Alison Kim is an intern with the Sunlight Foundation. Her project was to develop an ad advocating for a better... View Article
Continue readingFinancial reform fundraising: Are lobbyists for Wall St. firms hosting hundreds of events for lawmakers?
Sam Geduldig, a lobbyist for high profile financial firms, banks and credit card companies who has the ability to "kill legislative threats to his clients," is listed as a host on 18 invitations to fundraisers for Republican members of Congress and their leadership committees, a Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group review of Party Time data from January 2009 to the present has found.
Geduldig's name appears on both fundraising invitations in Party Time and the
Center for Responsive Politics' lobbying database; Sunlight is also releasing a spreadsheet listing all matches of names hosts to names of lobbyist with links to ...
The Drumbone API
On our new API homepage, we recently added the Drumbone API. It's a light, flexible, JSON-only API over Congressional legislator, bill, and vote data, and we currently use it in two of our products. I wanted to take a minute and explain why we built this, especially in the face of the existing suite of community sources for this data.
Continue readingBig Day for Earmark Transparency
Today’s a big day for earmark transparency. Bill Allison just wrote up some reactions to today’s coming Senate bill, the... View Article
Continue readingEarmark Transparency Act will finally bring transparency to earmarks
The Earmark Transparency Act of 2010, a bipartisan bill introduced today by Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., John McCain, R-Ariz., Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., vastly improves the way in which information about earmarks is disclosed. The bill requires a centralized, detailed, downloadable database that would track every earmark requested.
While Congress has greatly improved the amount of information available about earmarks, it has not provided that information in user friendly formats. A single point of access to machine readable, standardized earmark data has been needed since the House and Senate Appropriations Committees announced that they would require ...
Fifty State Project: Redux
The Fifty State Project is now over a year old and has evolved from a Sunlight Labs side project to a funded endeavor. With this renewed focus on the project we're taking a look at some of the problems we've faced to see how we (and the community) can better tackle them.
Continue readingPOIA Would Make the Government Work Better
Senator Jon Tester introduced the Public Online Information Act (POIA) last week in the U.S. Senate, joining Representative Steve Israel... View Article
Continue readingWhy apply transparency to lobbying?
Multiple stories point to a huge lobbying effort on the part of the financial industry as the Senate debates reform... View Article
Continue readingSenator Tester Introduces the Public Online Information Act
Today, Senator Jon Tester introduced legislation that would revolutionize how the public gains access to government information. The Public Online... View Article
Continue readingMore transparency sought from White House’s OMB in regulation reviews
Under President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, the White House Office of Management and Budget became known as the place where promising new regulations died behind closed doors. So opaque was the OMB review process that a research and advocacy group called OMB Watch materialized in 1983 to “lift the veil of secrecy.”
Ten years later, unhappy with the lack of transparency, President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12866, which sought to “restore the integrity and legitimacy of regulatory review and oversight [and] make the process more accessible and open to the public.”
Seventeen years after that, the question ...
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