Sunlight Foundation Press Release Archive
Press Releases for 2009
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Nearly 200 Developers Across Country Participate in Sunlight Labs' "Great American Hackathon"
Washington, DC - The Sunlight Labs, Sunlight Foundation’s open source development community, held the first “Great American Hackathon” this past weekend, attracting nearly 200 software engineers and designers from across the country. The Hackathon was comprised of over twenty events nationwide and attracted attention from some of the biggest names in software development including Sunlight Labs partners Google, RedHat, Fedora and Mozilla. All Hackathon events and participants are listed at http://www.sunlightlabs.com/hackathon09/
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Sunlight Hails White House's Open Government Directive as Bold Step Forward to Strengthen Federal Transparency
Washington, DC - The Obama administration has set an unprecedented plan into action today in its Open Government Directive that will open public access to the information and policy-making process of the federal government. Today's release of the Open Government Directive shows that the administration takes its commitment to transparency seriously. The Sunlight Foundation applauds this long-anticipated action by the Administration and is pleased to see its own recommendations heeded.
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Sunlight Makes Congressional Expenditures Easier to Search and Analyze
Washington, DC - Two days after the U.S. House of Representatives posted its quarterly Statement of Disbursements online for the first time, the Sunlight Foundation released a searchable of database of each House member's expenditures to make it easier to search how lawmakers spent their funds. The Office of the Chief Administrative Officer posted the quarterly Statement of Disbursements in PDF format at http://disbursements.house.gov.
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Sunlight Labs Kicks Off Great American Hackathon
Washington, DC –Today, the Sunlight Labs, Sunlight Foundation’s open source development community, announced its first Great American Hackathon, to be held December 12-13, 2009 in partnership with Google, RedHat, Fedora, Mozilla, Open Source for America and Code for America. Sunlight and its partners created the Great American Hackathon to spur the open source community to organize events across the country to cooperatively work on technological solutions for making government information more publicly accessible online.
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New Multimedia Investigation Shows How Congress and Special Interests Kept Crucial Clinical Trial Data Secret
Washington, DC - As part of a new series highlighting cases of secret government data that affect the public, today the Sunlight Foundation released a new new multi-media investigation that examines the medical industry forces that successfully lobbied Congress to keep critical information about clinical trials regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) out of the public eye.
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Sunlight Foundation Calls for Congressional Hearing on 72 Hour Rule for Posting Legislation Online
Washington, DC – As part of its ReadTheBill.org campaign, the Sunlight Foundation led a broad coalition to petition the House Committee on Rules to hold a hearing on requiring the House to post all non-emergency legislation bills online for 72 hours prior to consideration. In its letter to Speaker Pelosi, Minority Leader Boehner, Chairwoman Slaughter and Ranking Minority Member Dreier, the coalition asked the Committee to take prompt action to analyze the effects of amending House rules to create such a transparency measure.
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Hidden 'Bundles' of Lobbyist Giving Show Full Court Press by Health Care Donors
Washington, DC-A month-long collaborative investigation by the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Responsive Politics has uncovered never-before-seen webs of campaign contributions from outside lobbyists and their clients, who are all important players in the health care reform, to key members of Congress. The investigation identified outside lobbyists that donated to the same members of Congress as their clients, and strongly suggests that special interest giving is enhanced by the K Street contributors they hire.
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The Sunlight Foundation Names Apps for America2 Winners
Washington, DC –The Sunlight Foundation awarded Datamasher.org with the grand prize of $10,000 for Sunlight’s Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge. Datamasher.org is a Web application designed by Forum One Communications that lets anyone—no programming background required—choose different government data sets and mash them up to create visualizations and compare results on a state by state basis. Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs, announced the winners and distributed over $25,000 in awards late yesterday at the Gov 2.0 Expo hosted by O’Reilly Media and TechWeb.
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The Sunlight Foundation Commends White House for Releasing Visitor Logs
Washington, DC - Today, the White House took a huge step toward a more transparent government by announcing a new policy to voluntarily disclose White House visitor access records. Sunlight has called on the Obama administration and advocated for the disclosure of these visitor logs, and has blogged about the need to release this information here and here. Each month, records of visitors from the previous 90-120 days will be made available online. While Sunlight commends the White House for this historic policy, ultimately, Sunlight believes all government information should be disclosed online in real time.
