Gary Andres, a lobbyist for Dutko Worldwide, has been hired by incoming chairman Fred Upton to be the staff director... View Article
Continue readingSenate discloses earmarks…poorly
Senate Appropriations chairman Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, packed more than $130 million worth of defense earmarks into the $1.1. trillion Omnibus Act that the Senate released yesterday. Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., the committee's top Republican, larded the bill with more than $167 million defense earmarks. To find that out, one has to download the earmark table--in PDF--then convert the PDF to a tab delimited format, then plug them into a database (we've done so for Defense earmarks in a Socrata database below).
In January's State of the Union address, President Obama called for Congress to release ...
Continue readingSenate releases Omnibus spending bill
The full text of the Senate's 2011 $1.1 trillion Omnibus bill is here; supporting documents--including tables featuring pages and pages of earmarks--are here. Among the Senate's priorities--$10 million to the John P. Murtha Foundation (in the Defense earmarks, here, and note that the funds were requested by five house members--Rep. Jim Moran, Va., Rep. Mark Critz, D-Pa., Rep. Chaka Fattah, D-Pa. and Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio).
Continue readingNew Financial Services Committee members raise money from finance sector
Eight of the twelve new members chosen to take seats on the House Financial Services Committee can count the finance,... View Article
Continue readingStatelight, Transparency in a Box: Pt. 4(a)
This is a continuation of Statelight, our series on advocating for open government change on a local level. Depending on... View Article
Continue readingThe Senate Should Change its Rules for Easy Transparency Fixes
At the beginning of each new Congress, both the House and the Senate have the opportunity to update their respective... View Article
Continue readingWikiLeaks Thoughts
This post was co-written by Ellen Miller and Mike Klein, Sunlight’s co-founders. The Sunlight Foundation was founded in 2006 with... View Article
Continue readingNation’s biggest banks benefit most from Fed program
Data recently disclosed by the Federal Reserve shows that one of its emergency lending programs, the Term Asset-Backed loan Facility or TALF, led to the purchasing of assets from 56 organizations--among them seven were also aided by the biggest bailout program, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Those seven financial firms benefited from $25 billion--or 35 percent--of the $71 billion in loans issued through through TALF.
More than two years after the financial crisis was touched off by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, when Congress, the Bush administration and independent agencies like the Federal Reserve took unprecedented actions to prop up bankers, brokers and other financial firms, the public is only now beginning to see detailed information on actions the government took that were considered secret before. While the Federal Reserve has released transaction level detail for TALF purchases, something that was ordered by Congress, it has withheld much of the underlying data for other emergency programs; Bloomberg.com reported that the Fed did not release information on the underlying securities purchased through the Term Securities Lending Facility program (TSLF) or the Term Auction Facility (TAF).
Sunlight Congress API & The 112th Congress
We've recently gotten a few questions about our Congress API and when it will include new members elected in November.
The reason that these members are not yet in the Congress API is that most* new members will not take office until January 3, 2011 when the 112th Congress convenes. Because the 111th Congress is still in session we are waiting until these members are sworn in and have offices assigned to them to add them to the API. Rest assured though that we have begun work on tracking down all of the relevant information for the representatives and senators elect and should have a large update for the first week of the new year.
Note: Some individuals, such as Mark Kirk in Illinois were elected in special elections and have already been added to the API. To keep track of what changes have been made already look at our apidata repo.
Continue readingLeading by Example: Earmark Transparency
Due to the failure of Congress to act on President Obama's State of the Union call for a central database of earmarks, a number of NGOs had to build one from the disjointed and disparate disclosures on congressional websites. The database of earmark requests for 2011 was diligently compiled by WashingtonWatch.com, Taxpayers for Common Sense (both Sunlight grantees) and Taxpayers Against Earmarks. They had to troll through more than 39,000 requests sprinkled across congressional websites and deal with horrible data quality issues. As Daniel Schuman expanded on earlier this year, it ain't easy tracking earmarks.
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