The Center for Investigative Reporting and the Los Angeles Times used some of our correspondence logs to track down letters members of Congress were writing to federal agencies requesting funding for certain projects. Here's a link to the LA Times story.
CIR's Will Evans mentions Real Time and posts some of the letters CIR received here.
Continue readingDefense correspondence logs
Here's the correspondence logs we received from the Department of Defense recently. We received about 100 pages of documents in PDF format that we converted to text.
Continue readingDefense Contractors Reap Windfall in 2005 Earmarks
By Larry Makinson and Anupama Narayanswamy
The nation's top defense contractors were also the biggest beneficiaries of congressional earmarks in 2005, an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation has found. Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics led the pack. Those four corporations collected a combined $1.09 billion in earmark awards. Overall, the top 20 corporate recipients of 2005 earmarks were all defense contractors.
The analysis was based on the database of earmarks from 2005 produced, and posted online, by the federal government's Office of Management and Budget. OMB collected the data from the agencies responsible for ...
Continue readingWhistleblower Complaints to DoD
Two letters members of Congress wrote to the Defense Contract Audit Agency reveal two cases of employees of government contractors who alleged wrongdoing by their companies.
We learned about the letters from our Freedom of Information request to the agency for congressional correspondence logs. We have received DCAA's responses to both members of Congress, but not the original letters to which DCAA was responding. When we receive those, we'll post them, highlighting any relevant information from them.
Here's what we do know:
On Jan. 5, 2007, Senator Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., wrote to DCAA, which does all contract ...
Continue readingFCC Correspondence Logs
Here are the two Federal Communications Commission spreadsheets, converted from PDF to excel. The first one is for January and February and the second for March.
Continue readingFOIA on a Floppy
Here's a picture of the most recent addition to the stack of FOIA clutter on my desk.
Luckily, Bill's computer still has a floppy drive so we could read the word document sent to us on a 3.5-inch diskette by the Department of Transportation. Responses to our FOIA request for congressional correspondence logs from Transportation have been trickling in slowly because each agency within the department has been replying separately.
The Department of Transportation is not the only government entity that's technologically challenged. The list is long. But the two responses we have received from the ...
Continue readingAn interview with a former Alaska lawmaker on the Veco scandal
Air Force Logs of Correspondence
We received a response from the Air Force yesterday for the congressional correspondence logs, both for our first request, for logs in January and February, and the second, for March.
After reading the list, I emailed the Air Force and asked for copies of some of the letters and responses for some on the list. On the March list, there a bunch of letters written by members of Congress to the Secretary of the Air Force regarding the CSAR-X contract given to Boeing. (That's the same issue that McCain wrote the Air Force about.) Although it ...
Continue readingGoing Back To An Earlier Post…
on the letter Senator McCain wrote to the Secretary of the Air Force: Here's a copy of it, from the Project on Government Oversight web site. I'm trying to get Air Force's reply to this as well, which again the Senator's office refused to release.
Continue readingDOD misinterpreted the FOIA
A couple of days ago I followed up with DOD about why they denied our FOIA for correspondence logs earlier. Their denial was based on the fact that the records were too large and they wanted us to narrow our request. On talking to them I figured that DOD officials had interpreted our FOIA to include all documents and not just the logs of correspondences. So, they agreed to re-open our FOIA based on this clarification.
Unfortunately, other Agencies have also been misinterpreting out FOIAs, assuming we are asking for copies of the letters and not just the logs.
So ...
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