Here’s some potentially encouraging news. On Wednesday, Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General of TARP, disclosed that recently-approved agreements with... View Article
Continue readingUpdate on Earmark Disclosure
Just spoke to Kirstin Brost, the press contact of the House Appropriations Committee, who was kind enough to tell me that while not all of the details of the new earmark rules have been worked out, when members disclose their earmark requests, they will include the name of the beneficiaries. (Our friends at Taxpayers for Common Sense told us they had heard the same thing).
Still under discussion is whether requests will be disclosed in a standardized format or however members choose to release it.
Continue readingLooking At The NYTimes Congress API
Earlier this week the New York Times released their Congress API second politics API (following up on the release of their Campaign Finance API late last year). Here at Sunlight Labs we are always happy to see new APIs that wrap government data and there is definitely a lot to like here, although there are some things that will hopefully change to make the API more useful to the community at large.
Continue readingOpenData Thursday
Massie Ritsch, the Center for Responsive Politics’ communication director, has declared 2009 “The Year for Open Data.” And judging by... View Article
Continue readingNew Earmark Reform Push in the Senate
John McCain and Russ Feingold are putting the old team back together to push for earmark reform in the Senate.... View Article
Continue readingPresidential Library Reform bill…
...is one of the first bills introduced In the House. If passed, it would require quarterly reports on donors to presidential libraries.
Items like this and this demonstrate why this is useful.
Which reminds me -- how is the Clinton Foundation going to handle new donations? Will they periodically add to what they've already disclosed? And will the Bush Presidential Library Foundation release the names of any donors at all? Nope.
Continue readingPresidential Library Disclosure
Maybe I’m tilting at windmills here, but I think that the fact that one of the first pieces of legislation... View Article
Continue readingSunlight @ Google January 9th
In Washington and have nothing to do on January 9th, the New America Foundation, Wired, and Google are hosting a... View Article
Continue readingFive Ideas from MySociety.org
Five ideas for better electronic government from MySociety.org Tom Steinberg, Sunlight friend and director of the UK’s MySociety.org, has some... View Article
Continue readingEarmark Disclosure Diaspora
Yesterday, the House and Senate announced new earmark rules, which Sunlight’s Bill Allison addressed here on the Sunlight blog and... View Article
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