Sunlight Foundation

Press Editorials

Press Articles & Mentions for 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?

• 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.

• The Daily News - Baird's transparency effort earns honor, but his colleagues still aren't on board

  The nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation last week awarded Congressmen Brian Baird, D-Wash., and John Culberson, R-Texas, its Sunlight on the Hill Award. It’s well-deserved recognition of their commitment to passing Baird’s proposed 72-hour rule, which would require a three-day “timeout” to give lawmakers and the public time to read legislation before a final vote is taken.

• Longview News-Journal - Amtrak: Money Losses Shouldn't Stop or Slow Service

  A private study indicates it costs about $32 to subsidize each Amtrak passenger, which is about four times what the federally funded rail operator estimates. The study, conducted by Subsidyscope and funded by the Pew Charitable Trust, claims that nearly all of Amtrak's 44 routes lost money in 2008. The main difference in how the losses are recorded is that the rail operator does not count depreciation, and the Pew study did.

• The Chronicle - Our Views: Give Baird Credit for Commitment to 72-Hour Rule

  David Castillo is running for Congress, hoping to unseat Rep. Brian Baird, D-Vancouver. Castillo, in our opinion, is the first credible opponent to emerge against Baird, who has been our congressman since being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1998. Baird has been popular, even in conservative Lewis County, being voted by the readers of The Chronicle as their favorite politician in past years.

• Peoria Journal Star - Our View: House Democrats Must Prove That Ethics Matter

  Have majority Democrats in Congress learned nothing from the GOP's mistakes when it held the reins?

• Battle Creek Enquirer - Lots of Loopholes

  Back in 2007, in the wake of the scandal involving mega-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Congress passed so-called ethics legislation. No longer would lobbyists influence lawmakers with undisclosed campaign contributions, supporters said. They called it the "Honest Leadership, Open Government Act," and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi proclaimed that the legislation would "draw back the curtains, throw up the windows and let the sunshine in."

• Sunday Mail (South Australia) - Register of lobbyists is long overdue

  Travel can often be relied on to provide a fresh perspective of home. Distance can produce a clarity that petty domestics otherwise obscure.

• Colorado Springs Gazette - OUR VIEW: Campaign rhetoric meets D.C. reality

  It should hardly come as a surprise that once in office elected politicians forget about, abandon, or fudge on promises made to get elected. President Barack Obama’s record on transparency and openness, however, is more disappointing than most such instances.

• Brattleboro Reformer - Dogging democracy

  A group of conservative House Democrats from the South and Midwest who call themselves the Blue Dogs are doing their best to stall and obstruct efforts to get a health care reform bill through Congress.

• Journal Star - Not too much to ask from Congress

  Call us naive, but requesting members of Congress to read the bills they pass doesn't seem like too much to ask. That's why the Journal Star editorial board is jumping on the bandwagon of a new movement that has drawn adherents from across the political spectrum.

• The Leaf-Chronicle - Obama promise broken

  Candidate Barack Obama promised repeatedly on the campaign trail that he would run a more open federal government. Although it's still early in his administration, thus far his actions are falling short of his earlier rhetoric.

• The Olympian - Time’s essential to properly review bills

  Congressman Brian Baird, D-Wash., has re-introduced a bill in Congress that would ensure the public and members of Congress have adequate time to review legislation before it comes up for a vote.

• The Patriot-News - Let legislators, public read bills before Congress votes on them

  On Friday, the House of Representatives voted on the American Clean Energy and Security Act, aka the "climate change bill." I'm going to sidestep the content of the bill today to make a different point: The legislation is more than 1,000 pages long.

• Chicago Tribune - Too big, too fast

  Remember that gargantuan climate change bill we told you about last week? It's gotten bigger. Over the weekend, the bill grew from 946 pages to 1,201 pages, according to the Sunlight Foundation. It's still changing, with important amendments in flux.

