Tag Archive: Grants

No-See-ums

by Zephyr Teachout Jul 12, 2006 3:12 pm

later

Ah, The Value of Databases

by Ellen Miller Jun 23, 2006 10:11 am

Not much attention was paid to a new report issued by Rep. Henry Waxman on government contracting.

Bottom line? The value of federal contracts has grown 86 percent between 2000 and 2005, going from $203 billion in 2000 to $377.5 billion. Waxman's team studied more than 500 sources, including government and independent agency reports, audits, and investigations to prepare the report. Waxman's staff also interviewed government procurement experts and relied on data from the Federal Procurement Data System to reach its conclusions, the report said. Sounds like pretty thorough research to me.

Giving Money Away

by Ellen Miller May 3, 2006 10:53 am

We've had numerous requests -- both by phone and online -- over the past several days about how to apply for grants from the Sunlight Foundation so I wanted to take a couple of minutes today to talk about that.

First you should know that we know that there is a large community of people and organizations who are already doing amazing things when it comes to making information about Congress available and accessible. We want to encourage them to go further by digitizing more information to make it searchable more easily and to present it in a truly public-friendly fashion. Our primary example of this is a grant we have already made (to the Center for Responsive Politics) to take the Personal Financial Disclosure Forms now filed on paper (!) by elected officials and make a searchable database out of them. Another example is a grant to OMB Watch to create a searchable database out of government grants and contracts.