With the new Congress, many former members and staffers are now legal to lobby. But the law's so full of loopholes that it hasn't stopped many from entering the influence game before their "cooling off" period expires.
Continue readingOpenGov Voices: Transparency is not just television
Our problem has been far too little transparency in the legislative chamber — not too much.
Continue readingWe need an affirmative vision for Congress
We need to channel our frustration over Congress, and use our frustration to ask a more fundamental question: What would a strong, representative, effective Congress look like?
Continue readingCongress API revamps during recess
Congress has been at recess, but here at the Sunlight Foundation we have been working hard to improve our Congress API! There two new endpoints that make congressional and accountability documents searchable, and more information about hearings and legislators.
Continue readingHow Sunlight, EFF and 150 civic hackers reverse-engineered Congress’ email system in two days
It's long dismayed us that Congress doesn't provide an easy or straightforward way to contact lawmakers directly - but all that changed when 150 civic hackers tackled this important problem.
Continue readingBig step for public access to legislation
The House Appropriations Committee made a major move towards improving public access to information, announcing new, machine-readable bulk data on legislation will be available soon.
Continue readingDoes money buy access in Washington? Science says: yes. Plus, a Q&A
If you read this blog, chances are you think money buys access in Washington — and possibly a lot more. But do you have proof? There is actually a remarkable dearth of hard empirical evidence that confirms your suspicions.
Continue readingSample the new, à la carte, Congressional Record parser
Introducing congressional-record! This is a project that can parse the flat text of the Congressional Record from the Government Printing Office's HTML files and produce bulk XML data for the entirety of the digital record — no database required.
Continue readingAskThem.io launches today – questions-and-answers with every elected official
What would you like to ask your members of Congress? What would you like to know from your U.S. senators? What questions would you like to hear your U.S. representative answer, in a public town hall?
Continue readingHow 60,000 bills tried to become law – in one graph
While working on OpenCongress, one of the questions we've been tackling is how close a given bill is to actually passing into law. So we made a graph to help find out.
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