The Carson City Airport Authority, which has benefited in the last four years from more than $13 million in federal funds, is now slated to receive another $9.6 million in stimulus money, even though an independent auditor cited problems earlier this year with how it manages its federal grants.
The airport authority, which saw a board member resign in 2008 while calling for an independent investigation into the authority's directors, is one of dozens of organizations that received funds from the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act despite having flaws in their management systems. Overall, federal agencies ...
Continue readingSupport for Baucus Healthcare Plan Brings in Donations
Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., the key architect of one of several competing health care reform bills under consideration in Congress, isn't up for re-election until 2014, yet his campaign committee has enjoyed an influx of contributions. In the third quarter of 2009, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee added more than $136,000 of campaign cash to his coffers, bringing his total for the year to more than $448,000. Overall, Baucus has more than $2.2 million in his campaign account, the majority of which is left over from his 2008 re-election bid.
Continue readingRecovery.gov recipient schema
Digging into recovery.gov data
We're playing with the new stimulus data released last week on the Recovery.gov Web site - analyzing the data, trying to find out which states are receiving the most money and what kinds of projects are receiving the most money. Data on contracts can be downloaded from FPDS site and the grants and loans from the USAspending Web site.
Although there is an easy way of downloading contracts data from FPDS, those wanting either grants or loans data will have to rely on the USASpending site, which allows downloads of slices of the data, from each agency or state ...
Continue readingCorruption charges prompt Congo to lobby Congress
Opening the Window on Foreign Lobbying
Adding it up: The Top Players in Foreign Agent Lobbying
The FOIA Process: Still as Archaic as Snail Mail
There are very few occasions in the Sunlight offices for us to use the fax machine, so we were somewhat out of practice when we learned that we had to use it to send Freedom of Information Act requests to the Department of Treasury. At least the fax is instantaneous: we received most of our responses from them via snail mail.
To do this story, which involved looking into various agencies in charge of the bailout of the financial sector, we had to file seven FOIA requests--all sent via fax to Treasury--then make several phone calls to follow up on ...
Continue readingIs FOIA any better under Obama? An anecdote today, data later
Newsweek's Michael Isikoff report on the Obama administration's mixed record on transparency got me to thinking about our own experience with FOIA requests. Isikoff notes,
As a senator, Barack Obama denounced the Bush administration for holding "secret energy meetings" with oil executives at the White House. But last week public-interest groups were dismayed when his own administration rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for Secret Service logs showing the identities of coal executives who had visited the White House to discuss Obama's "clean coal" policies. One reason: the disclosure of such records might impinge on privileged ...Continue reading
The unbearable opacity of TARP: Government agencies can’t tell us who’s in charge
The new report to Congress from SIGTARP -- the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program -- begins by noting that TARP has evolved into "12 separate, but often interrelated, programs involving government and private funds of up to almost $3 trillion" of an "unprecedented scope, scale, and complexity." The report highlighted the possibilities of fraud and conflicts on interest in the bailout process and calls for better disclosure. We continue to find that even some of the most elementary details about the program -- like who is actually managing distribution of the bailout money to financial institutions -- is still shrouded ...
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