Sunlight Foundation

Press Articles & Mentions Archives

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December 2009

  • San Francisco Chronicle - Obama initiative attempts to restore trust

    The recent recovery of 22 million missing White House e-mails is an eye-popping wonder. How much other government information is purposely buried, poorly tracked or laying just out of reach to the public?

  • CNN - Cities embrace mobile apps, 'Gov 2.0'

    Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist and a customer-service guru, was riding on a public train in San Francisco, California, recently when something common but annoying occurred: The railcar filled with people and became uncomfortably hot.

  • The New York Times - Fast Trains Lead Amtrak List of Needs

    Amtrak has been working hard to lure more business travelers to its trains, with advertisements highlighting its advantages over air travel — roomier seats, power outlets on its Acela trains and fewer annoyances. And its efforts have borne some fruit: the number of riders on its Northeast corridor trains has been rising.

  • Congressional Quarterly - Tariffs Spur New Look At Congress' Trade Duties

    Every three years or so, members of Congress and their staffs immerse themselves in the characteristics of complex ingredients used in manufacturing, such as synthetic staple fibers or chemicals like 1,3-Dimethyl-2-imidazolidinone. They're rarely chemists or engineers, but lawmakers effectively hold sway over hundreds of small decisions written to give hometown factories a break on tariffs for the imported materials and components they use in products -- hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of breaks wrapped into one omnibus measure.

  • NBC - KSL TV: Campaign Fundraising Efforts of Senator Bennett

    KSL (a NBC affiliate in Salt Lake City) used the Sunlight Foundation's Party Time project to gather information about Senator Bob Bennett's campaign fundraising efforts:

  • Federal News Radio - Great American Hackathon a success for 'positive hacking'

    Federal News Radio told you last month about the Great American Hackathon. The event was held this past weekend, and hundreds came together to participate in 'positive hacking'. Clay Johnson is the director of Sunlight Labs, the group that kicked off the event, and explains who took part and how exactly hacking could be a good thing.

  • The News & Observer - Burr parties with energy and purpose

    U.S. Sen. Richard Burr is the hardiest partier in Congress, according to a watchdog group that tracks fundraising events. The Sunlight Foundation's Party Time blog has 35 fundraiser entries for Burr in its database, more than any other member of Congress.

  • The Washington Times - Obama falling short of bill-signing pledge

    The White House in recent weeks took a step toward fulfilling one of President Obama's transparency pledges from the campaign by posting a link on its main Web site for Americans to comment on bills he's about to sign into law. That still didn't help Mr. Obama keep his pledge when he signed two giant spending bills in the past five days.

  • Politics Daily - Obama's Health Care Pledge: Getting a Deal Trumps Making the Process Transparent

    When candidate Barack Obama was criss-crossing the country in his two-year presidential campaign, a standard part of his stump speech -- lines that always won him applause -- had to do with his promise to negotiate health care reform in public, on C-SPAN, for all to see. As the wrangling over health overhaul legislation heads into its final stretch, it's clear that was a promise President Obama did not keep. The dealmaking remained behind closed doors.

  • Deseret News - U.S. Sen. Bob Bennett is a 'party animal' for donors

    WASHINGTON — Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, may look like Ichabod Crane and speak with all the sleepy excitement of a banker, but he is one of the biggest party animals in Congress. The Sunlight Foundation reports that he ranked No. 5 out of the 535 members of Congress for the number of political fundraisers he held this year: 29.

  • The News & Observer - Open government for all the Web to see

    RALEIGH -- Towns around Wake County, and the county itself, are putting more information online. This is good news for taxpayers and advocates of open government. It is also good news for government employees who will have more time and better tools to do their work. The John Locke Foundation created NCTransparency.com to encourage governments in this effort.

  • Malibu Magazine - Arianna Huffington [New Media Magnate]

    Since founding the Huffington Post, authoring 12 books and being named one of Time magazine’s most influential people, Arianna Huffington’s influence has spread from the written word to the radio waves on public radio station KCRW-Santa Monica’s political roundtable, Left, Right and Center. A leading voice on the environment, Huffington was most recently recognized at Oceana’s 2009 Partners award gala for her contributions to conservation.

  • InformationWeek - Chief Of The Year: Vivek Kundra

    On the wall of Vivek Kundra's Washington, D.C., office hangs a poster-sized IT diagram with such fine-grained detail that it strains the eye to study it. The diagram, showing the computing infrastructure of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, was created to expose data that could be made publicly available as part of President Obama's government "transparency" initiative. Kundra, appointed the nation's first federal CIO in March, has learned that it's not enough to mandate data disclosure; he must get involved.

  • National Journal - Lobbyists Look For Ways Around New Rules

    Many on K Street have warned that President Obama's rules targeting lobbyists could have the unintended consequence of driving the activity underground. Ethics lawyers Kenneth Gross, a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, and Stefan Passantino, a partner at McKenna Long & Aldridge, described to National Journal one way that that caution may be coming true.

  • CNET - Charting a course from virtual reality to the White House

    Beth Noveck is deputy chief technology officer for the Obama administration. Her path to that role began with putting together the first academic conference on virtual worlds and led her to create what may be the first open social networking project in American government history, a re-working of the U.S. patent review process known as peer-to-patent.

  • Journal Sentinel - Kagen leads in office expenses

    Rep. Steve Kagen is the biggest spender in the U.S. House when it comes to spending taxpayer money on maintaining his congressional office, according to the latest quarterly logs of expenditures by members of Congress.

