Lots of activity in Congress about issues that Sunlight cares about.
First, the bill sponsored by Senator Tom Coburn and Senator Barack Obama that would create an online searchable database for government grants and contracts is scheduled for mark-up today. According to CQ Reports, Sen. Tom Coburn said that the bottom line is: "Why shouldn't Americans know where their money is being spent?"
We couldn't agree more. We're particularly excited about this bipartisan legislative initiative because we have had a sneak preview at the grants and contracts database that OMB Watch is preparing to release in the early fall. It's a wow -- an information powerhouse. (Yes, I feel badly about mentioning it here and not giving you a link to it, but I guess it's OK to tease our readers once in a while.) When I saw it, I thought of a hundred ways to find out more about who's getting how much money from government, and for what projects, than I ever thought was possible. OMB Watch's team has done an amazing job in putting it together. They are looking for some citizen beta-testers, so if you're interested let me know and I will pass your name along to them. This database will be live in six weeks or so.
Continue readingCrunched. Boinged. Digged.
We're delighted that so many sites have been picking up the news of our Popup Politicians' widget. You can find it on Boing Boing and TechCrunch, Open Source News, The Left Coaster and a host of others. A number of excellent suggestions have already been made. Some folks want us to expand us to include state and local politicians, some want to see other information in the profile such as positions on environmental issues, or links to criminal records. Keep your ideas coming on how to improve on it.
More Polling In The Works
We are so pleased with the results and process of our first online polling that we are now thinking about our next steps. We'd love to dig a little deeper and ask a series of questions about specific ways to make members of Congress and their business more transparent.
We might ask some of the questions that we asked in our launch poll, like requiring disclosure of all money raised for a campaign by registered lobbyists (this idea has been picked up by Public Campaign Action Fund and Common Cause in their recentlly launched national pledge campaign), requiring specific disclosure of earmarks, or requiring lawmakers to file reports on legislation they have introduced that would benefit a campaign contributor.
Continue readingSo Clear
Kudos to ThinkProgress for this analysis and presentation of the scandal that is the hallmark of this Congress. Following all the strands of the current Congressional scandal has even defied the best of us. I don't know how many hours it took ThinkProgress' staff to put this together: it's taken a couple of years to unravel the information. If there was real time, online disclosure of trips, gifts, spousal employment, personal financial information, campaign contributions and expenditures, meetings between lawmakers and lobbyists, connections to charities, we'd be a lot better off.
A Wonderful Widget
We've been promising to introduce our Sunlight Labs more formally and today we're doing that, along with the announcement of a really neat widget that we're calling "Popup Politicians." Before you imagine the worst, like, Representative J. Dennis Hastert or Sen. John McCain or Representative John Boehner popping out of cake, take a look at what Greg Elin and Duncan Werner have developed -- a web page plug-in that links the reader to information about who's financing the lawmaker's campaign, the lawmaker's voting record, and their profile on Congresspedia. The widget appears as a small popup window when you mouse-over the little sun icon that appears at the end of the name.
Continue readingAn Introduction: Carl Anderson
How lucky can we get? We've had another amazing person join the Sunlight team, specifically working on the Sunlight Labs effort and I want to introduce him to you.
Carl Anderson has been involved in things I can barely grasp -- agent-based modeling and complex systems. (This, of course, means he has the qualifications to understand Congress.) He's the author of more than 35 scientific journal papers and an interdisciplinary scientist. He has worked in biology (Duke; Regensburg, Germany; Aarhus, Denmark), mathematics (Sheffield, UK), and industrial and system engineering (Georgia Tech) university departments.
Continue readingWhat You Don’t Know Can Hurt You
Senator Tom Coburn is holding a hearing this morning with the above title. The hearing is focusing on the nearly complete lack of transparency for federal spending decisions and his bill to remedy that. He says his bill would create a "google-like search engine" that will disclose all the recipients of federal funding. Could there possibly be a sane argument against this? The co-sponsorship alone (Sen. McCain and Sen. Obama) suggests that this legislation is significant.
