Here's a brief round up of a number of Sunlight tools that you can use to follow updates on the ongoing government shutdown.
Continue readingDemocrats making shutdown an issue in swing races
Democrats are making a political bet that swing voters will make Republicans pay for the shutdown of the federal government.
Sunlight's Ad Hawk database, which tracks political ads and enables smartphone users to identify sources of money behind them, picked up four ads on Thursday by Democratic candidates or political action committees that tie GOP officeholders to the shutdown.
In Virginia, where voters go to the polls Nov. 5 to elect a new governor, Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe is linking his GOP opponent, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, whose outspoken opposition to the implementation of ...
Continue readingClosure of disclosure, part II: Political ad filings go dark
The government shutdown is turning into a major denial of service for journalists and other citizens interested in tracking the influence of big money on politics.
Not only is it preventing scrutiny of campaign finance records -- potentially leaving voters in at least one Louisiana special election with NO information on donors before they head to the polls -- it's also making it next to impossible to provide up-to-date information on political ad buys.
The shuttering of the Federal Communications Commission's website has severely hamstrung Political Ad Sleuth, a tool that the Sunlight Foundation and Free Press developed last year to track those buys at hundreds of TV stations across the country.
And there are plenty of them -- some of them attempt to capitalize on the shutdown itself.
Today in #OpenGov 10/3/2013
National News
- Some of the earliest causalities of the government shutdown have been the various Federal watchdogs. The GAO won't be publishing reports, the CBO will be drastically reducing their workload, and FOIA processing is being crippled by "nonessential" status. (Washington Times)
- The Federal Election Commission may be down to only the four active commissioners, but they want campaigns and candidates to continue filing their campaign finance reports. While the servers are still up and running, there's no telling what might happen if the shutdown drags on, keeping the folks who make sure the computers are working away from their desks. (Washington Post)
- Lobbyists aren't letting the shutdown close their calendars. Despite logistical issues and the budget standoff sucking oxygen away from any other issue, many lobbyists reporting attempting to keep up a normal workload around the hill. (POLITICO)
- In non-shutdown news, a Nevada lawyer and lobbyist with close ties to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was sent to the slammer for two years after being found guilty of making more than $100,000 worth of straw donations to Reid's 2008 campaign. Reid has not been specifically implicated in the scheme. (POLITICO)
- A group in Madagascar is tracking presidential platforms ahead up elections later this month. Madatsara breaks election issues down into 9 topic areas and compares the various candidates stances on the issues. (Global Voices)
- Singapore is looking to open source solutions to push forward business analytics development for future projects. The government signed a Memorandum of Understanding with leading open source provider Red Hat recently. (Future Gov)
- Efforts underway in Wales will hopefully result in a better system to track transit access in Wales. The Welsh government commissioned Mapumental to figure out how to plot transit times to and from a variety of points. (My Society)
- A new app from a Code for America team in South Bend, Indiana takes aim at the city's vacant housing problem. CityVoice is a voice-based app allows citizens to report vacant houses by making a quick phone call. (Code for America)
How do other countries perform when it comes to procurement transparency?
The first thing to admit is that the title of this post might be a bit misleading. While in the last few months Sunlight was indeed busy researching procurement transparency on many different levels, we’ve never had the intention (or the power) to do holistic international research on procurement transparency, nor did we want to rank countries based on their performance. This would have been an endless - and probably pointless - effort. Our motive behind mapping the global landscape of procurement disclosure trends was to find best practices, powerful online tools and also to gain inspiration for Sunlight’s recently released open data guidelines for procurements.
Continue readingGovernment APIs Aren’t A Backup Plan
When the government shuts down and takes most of its data with it, the public needs to have a backup plan.
Continue readingReasons to Not Release Data, Part 3: It’s Hard!
Earlier this month, we shared a crowdsourced collection of the top concerns data advocates have heard when they’ve raised an open data project with government officials at the federal, state, and local level, and we asked for you to share how you’ve responded. Dozens of you contributed to the project, sharing your thoughts on social media, our public Google doc, and even on the Open Data Stack Exchange, where 8 threads were opened to dive deeper into specific subjects.
Drawing from your input, our own experience, and existing materials from our peers at the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership and some data warriors from the UK, we’ve compiled a number of answers -- discussion points, if you will -- to help unpack and respond to some of the most commonly cited open data concerns. This mash-up of expertise is a work in progress, but we bet you’ll find it a useful conversation starter (or continuer) for your own data advocacy efforts.
Click here to see other posts in this series.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing challenges and responses from our #WhyOpenData list that correspond to different themes. Today’s theme is Difficulty.
Continue readingMortgages, health care and animals: What won’t get governed during shutdown
With the federal government in shutdown mode, so is one of its main products: rule writing. Federal bureacrats who develop the regulations to implement major laws--from the Dodd Frank financial reform law to food safety standards to the Affordable Care Act itself--are out on furlough. This prospect may not bother many on the Republican side of the aisle, where regulations are not particularly popular anyway and efforts to roll them back are common. But many of these rules affect the very fabric of daily life.
This list illustrates some of the issues that are important to many Americans and that will be on hold until the budget impasse is resolved. It's by no means exhaustive, and the devil is often in the details when it comes to regulation writing. Dig in to the list and click around to read agency proposals and comments submitted about these proposals, or do your own searches on Docket Wrench.
Continue readingBreaking the limit: How the stealthy wealthy engaged in checkbook lobbying
Striking down the limits on how many federal candidates and party committees an individual can shower with campaign cash--the main issues in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission--would not only open the door to bigger money in politics, it could also open the door to stealth lobbying campaigns on Capitol Hill by well-heeled donors. We know that because it already has happened, when limits were in place but not enforced. More than two decades ago, when Congress considered reforms that would put the brakes on hostile takeovers by corporate raiders, some of them used their checkbooks and their access to derail the effort without ever disclosing their lobbying efforts. Back in 1989, federal election law limited the amount an individual could give to candidates, parties and political action committees to $25,000. That year Texas billionaire and corporate takeover artist Harold C. Simmons contributed $45,500. That year Simmons, a staunch Republican now best known for seven-figure contributions to groups like Swift Boat Vets for Truth and American Crossroads, gave plenty to GOP pols. But, unusual for him, he also wrote $1,000 checks to Democratic stalwarts like Sens. David Boren, D-Okla., Paul Simon, D-Ill., and Max Baucus, D-Mont., as well as a $15,000 check to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
Texas billionaire Harold C. Simmons
The 1,000 donors most likely to benefit from McCutcheon — and what they are most likely to do
If the Supreme Court lifts limits on aggregate individual campaign contributions, as it may very likely do in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, it will empower the limited number of donors who have the heart, the stomach and the bankrolls to contribute hundreds of thousands of their own money to determine who is in office. These truly elite donors are poised to be the big winners.
In our recent analysis on the 1% of the 1%, we looked at the top 31,385 donors (.01% of the U.S. population). Today, we will focus just on the top 1,000 donors: the donors most likely to up their political giving if they are given the chance to donate even more. All of these donors contributed at least $134,300 of their own money in the 2012 election.
Our best guess is that parties and leadership committees will converge on these donors, giving roughly 1000 people a unique ability to set and limit the party agendas. Presumably, they will shift their money from super PACs to party committees because giving directly to party and leadership committees affords these donors more opportunities to talk directly to party leaders, and increases their bargaining power within the party structure. And party leaders want to control the money and the messages it buys.
2. Almost 2/3 of the Top 1,000 donors primarily support Republicans
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