• Orange County Register - Climate change bill all pain, no gain

  The House of Representatives is preparing to vote Friday on a massive "cap and trade" bill purportedly designed to address global warming - though they call it "climate change" now since the globe hasn't warmed in the past few years - that will probably not be finished until minutes before voting begins. The reason is that proponents are still buying votes from moderate Democrats with special-interest favors and sweetheart deals. Not only will this bill do little or nothing to curb global warming - it's all pain and no gain - it has become a Christmas tree for politically connected industries and lobbyists.

• Clovis News Journal - Cap and trade bill polluted by politics

  The House of Representatives is preparing to vote on a massive “cap and trade” bill today purportedly designed to address global warming — though they call it “climate change” now since the globe hasn’t warmed in the last few years — that will probably not be finished until minutes before voting begins.

• Roll Call - Black Hole?

  The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has served notice that it will file an ethics complaint against Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), and we concur — without prejudging the case — that issues arising from his sexual affair with a former aide deserve examination.

• St. Paul Pioneer Press - Cap-and-trade energy bill: Has anybody read those 1,200 pages?

  Without regard for the merits or demerits of the bill itself, we pause to take note of criticism for the process by which the new cap-and-trade energy bill is headed for a vote on Friday in the U.S. House of Representatives.

• Gazette Times - Editorial: Where there’s influence to buy, there’s a way

  A national news report last week shed some light on another tactic lobbyists use in their efforts to curry favor with lawmakers and other influential government officials. It’s all perfectly legal. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it passes the sniff test.

• The New York Times - Pound-Foolish Lesson for Congress

  So far no moat cleaning has shown up in Congressional fine print, but Speaker Nancy Pelosi is wisely ordering electronic disclosure of House members’ expense spending. The speaker grasped the transparency lesson of the scandal in the British Parliament, where members’ long-hidden expense account abuses forced the ouster of the speaker of the House of Commons.

• Seed Magazine - Gordon Brown reshuffles science, Europe and the pursuit of guilt-free energy, reviving the chestnut to fight climate change, creating clonal crops, and letting the sun shine on government.

  UK’s Blue Skies Turn to Gray? The mood in British science has been bleak of late. Two months ago came the announcement that, while their colleagues across the pond would be receiving a large stimulus package, scientists in the UK would have to do without. Then they found themselves fighting off an attempt by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to ban scientists who had a record of failing to get grant applications approved from even applying for grants at all. And now they find themselves dealing with the fallout from Gordon Brown’s reshuffling of the British government last Friday, when among other things, he abolished the Department of Universities, Innovation, and Skills—the umbrella organization that included the Ministry of Science and Innovation—and created a new Department of Business, Innovation, and Skills that would be home to a restructured Ministry of Science and Innovation that now includes a substantial military orientation.

• Times Record News - Out in the open; Speaker's bill would allow constituents to view expenses

  If Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi makes good on her word, taxpayers will be able, for the first time, to monitor the spending habits of members of Congress with the click of a mouse.

• The Fresno Bee - Cardoza ducked out of first lady's Merced speech to hold fundraiser at the Preakness

  Remember that Rep. Dennis Cardoza's spokesman wouldn't say why the Merced congressman wasn't attending first lady Michelle Obama's speech to UC Merced's pioneer class?

• The (Baton Rouge, La.) Advocate - Our Views: A new light for earmarks

  In “The Purloined Letter,” the stolen missive is hidden in plain sight. Edgar Allan Poe lived long before the Internet, but members of Congress have only gained creativity in hiding things that are supposed to be in plain sight.

• Roll Call - Imperfectly Clear

  Democratic Congressional leaders can legitimately pat themselves on the back for increasing the transparency of the earmarking process — which only raises the question, “Why not make it perfectly clear?” Right now, it’s far from tha

• The New York Times - Data.gov

  When he was information technology chief for Washington, D.C., Vivek Kundra delivered huge caches of information to the Web for public use -- from controversial hourly pay rates of city contractors to the daily pickups of road kill. We hope he does the same and more, now that Mr. Kundra is chief information officer for the federal government.

