, but that this acknowledgement is not in itself sufficient. "Transparency initiatives must now yield information that is accurate, complete and useful." She walks through the flawed data underneath USASpending.gov and the challenge of imposing useful unique ids.