Kaitlin Devine : Sunlight Foundation

Your Tax Day Guide to Government Spending Through the Tax Code

by Kaitlin Devine Apr 18, 2011 11:29 am

It’s that time of year again! With tax day upon us, many people might be wondering where all of their... View Article

OMB Watch’s Six Principles of Federal Spending Transparency

by Kaitlin Devine Mar 24, 2011 2:49 pm

Last Friday, OMB Watch’s Sam Rosen-Amy wrote about their six principles of federal spending transparency, in response to the oversight... View Article

House Oversight Subcommittee Discusses Problems with USASpending.gov Data

by Kaitlin Devine Mar 15, 2011 4:46 pm

On Friday, Ellen testified in front of the Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations and Procurement Reform, a subcommittee... View Article

USASpending.gov Data Quality — Still Bad?

by Kaitlin Devine

technology

Mar 8, 2011 5:08 pm

We at the labs have written about USASpending.gov several times now. We’ve recently been able to make use of their bulk data downloads to regularly populate some of our webapps with federal grants and contracts data. However, we also have an old snapshot of the data that we received in April of 2010. This snapshot was received on a hard drive that we shipped to USASpending engineers -- before the bulk data downloads existed. Thankfully, we don’t have to go through that process anymore. I wondered how the data has changed over the past year. Last year, the USASpending team took a lot of flak for their data quality issues. Has it been improved? I thought I’d take a look back and see how two data snapshots from April 2010 and December 2010 compare.

Why You Should Care About Tax Expenditure Transparency

by Kaitlin Devine Jan 27, 2011 12:44 pm

In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Obama called for ambitious reforms of the tax code: lower rates, fewer... View Article

Searching Earmarks Isn’t Actually That Hard

by Kaitlin Devine

technology

Jul 29, 2010 3:14 pm

Yesterday morning I watched the first markup session of the Earmark Transparency Act. The bill aims to create a comprehensive database of all earmark requests, not just approved earmarks. In its current version, there are over twenty required data elements, including free text descriptions and justifications of the earmark request, as well as related documents. The bill also calls for huge flexibility in the search interface and the API. Overall, it's a win for transparency and a big technical leap forward in terms of how the government thinks about releasing its data. It's biggest opponent in committee was Senator Carl Levin.

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