A number of folks are testifying this morning, including Gary Bass, Executive Director of OMB Watch. OMB Watch is working on just such a searchable online database of all grants and contracts as a grantee of Sunlight. It's pretty certain that the database will be ready (look for it in the early fall) before Coburn's bill becomes law given the indefensible hurdles the bill faces. But the OMB Watch database will reveal how "what you don't know can hurt you" and hopefully give a push to enacting a Coburn-type bill down the road.
Continue readingEarmarks and Ethical Transparency
Maybe no one else will find this amusing or ironic, but I certainly did. The Washington Post published a letter to the editor of mine yesterday, but didn't post it online. It’s a little surprising that a paper with such a robust Web presence wouldn’t post online all the letters to the editor it prints on paper.
Here it is:
The Post correctly identifies pork-barrel spending "earmarks" as a major problem on Capitol Hill ["Pet Projects," editorial, July 5]. However, this issue is just one symptom of a much larger problem - the lack of transparency in Congress.
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Overheard Only In Washington
So there I was in a very public setting today and the woman next to me was talking with a Senate staffer very loudly on her cell phone. After dropping names of the ex-Senator's top aide she said: "Tell that to the person who has 21." Then she sternly said into her earpiece, "I have one, repeat one, earmark that I need. I know that the Senator is under a lot of pressure about earmarks and lobbyists but this is just one request." Without taking a breath she then said, "Yes, $500 would be perfect. That's a very generous personal contribution."
The next series of calls had to do with various meetings she was attending and arranging for doctors, pharmaceutical companies and Big Pharma itself. She mentioned her name in one of the conversations and when I returned to the office I looked her up. A big time lobbyist, former congressional staffer, who's working for a former lawmaker's lobbying firm on behalf of pharmaceutical firms, cigarette makers, brokerage firms, and even at one time, Enron.
Continue readingAnnouncing Mini-Grants
The Sunlight Network, our affiliated advocacy group, is announcing today a series of "mini-grants," in the $1,000 to $5,000 range, for local or regional nonprofit organizations and non-affiliated groups that have innovative approaches to strengthening the relationship between Members of Congress and the citizens they represent. (Note that the website for the Sunlight Network is not yet live.)
We are particularly encouraging applications from existing small nonprofits, local or regional chapters of national organizations and groups of individuals. Grants are available to augment existing projects or to jumpstart new ones. Grants will be made available on a rolling basis starting July 15. Sunlight believes that open, honest, sincere representation is possible, and that engaged citizens can make it happen. These are grants designed to stimulate your action!
We'll make our decisions based on projects' creativity, their likelihood of success, and the degree to which they match Sunlight's goals. We strongly favor efforts that are themselves open and democratic in their internal structure. We are very excited to see what you come up with.
Send a one-page summary of your proposed project, a budget (including the amount requested from Sunlight) and contact information to Zephyr Teachout, National Director, Sunlight Network, zteachout at sunlightfoundation dot com.
We don't want to prejudge what might come in the door, but here are a couple of some hypothetical examples which might jump-start your thinking:
An Austin, TX website that aggregates news and commentary on local issues and blogs about it might seek a grant to expand their work to cover their Congressional delegation. The money they request is for travel, a video camera, Lexis-Nexis access.
A group of students in Miami want to investigate the placement of a controversial landfill so they ask for a grant to pay for research that seeks to show that business interests which may have supported local politicians may have distorted decision-making regarding placement of the landfill. Their grant funds the investigative report and its broadcasting on the web.
Citizen Porkbusters in Kansas wants a grant to create an online video to educate other citizens about the powerful moneyed interests behind the promotion of ethanol. They plan to place the video on YouTube.
We can't wait to hear your ideas. Send them to Nisha Thompson at nthompson at sunlightfoundation dot com.
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