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Sunlight Foundation & ProPublica Create New Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker
Washington, DC - Lobbyists for foreign interests disclosed more than 22,000 contacts with executive branch officials, members of Congress and their staffs and others as they sought favorable policies for their clients on everything from tax and trade issues to the resolution of longstanding territorial disputes and U.S. defense policy, a new analysis of filings made in 2008 under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) has found. The $87 million in fees the lobbyists received seemed to otherwise be a good investment for their foreign clients: members of Congress introduced legislation, wrote letters, or often took action soon after meeting with the lobbyists.
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New Features on Revamped OpenCongress.org Help Americans Better Track Legislation and Watchdog Congress
Washington, DC - OpenCongress.org, the free and open-source Web site for tracking and understanding the U.S. Congress, recently unveiled new features for monitoring the latest actions on Capitol Hill and communicating with legislators as part of a comprehensive site redesign and upgrade. OpenCongress is a project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation.
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Sunlight Foundation Releases Web Service for Organizing Volunteers to Increase Government Transparency
Washington, DC - Today, the Sunlight Foundation launched Transparency Corps, a Web service that enables citizens to help create greater government transparency by performing small, discrete tasks to analyze and enhance the usefulness of government data. Sunlight’s Transparency Corps aggregates simple actions—such as evaluating lawmakers’ earmark requests—that require human intelligence, but not specialized political knowledge. Sunlight demonstrated the new, open source site at the annual Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York.
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The Sunlight Foundation Lambasts Secrecy of New Cap and Trade Energy Bill
Washington, DC - This Friday, Congress plans to vote on a bill that could fundamentally alter the American economy, dramatically affect the climate, and have huge implications for our national security. But, right now no one knows what's in the bill or how it came to be.
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House Introduces Bill to Enact 72 Hour Rule Mandating Online Publication of Legislation Before Debate
Washington, DC - Late yesterday, Reps. Baird and Culberson introduced a resolution (H. Res. 554) to require the U.S. House of Representatives to post online all non-emergency legislation 72 hours before debate begins. This resolution will create more transparency of the legislative process by giving lawmakers the time to debate bills with full knowledge and consideration of their implications, while giving citizens time to read legislation and voice their concerns to their congressional delegation. Sunlight posted a copy of the resolution on its site.
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The Sunlight Labs Organizes Open Goverment Developer Community to Collaboratively Bid on Recovery.gov
Washington, DC –The Sunlight Labs, Sunlight Foundation’s open source development team, is organizing the hundreds of developers in its community, and the public at large, to collaboratively bid on the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board’s request for proposals (RFP) to build Recovery.gov. Through its blog, wiki, listserve and Internet chat room, the Sunlight Labs is leading the discussion on how to build a new Recovery.gov site. The RFP, which Sunlight obtained on Tuesday afternoon, is due June 26.
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Speaker Pelosi Heeds the Sunlight Foundation’s Call for online disclosure of House Members’ Expenditures
Washington, DC - Today, following the Sunlight Foundation’s calls for online disclosure of House members’ expenditures, Speaker Pelosi instructed House administrators to post House members’ expenses on the Web. These statements disclose how representatives spend their Member Representational Allowances, which are federal funds allocated to support expenses such as staff salaries, official travel and administrative supplies.
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The Sunlight Foundation Announces Data.gov Mashup Challenge
Washington, DC - Today, as the Obama administration released Data.gov, a centralized repository of downloadable government data, the Sunlight Foundation announced its third mashup contest, Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge, to solicit creative software applications using Data.gov’s information.
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'Filibusted' Wins Sunlight's Apps for America Mashup Contest
WASHINGTON, DC-The Sunlight Labs, Sunlight Foundation’s open source development community, has announced that “Filibusted” won the grand prize of $15,000 in Sunlight’s Apps for America government mashup contest. Filibusted, created by Andrew Dupont, uses data from GovTrack.us to track Senate votes, and highlights which senators use parliamentary procedures to block votes on legislation. The $5,000 second prize went to “
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Sunlight Foundation Proposes How the Obama Administration Can Improve Lobbying Disclosure
WASHINGTON, DC – Yesterday, the Sunlight Foundation unveiled designs for a model system of Web-based lobbying reporting — both disclosure forms and methods of aggregating such data. This system demonstrates how the Obama administration can fulfill and broaden the president’s new policies to provide more transparency about lobbying executive branch officials.
