The Sunlight Foundation has joined with Americans for Prosperity, OMB Watch and Taxpayers for Common Sense to ask you to ask your members of Congress to take the following pledge:
Earmark Transparency Pledge I, __________________________________ (Member of Congress) do hereby pledge in the spirit of transparency and reform that effective immediately I will voluntarily post on my official Congressional website a regularly updated list of every earmark and/or targeted tax benefit that I request. Continue reading
Taxpayers for Common Sense Find $744 Million Worth of Undisclosed Earmarks
When the House Armed Services Committee disclosed earmarks in the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act, it left out 53 of them worth a total of $744 million, according to a new report from our friends at Taxpayers for Common Sense:
When the House of Representatives passed new rules just a few days into the new Congress requiring lawmakers to disclose the earmarks they insert into bills, applause was tempered by Washington concern about whether or not lawmakers would actually do what they say. Continue reading
Rep. Issa Calls on Colleagues to Disclose Earmarks
Rep. Darrell Issa, one of a handful (but a growing handful) of members who post lists of their earmark requests online has sent a "Dear Colleague" letter to fellow House members asking that they do the same (full text, plus a release, is here:
An effort is reportedly underway on the Appropriations Committee to hide Member “earmark” requests from public scrutiny. According to the Associated Press, “Democrats are following an order by the House Appropriations Committee chairman to keep the bills free of such earmarks until it is too late for critics to effectively challenge them.” While the leadership of the Appropriations Committee forges a procedural shield to protect wasteful spending and thwart public scrutiny of projects, I urge you to counter this wrong-headed approach and join the handful of Members who have made a voluntary public disclosure on their websites of all FY 2008 project requests made to the Appropriations Committee. Continue reading
OTA Renewed, Gets $2.5 Million
Lawmakers renewed funding for the Office of Technology Assessment yesterday at a markup for the Legislative Branch Appropriations bill. We don't have full details yet but the subcommittee approved $2.5 million to reestablish the OTA, which will provide nonpartisan technological and scientific research to members of Congress and the general public. Congress has finally reversed what science blogger Chris Mooney called a "stunning act of self-lobotomy." Let us all rejoice in knowing that Congress has its brain back again. This will hopefully bring new research that will support our mission to use Internet technologies to make the Congress more open, transparent, and accessible to the public.
Continue readingFree PACER docket search from Justia
I stumbled across this site by accident, but I'm glad I did -- a free search that allows you to look up federal court cases without logging into the Pacer system. It seems to be a little more user friendly than the U.S. Party Case Index. To get the actual court documents, however, you'll still need a PACER account and will still have to pay eight cents a page to view filings...
Continue readingTwittering All Public Laws
Someone has finally made a useful feed of information with Twitter. Twitter is mostly a collection of people's every minute musings about what they are doing at that very minute ("I'm twittering"). It's sort of an RSS feed of poems from the Zenrin Kushu ("Sitting quietly, doing nothing. Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself"). Josh Ruihley, from Sunlight Labs, however, decided to do something useful with Twitter and created the first Twitter feed of U.S. Public Laws. Everyday new laws are introduced in Congress and with the Public Laws Twitter feed you can now stream the laws introduced in Congress onto a widget on your blog or keep track of the laws for your own purposes through the Twitter feed or through RSS. Check it out.
Continue readingAFP Offers Rep. Obey Citizen Help, Oversight for Earmarks
Via Mark Tapscott comes word of this excellent offer from our friends at Americans for Prosperity: Citizen oversight of the earmarking process. Let's all offer some our time, plus our common sense and good judgment, to Rep. David Obey, his fellow appropriators and the House Democrats so that they don't have to labor in secrecy to evaluate all those earmarks all by themselves. In a June 6, 2007, letter addressed to Obey, AFP president Tim Phillips writes,
Continue readingPelosi to Allow Outside Groups to File Ethics Complaints
Over the past two days The Hill and Congressional Quarterly have reported that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) intends to allow outside groups to file ethics complaints against members of Congress. This would be a restoration of the policy that was abolished in 1997. Since 1997 only sitting members of Congress have been allowed to file ethics complaints. This policy led to an ethics truce between the two parties where an ethics complaint to the Committee by one party would result in retaliation by the opposing party. The truce has effectively shut down all internal accountability in the House of Representatives. Allowing citizens and organizations to take part in the ethics process in Congress is not only a sensible way to engage the public in yet another part of government but it also is a good policy in terms of reducing ethics violations and corruption.
Continue readingDemocracy Connect, Indian Style
Nearly every day someone emails me an idea or website that is doing some exciting work but I was particularly taken by a site called DemocracyConnect which is working in India in our sweet spot -- the intersection of politics, technology and civic engagement.
Writes one of the movers behind the site -- Anshuman Bapna:
An average member of the Indian Parliament has 2M people in their constituency and the legislative infrastructure to create large-scale social impact during their elected term of office. However, they are hampered by a lack of relevant information, management expertise and apathy from both development organizations and the larger population.
Our approach is to think of these elected representatives as social entrepreneurs. We make them successful by providing information support to them on legislations, providing oversight for development projects in their constituencies and by connecting them to a global talent pool of professionals with specific areas of expertise. Technology plays an important role in making this possible....
Over the past 2 years, Democracy Connect has reached out to over 50 Members of Parliament in India through mini-workshops and policy briefings.
Here's just one cool element of their site - a wiki to provide policy advice on request to members of Parliament. The idea behind the Virtual Policy Cell is that a volunteer team of experts and individuals across the world will work collaboratively to come up with a fact-based response to specific questions of interest.
Very impressive group of folks behind this effort.
Send any ideas their way. I'm sure they'd appreciate it.
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OMB will track phonemarks, but last-minute-marks present more of a problem
Christin T. Baker, the associate director for communications in the Office of Management and Budget, voicemails and emails that OMB already tracks "nontraditional sorts of ways of getting projects funded" in its database, something they'll continue to do in 2008. Here's one example from 2005, gotten by downloading the CSV data from the site into an excel spreadsheet, sorting on the field called "Citation_Source" and looking for the ones that aren't bills or conference reports.
CitationSource: Senator Stevens' colloquy
Reference: Congressional Record S12030
Method: User entered excerpt
Citation Excerpt: The Following Language is from Congressional Record ...
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