This passage is from page 85 of the Labor, HHS, Education portion of the committee report for the big appropriations bill:
Buildings and Facilities
Within the amount provided for Buildings and Facilities, the bill includes $30,000,000 for nationwide repairs and improvements; $71,300,000 for the completion of Building 24 on the Roybal Campus in Atlanta, Georgia; $1,500,000 for facilities and equipment at the CDC laboratory in Ft. Collins, Colorado; and the remaining funds shall be used to begin planning and construction of Buildings 107 . and 108 on the Chamblee Campus in Atlanta, Georgia.
...don't ...
Continue readingWho’s seeking A Piece of the Action?
The bailout (the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP, etc.) and the stimulus (the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act) are massive pieces of legislation with lots of moving parts. Thus, the more eyeballs on them and what's around them, the better.
A Piece of the Action? tracks one aspect of the unfolding age of bailing and stimulating -- interests hiring Washington lobbyists to at the very least monitor and likely to try to influence how the government spends its money.
As noted immediately below, this database is an imperfect resource. But it's what we can do ...
Continue readingSeventy-Two Hours Is All We Ask
It’s not much to ask Congress, as we do, to make available legislation for public perusal for 72 hours before... View Article
Continue readingLobbying for a Piece of the Bailout and Stimulus Action?
First a word of caution: when the title of a database ends with a question mark (in this case, A Piece of the Action?, approach it with some caution.
I've tried to put together a tool for tracking the lobbying surrounding the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act, and whatever other bailouts and stimuli Congress enacts (TARP II? Son of Stimulus?) over the next few months. Using very imperfect records from two online congressional disclosure systems that track the same information in different ways (the classic square filters, round holes government problem), I've pieced together ...
Continue readingTARP Recipient Banks Need to Disclose Political Giving
Today, the Center for Political Accountability (CPA), a non-partisan group working to create transparency and accountability with corporate political spending,... View Article
Continue readingContent Management Systems just don’t work.
Somebody asked me the other day what I thought of Recovery.gov using Drupal and it got me thinking about content management systems. In my consulting days, I watched companies and political campaigns and non-profits sometimes spend hundreds of thousands of dollars annually trying to make their content management system do what they wanted it to do for their online campaigns. As an honest developer and honest consultant, this made me apoplectic-- I knew that at the end of the day, technically what they wanted was fairly easy to build. But they had to pay hundreds of dollars an hour to get a "Drupal Specialist" at an outside consultancy to set up simple pages because they could not figure out how to get the stuff to work right.
I think if your budget for your website is $40,000/yr or more, you shouldn't be worrying about Content Management Systems at all. You should be worrying about hiring. I'll explain why after the jump.
Continue readingWhat You Can Do For Transparency
Transparency isn’t just something government does. It is an expectation of behavior. Citizens have to demand more transparency from government... View Article
Continue readingWeekly Lab Report 2009.06
The Labs is preparing for a sold out TransparencyCamp (Feb 28, Mar 1). Meanwhile, interesting tidbits continue. Here's what happened this past week at Sunlight Labs...
48 Hour Open Govt Hack-a-thon Announced. Labs Developer James Turk is attending PyCon in Chicago at end of March (Mar 29 - 31) where Sunlight Labs will be hosting a 48 hour Hackathon. Great chance for developers to talk to people at the Labs.
2/13-2/20 Top Sunlight Blog Posts
This week’s most read Sunlight blog posts look a lot like the previous week. 1) “Stop Hiding the Stimulus Bill”... View Article
Continue readingThe States Open Up Their Books
Since Congress passed the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, (also known as the Coburn-Obama bill) which mandated... View Article
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