  • Journal Gazette - Small airports reap federal aid

    New signage is in place at Fort Wayne International Airport, which received about $1.2 million in federal stimulus money.

  • National Public Radio - Open to Scrutiny

    This week the White House announced its Open Government Directive - a set of rules and recommendations governing how federal agencies should make data public and easy to access. John Wonderlich, policy director at the Sunlight Foundation, says releasing this data could have meaningful effects on government accountability and even spur new services in the private sector.

  • Greenwire - DOE: 'The world can contribute' to new clean energy site

    A new Energy Department Web site promises energy information for the masses, using data sharing, open-source and social networking tools to reach people beyond government circles. The Open Energy Initiative is home to more than 60 clean energy resources and data sets, linked by interactive maps and networking sites.

  • KTVU - Hacker Plans

    KTVU - Fox San Francisco discusses the Great American Hackathon that occurred in nearby Cupertino, organized by Sunlight Labs.

  • The Wall Street Journal - As Boeing Hits Turbulence, Uncle Sam Flies to Its Aid

    Airlines are struggling amid the global recession. Boeing Co., meanwhile, is churning out jetliners at its fastest clip in years.

  • Politico - Open Government Directive launches

    A new White House directive released Tuesday on transparency and open government was hailed by advocates as signaling dramatic, aggressive change in making government information available to the public.

  • The Washington Post - Federal agencies must post public data online

    The White House released a series of wide-ranging mandates Tuesday designed to make agencies more transparent and cooperative in the public's requests for information about the inner workings of government.

  • AFP - White House outlines government transparency plan

    WASHINGTON — The White House directed federal agencies to make the workings of government more transparent by publishing more data online and drafting plans to allow for greater public participation.

  • WNYC - John Wonderlich Discusses the Open Government Directive

    The Sunlight Foundation's policy director, John Wonderlich, discusses the White House's Open Government Directive with Brian Lehrer via Skype:

  • USA Today - Obama team launches its interactive 'openness' policy with online access

    Open government? There's an app for that. Or so the Obama administration proposes, rolling out a "transparency, participation and collaboration" directive for all federal departments and agencies at 11 a.m. ET today.

  • CNET - White House unveils open government directive

    The Obama administration on Tuesday officially unveiled its Open Government directive, a document that charges each federal agency with making high value data publicly available and with quickly coming up with formal open government plans.

  • The Associated Press - White House to release new gov't data collections

    WASHINGTON (AP) - The White House on Tuesday instructed every federal agency to publish before the end of January at least three collections of "high value" government data on the Internet that never have been previously disclosed, an ambitious order to make the administration as transparent as President Barack Obama had promised it would be.

  • WTOP - Discussion about the Open Government Directive

  • Slate - Metatransparency

    On his first full day in office, President Obama promised a "new era of transparency" for government. But that promise has gone largely unfulfilled, as the executive branch launched a gajillion clunky Web sites and a nifty Flickr photo stream. Today, the administration finally pinned down its transparency policy: The White House is not just making things public. It's making public the process of making things public. This is not just transparency; it's metatransparency.

  • Roll Call - K Street Files: The Anti-Chamber

    A group of activists has taken out an ad offering a $200,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue. The full-page ad, which ran in the Dec. 4 Washington City Paper, asks would-be tipsters to call a 1-800 number hot line or to e-mail any dirt on Donohue. “We now seek hard evidence that will stand up in the court of law,” the ad states. It wants “documents, affidavits and testimony implicating Donohue in crimes; including fraud, tax violations, campaign finance violations, money laundering, insider trading, election tampering, pension fund and stockholder manipulations.”

  • Concord Monitor - Ever wonder where the money's going?

    How do New Hampshire's members of Congress spend their money? Obviously, personnel is the biggest driver of any office budget - whether in business or politics. Beyond that, 1st District Rep. Carol Shea-Porter has an affinity for travel. Second District Rep. Paul Hodes puts money into maintaining numerous district offices.

  • The Record & Herald News - Herb Jackson: Capital Games

    Bipartisanship on job creation DEMOCRATIC LEADERS should be bringing Republicans in now for talks about how to shape a jobs bill that is widely expected to come before the House next month, Rep. Bill Pascrell says. “Let’s have an inventory of their ideas, our ideas, our bills, their bills and come up with a bipartisan package that we pay for,” Pascrell, D-Paterson, said in a recent interview. “I’m committed to taking $75 million to $100 million from TARP.”

  • NextGov - Ability to access comments gathered by White House questioned

    Open government advocates have criticized the Obama administration for removing some public comments it collected on a site developed for the presidential transition and fear the practice means the White House might stop making some citizen input accessible on its site.

  • NBC - Report Details Spending Among Congress

    COLUMBUS, Ohio—A new report sheds some light on just where your money is going. For the first time, the U.S. House of Representatives posted their expenditures online. NBC 4 took a closer look at the data found on the open government Sunlight Foundation Web site and found that so far, Congresswoman Mary Jo Kilroy has spend more than $881,000 for her office and employees.

  • Roll Call - House’s New Financial Reports Drop Details

    Claiming a milestone in Congressional transparency, the House on Monday for the first time released its quarterly expense reports online. But first, Congressional administrators erased a vast array of details on the expenditures of House Members, making it impossible to determine what much of the money was actually spent on.

  • Observer-Reporter - A History of Thick Bills

    Aside from the usual characterizations of health-care reform as incipient socialism, Republicans have another problem with the bills that have been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate - they're too long.