• Washington Examiner - 96 senators post their earmarks online

  One of the unsung heroes in the nation's capital is Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation. Bill is a former investigative reporter and has for the past three years at Sunlight been a leader in the trans-partisan movement for greater transparency and accountability in government.

• The Denver Post - Transparency takes a big hit

  It's a shame the program to track federal stimulus funds won't be active until October – and not fully online even then.

• New York Times - Sharing Congress’s Research

  The Congressional Research Service investigates important issues and produces detailed, well-written reports that are available to members of Congress but not the general public. A resolution has been introduced in the Senate to make these reports freely available online. It would be an important step forward for government openness, and it would narrow the information gap between Washington insiders and ordinary Americans.

• Lebanon Daily News - Still opaque

  When it comes to government spending, waste and graft are always a risk. So it was laudable of President Barack Obama to seek full transparency in how the $787 billion stimulus package was to be spent -- with the details center stage for all to see.

• Washington Examiner - Senate joins 21st century with high-tech web postings

  Sometimes it seems that encouraging greater transparency in government is the only issue that still attracts bipartisan efforts. Be that as it may, Sen. Jim DeMint, R-SC, and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL, deserve praise for persuading the world’s most exclusive debating society that it should post its voting record on the Internet using the most advanced technology possible. In this case, that means posting Senate vote data using what is known among Internet programmers and entrepreneurs as “XML” programming language. Briefly put, as the Sunlight Foundation’s John Wonderlich explains, XML-based posting “encourages advanced processing and analysis, making votes legible to both humans and computers, and giving us a new view on how Senators vote.” It is no exaggeration to say XML is the key element in making possible Web 2.0, with its marvelous inter-activity among multiple users and sophisticated visualization applications that draw from multiple web sites and databases.

• USA Today - Secrecy gone wild

  When the question is whether to make information public or hide it, the federal government's default button has long been stuck on concealment.

• Rapid City Journal - Editorial: Earmark rule opens the process

  Anything to make the mind-numbing Congressional budget process more transparent and understandable just has to be applauded.

• McClatchy Newspapers - Earmark? Controversial term has vanished in Congress

  Recession? Bailout? Stimulus? Deficit?

• San Francisco Examiner - Stop the stalling and show America the bailout books

  Unwarranted secrecy regarding the largest disbursement of public funds in U.S. history continues in the executive branch. Congress should finally exercise its oversight authority and find out where every last bailout dollar has been spent.

• Newsday - Others should follow Gillibrand's sunlight lead

  The Internet has become a cyber eye on Washington that members of Congress should embrace and expand.

• Roll Call - Earmark Requests Detailed in Database

  In an effort to make it easier to find Members’ earmark requests, the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation unveiled a database today listing every Representative and providing, when available, a link to their requests.

• Yuma Sun - Sunshine Week: Senate should make campaign contributions transparent

  Imagine if Google worked this way: You type in a search term, and, at Google headquarters, an army of workers in the search department printed out the contents of every responsive Web page, then hauled them in wheelbarrows to a results department, where another army of workers typed the contents of those pages back into their computers.

• Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch - Clear the Muck

  Unlike their counterparts who run for the House -- not to mention candidates for president -- candidates for the U.S. Senate submit campaign-finance reports on paper, rather than electronically. They submit the paperwork to the Senate Office of Public Records, which then trucks it over to the Federal Election Commission, which then pays clerical staff to enter the information into electronic databases.

• Winston-Salem Journal - Making contributions transparent

  Imagine if Google worked this way: You type in a search term, and, at Google headquarters, an army of workers in the search department printed out the contents of every responsive Web page, then hauled them in wheelbarrows to a results department, where another army of workers typed the contents of those pages back into their computers. Crazy? Indeed, but that's exactly how the Senate handles its campaign-finance reports.

