Sunlight Foundation

Press Editorials

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May 2009

  • 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.