The bailout (the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP, etc.) and the stimulus (the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act) are massive pieces of legislation with lots of moving parts. Thus, the more eyeballs on them and what’s around them, the better.

A Piece of the Action? tracks one aspect of the unfolding age of bailing and stimulating — interests hiring Washington lobbyists to at the very least monitor and likely to try to influence how the government spends its money.

As noted immediately below, this database is an imperfect resource. But it’s what we can do with our inadequate disclosure regimen, and you can help make it better.

Click on any line item in the database, scroll down to the bottom of the screen, and see if you can help track down information on the client — its headquarters location, a brief description, a link to information on its lobbying interests — to make this resource more useful.

Take a look at this entry, culled from the database — it lists San Mateo County as the client. The actual form filed at the Senate tells us that San Mateo County is in California, its headquarters is in Redmond, CA, zip code 94063 — adding that information helps to make this resource more useful (I’ll start posting a map if we start getting a lot of location information). You can also find that the county lists, among its lobbying interests, TARP. It’s no secret why the county government is interested–a link that would be well worth adding to the database in the “What do they want?” field.

I’ll keep updating the database a few times a week with new filings.