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Statement on Bonus Exemption Provision in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
Statement from Ellen Miller, executive director and co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation on Senator Dodd’s bonus exemption provision in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (AARA) of 2009 permitting AIG bonuses:
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Sunlight Foundation Announces $4 Million Investment from Omidyar Network
WASHINGTON, DC – The Sunlight Foundation announced today it has received a $4 million grant from Omidyar Network to support Sunlight's efforts to improve access to existing government information, digitize new information, and create new online tools to foster greater government transparency.
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OpenCongress Celebrates Sunshine Week by Unveiling New Wiki, Open Source Video and Inline Commenting on Bills
WASHINGTON, DC – OpenCongress.org, a project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation, recently announced new features on its open source site to make it even easier to follow the latest actions in Congress. The new features include an integration of a wiki, video of House and Senate floor proceedings, an RSS feed that tracks "rushed" bills, version tracking for legislation and the ability for citizens to comment on specific sections of pending legislation.
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Editorial Memo: The 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. Crazy? Indeed, but that's exactly how the Senate handles its campaign finance reports.
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Editorial Memo on Strengthening Government Transparency
Public oversight, civic participation and electoral engagement—the stuff of democratic accountability—all are predicated on the idea of a transparent, open government. Transparency is the cornerstone of public trust; without the former, the latter is meaningless.
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Sunlight Foundation Launches ReadTheBill.org Campaign to Urge Congress to Post Bills Online 72 Hours Before Debate
Washington, DC – Today, the Sunlight Foundation announced ReadTheBill.org, a grassroots campaign to create a more transparent government by calling for all non-emergency legislation to be publicly available online for at least 72 hours before Congress begins debate. Joining Sunlight in supporting its ReadTheBill.org effort is a bipartisan group of individuals and groups, including Newt Gingrich, Joe Trippi, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Citizen and the Federation of American Scientists. Just yesterday, the House of Representatives approved a $410 billion omnibus spending bill, two days after the bill was posted online. That's not the first time important legislation has rushed through Congress—in near record time, Congress recently passed a 1,100-page, $787 billion stimulus bill only 13 hours after it was posted online. “ReadTheBill.org is nothing short of an effort to give Congress the chance to be a truly deliberative and representative democratic institution,” said Ellen Miller, executive director and co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation. “In the Internet age, there’s no reason important legislation should be deliberated under a shroud of secrecy. Instituting a 72-hour rule for posting bills online will give lawmakers the time to debate bills with full knowledge and consideration of its implications, while giving citizens time to read legislation and voice their concerns to their congressional delegation. Our elected legislators can’t adequately represent their constituents’ views if their constituents don’t have the chance to weigh in on a bill because they have never seen it.” Existing rules in the House and Senate are supposed to require a waiting period between the time a bill is reported and consideration, but neither chamber’s current rules provide that the public, too, should have the chance to review legislation. Moreover, the directive requiring the availability of bills has been routinely ignored no matter which party is in the majority.
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Sunlight Foundation Calls for Online Public Scrutiny of Stimulus Legislation
WASHINGTON, DC – Today, the Sunlight Foundation issued a statement urging Congress to post the Stimulus legislation online for at least 72 hours bill before consideration. Additionally, Sunlight urged President Obama to post the final version of the bill passed by both the House and Senate for at least five days on WhiteHouse.gov.
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Indecent Disclosure: Rangel Filings Don't Account for Assets Worth Between $239,026 and $831,000
WASHINGTON, DC – Rep. Charles Rangel, chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, failed to report purchases, sales or his ownership of assets at least 28 times since 1978 on his personal financial disclosure forms, according to a new analysis by the Sunlight Foundation’s Real Time Investigations. Assets worth between $239,026 and $831,000 appeared and disappeared with no disclosure of when they were acquired, how long they were held, or when they were sold, as House Rules require.
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Sunlight's Apps for America Contest to Award up to $15,000 for Best Government Mashups
Washington, DC - The Sunlight Labs, Sunlight Foundation’s open source development team, announced a new mashup contest, Apps for America, which will award developers for best applications based on data from Sunlight and its partners that makes Congress more accountable, interactive and transparent.
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Sunlight Foundation's New Transparency Timeline Shows the History of Congressional Public Access Reforms
WASHINGTON, DC – As the 111th Congress convenes, the Sunlight Foundation just released a new, interactive timeline that highlights key moments in the history of transparency reform in Congress and tells the story behind the events that have led to the current level of openness on Capitol Hill.
