So what is it with members of Congress and land deals? Sen. Harry Reid failed to disclose what the Associated Press describes as "a $1.1 million windfall on a Las Vegas land sale" on property he hadn't owned for three years. "The complex dealings allowed Reid to transfer ownership, legal liability and some tax consequences to Brown's company without public knowledge, but still collect a seven-figure payoff nearly three years later," reporters John Solomon and Kathleen Hennessey wrote. Rep. Charles Taylor, meanwhile, "owns at least 14,000 acres of prime land in western North Carolina. He's also the local congressman. So when he steers federal dollars to his district, sometimes he helps himself, too," John Wilkes reported in the Wall Street Journal (the story is available online here). Sen. Bob Menendez has his lease deal with nonprofit for which he's secured federal funds, while House Speaker Dennis Hastert has his own profits from earmarks and land deals. The real estate dealings of Rep. Gary Miller and Rep. Alan Mollohan have also come under scrutiny (as noted in the Journal article).
Continue readingDefeated Earmark Disclosure Puts Sham House Rule to Shame
Robert Novak has more on the backdoor maneuvering and dust-up between Sen. Tom Coburn and Sen. Ted Stevens over the issue of disclosing earmarks that he'd alluded to earlier. Coburn sponsored a measure that would require the Pentagon to issue report cards on the utility and effectiveness of projects earmarked by members of Congress; Stevens didn't care for the scrutiny. The intra-party squabble doesn't interest me so much as the bottom line:
The earmark process enables the congressional-industrial complex to fund projects the military does not want. This year's bill appropriates money to buy 10 unrequested C-17 Globemaster cargo planes from Boeing. It also funds 60 F-22A Raptor stealth fighters, not supported by the Pentagon and opposed by McCain and Sen. John Warner, Senate Armed Services Committee chairman. F-22A appropriations are guaranteed for three years, reducing leverage with contractor Lockheed Martin. Continue reading
APIs from IMSP in Official Use
Last week, the Institute on Money in State Politics annouced the launch of their APIs that give outside Web developers the ability to access and display the Institute's data on their own Web sites, to program fully interactive displays using Institute data within their Web pages, and to create applications that return live data from FollowTheMoney.org.
The first group to jump into using APIs is Project Vote Smart. Here's what it looks like on the Project Vote Smart Web site.
Continue readingEagle Eye Earns a Gold Star
If the news from Washington tends to give you indigestion more often than it makes you feel good, here’s a story that should warm your heart with something other than heartburn. Eagle Eye Publishers, a for-profit research and consulting firm in northern Virginia did something recently that’s distinctly odd behavior in the business world – helping a non-profit prepare a free website that, at least at some levels, competes with their own subscription-only database designed for high-budget customers.
One of Eagle Eye’s premier products is their database of government contracts – a much cleaned-up version, and vastly easier to navigate, than the federal government’s own website.
Continue readingRanking Influence in Washington
It's not just because of the name that I like the idea behind this new report (actually, the first installment of a new report) from Public Citizen's Congress Watch: it brings together several kinds of information on members of Congress in one place. It lets users look at contribution totals to incumbents from lobbyists, PACs, donors who don't live in the member's home state, small (under $200) donors, as well information on the junkets that members and their staff have taken. It also provides nice summary data by state (here's New York, for example).
Continue readingImitation is the Highest Form of Flattery
Andrew Cuomo, who is running for Attorney General in NY, issues a press release today that sounds like it came from us:
ANDREW CUOMO PROPOSES "PROJECT SUNLIGHT" TO INCREASE GOVERNMENT TRANSPARENCY AND DISCLOSURE
....The Attorney General's Public Integrity Unit would for the first time integrate and improve existing databases so that campaign finance data, lobbying information and state contracts can be viewed and easily searched by concerned citizens. With Project Sunlight, a citizen frustrated by high drug costs would be able to use her computer at home, type "prescription drugs" in a search box, and find out if her elected officials take money from drug companies, what drug bills they voted on, and even which companies ended up with lucrative state contracts.
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A Red Letter Day for Transparency
Two questions were answered on Tuesday: what’s the government spending its money on, and what do members of Congress own.
And when I say answered, I don’t mean in a sound bite or a pie chart or a news conference, though there was one of those too. I mean virtually every question you could dream up about who’s getting federal government contracts and grants, or which companies members of Congress are investing in, you will now be able to answer yourself, in seconds, on the web.
Continue readingMomentum
Well, we certainly feel some momentum from our experiment in collaborative research over the weekend, and we’re bracing for the huge burst of interest that’s been expressed in the databases that are being released tomorrow by our grantees OMB Watch and Center for Responsive Politics. More than 225 attendees have signed up to join the press conference either in person or on the web. (Here’s the sign up information, join us if you can. (Go to www.ConnectLive.com/events/sunlightfoundation at 9:30 am tomorrow morning.)
Continue readingCitizen Journalists Investigated 435 House Members in less than two days!
Citizen Muckrakers have investigated 437 members of Congress, and tentatively found 19 spouses who were paid by a member's campaign committee-totaling some $641,200 since January 1, 2005. Incredible!--in less than two days, a virtual investigative team dug through campaign finance records for 435 current members of Congress, trying to find out of they paid their spouses from campaign funds. There were 24 of us (myself included--I looked up six members) who left our names, and 83 members investigated by anonymous researchers. I'm not sure whether that's actually 83 individual researchers, or one very industrious but bashful person, or some total in between, but our tech folks should be able to give us some idea of what the actual number of participants was.
Continue readingWow! You Finished It Already!
In less than 2 days, over a holiday weekend, YOU have completed the research on the first step of our first major distributed research assignment -- Congress's Family Business. While we still have to verify the work, it appears that 16 current lawmakers are employing spouses in their campaigns. We'll be back to you as soon as we can with our final calculations!(we might even break some news with this.) No doubt, Bill will check in later in the day with some more of the details -- like how many folks participated in the project, etc.
So much for what people here in Washington say about the cynicism of the public! Anyone who believes that citizens don't want to get involved in monitoring what their representiatives do here in Washington has just been proven wrong.
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