• The Standard-Speaker - Do public business in the open

  This is Sunshine Week, the annual effort to bring the activities of government at every level squarely into the public eye where they belong.

• The Standard-Speaker - State Senate records still in the dark

  Tradition is regarded with reverence in the U.S. Senate, but it’s time for senators to put away the quill pens and parchment when it comes to telling Americans how much money they raise for their election campaigns.

• The (Petersburg, Va.) Progress-Index - More News

  Tradition is regarded with reverence in the U.S. Senate but even that has its limits. It’s time for senators to put away the quill pens and parchment when it comes to telling Americans how much money they raise for their election campaigns.

• The Patriot Ledger - SUNSHINE WEEK: Senate should make campaign contributions transparent

  Imagine if Google worked this way: You type in a search term, and, at Google headquarters, an army of workers printed out the contents of every responsive Web page, then hauled them in wheelbarrows to a results department, where another army of workers typed the contents of those pages back into their computers. Crazy? Indeed, but that's exactly how the Senate handles its campaign finance reports.

• The Knoxville News-Sentinel - Keep sunshine on officials' shoulders

  Today begins Sunshine Week, the time when corporate and individual members of news organizations remind the public of the vital role they play in gathering and presenting information about the operations of local, state and federal governments and their various agencies - operations that, in one way or another, affect the lives of all of us.

• Birmingham News - A chance to increase government transparency Senators should be required to file electronic campaign finance reports

  Here's an opportunity for Alabama's U.S. senators, Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby, to increase government transparency while saving taxpayer money, paper and time, to boot. They should sponsor the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act (SB482), which would require senators to do like members of Alabama's House delegation already do - file their campaign finance reports in electronic format.

• New York Times - The Cobwebbed Chamber

  When will the Senate boot up and join the rest of us in the electronic data age? The chamber has barely moved beyond the quill pen era when it comes to disclosing vital information to voters about who’s financing senators’ election campaigns and in what amounts.

• Topeka Capital-Journal - Lavish events

  The economy keeps swooning. Americans keep scrimping. And yet some members of Congress keep right on throwing ritzy fundraising events as if the bulls on Wall Street never stopped running.

• Washington Examiner - Editorial: Obama, Reid, Pelosi burn billions behind closed doors

  For officials who came into office promising to operate the most honest and transparent White House and Congress ever, President Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid seem determined to achieve exactly the opposite result. Their actions in securing passage of the $1 trillion economic stimulus bill – the total cost exceeds $1 trillion when interest is added to the $838 billion Senate or $827 billion House versions - would be laughable were not the consequences for the nation so dire. Take for example the trio’s determination to hustle the Senate-House conference committee to begin meeting within hours of Senate passage of the upper chamber’s compromise version.

• Roll Call - Outrageous

  In this year when “transparency” is all the rage, it would be appropriate for the Senate — at long last — to join the House and every federal political committee in filing campaign finance reports electronically.

• Detroit News - Let the sunshine in

  The Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan nonprofit devoted to transparency in government, is calling on President Obama to post the stimulus package online for at least 72 hours before it goes to a final vote. That's a fine idea.

• Orange County Register - Post stimulus bill online first. Why not?

  I get an occasional e-mail from something called the Sunlight Foundation, which so far as I can see is that rare creature, a group billed as non-partisan that really is pretty close to being non-partisan, in that they have fairly consistently encouraged more openness and transparency on both Republicans and Democrats.

• The Detroit News - GOP playing vital role in stimulus bill

  Twice in recent weeks President Barack Obama has reminded Republican members of Congress that there was an election in November, and he won. That's true. There's no disputing that Obama now gets his mail at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C.

• NY Post - And Over the Top

  Say this for Rep. Charlie Rangel, dean of the New York congressional delegation and chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee: He's consistent.