Our friend Jim Harper has written a post noting that one of the bills made available for comments on his WashingtonWatch.com site (full disclosure: Sunlight has supported it financially) has gotten more than 100,000 comments from users of the site. To me, that seems like a stupendous total for a site that tracks legislation.
So what's drawn so much interest? It's not the House or Senate version of health care. It's not the cap and trade bill designed to marginally address climate change. It's not the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the $787 billion ...
Researching and Writing the White House-PhRMA Deal
At the end of last year, the White House dropped a new pile of visitor log records into the public,... View Article
Continue readingAM Links
1) Wondering where retiring Sen. Evan Bayh might wind up. Considering the array of openings on K Street he may... View Article
Continue readingOur Door Opener (A Science Project)
Life in the labs has been pretty good since we moved into our current offices. Before, we were spread out over two floors: my team was upstairs in a stuffy law office sublet, and the rest of our colleagues were stuck in a homey but increasingly cramped and run-down space four floors below. Since moving everyone to the third floor we've found ourselves with plenty of room, lots more light and a nicer kitchen. It's just a more pleasant working environment in general.
But there's always room for improvement. For one thing, the new space came with new locks -- ones with really expensive keys. Issuing keys to the entire staff wasn't practical, and coordinating door-opening responsibilities in a way that accommodated team members' occasionally odd schedules was inconvenient. Fortunately, the space also came with the button you see to the right.
Located near the reception desk, this button opens an electronic latch on the front door. Pulling the assembly out of the wall revealed the system to be about as simple as possible: the button simply connects two wires. Bridging them with a screwdriver fired the latch (from their small gauge and uninsulated connections, it was obvious we weren't dealing with dangerous voltages, but please don't start pulling cable from your walls unless you know what you're doing).
Connecting two low-voltage wires electronically isn't a particularly hard trick, so I decided it'd be fun to spend some evenings building a system to expose that switch to our network.
FDA Lags USDA in Accessible Food Safety Data
Salmonella in peanut butter. E. coli in cookie dough. Tainted Serrano peppers. Fetid Chinese seafood. All these recent problems fell within the domain of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which shares food inspection responsibilities with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The USDA inspects meat, poultry and some egg products while the FDA monitors everything else. Food-safety advocates say the USDA is more forthcoming about its inspection activities and are prodding the FDA to do better.
Almost two years ago, Washington, D.C.-based Food & Water Watch filed a lawsuit against the FDA after it refused to release ...
Earmark seeking DC lobbyist fetes Coloradans
Louis Dupart, a lobbyist who has successfully sought earmarks from Colorado politicians, will host a fundraising breakfast on Feb. 24 for Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., the second event for a Colorado lawmaker he's scheduled this month.
The event occurs in the middle of earmark season the time of
year when members of Congress decide on their funding requests for the
next fiscal year and submit them to the two Appropriations Committees.
House requests have to be submitted by March 19.
Dupart and his colleagues at The Normandy Group, a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firm that ranks appropriations and ...
Recovery.gov: Completely Tracking One-Fifth of the Recovery Act
In his State of the Union Address late last month, President Barack Obama declared - to great applause - that there were two million Americans working now who would otherwise be unemployed if not for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the stimulus.
Three days later, the same night that Recovery.gov released a slew of new data on individual projects funded by the stimulus, the site Web ticker that tracks the total number of jobs reported by recipients dropped from 640,349 to 599,108.
Did we suddenly lose 40,000 jobs? And didnt the President say that ...
Now Is the Time
There’s no better time to speak up for what kinds of information you want from federal agencies. As yesterday’s launch... View Article
Continue readingA jobless recovery for lobbyists?
Perhaps the most interesting tidbit from the Center for Responsive Politics illuminating analysis of lobbying in 2009, which found a 5 percent increase in the amounts that businesses, trade groups, unions, nonprofits, universities, state and local governments and, of course, lobbying firms themselves reported spending, was this bit:
In a seemingly counterintuitive development, the number of companies or entities that reported lobbying the federal government in 2009 (15,712) increased slightly from the year before (15,049).But the number of actual, registered federal lobbyists decreased, falling to 13,742 in 2009 from 14,442 in 2008. Potential reasons for ...Continue reading
Great data available, but only if you pay up
One of the little-publicized gems on Data.gov comes to us from the Commerce Department's National Technical Information Service.
This office is a clearinghouse of government-funded scientific, technical, engineering and business-related information that provides access to 3 million publications covering 350 subjects. In January, the service added its database to Data.gov, with a description that reads: "The Database represents billions of dollars in research. The electronic file dates back to 1964. NTIS adds approximately 60,000 new records per year to the Database, most records include abstracts and are available in full text. Contents include research reports, computer ...
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