As stated in the note from the Sunlight Foundation′s Board Chair, as of September 2020 the Sunlight Foundation is no longer active. This site is maintained as a static archive only.

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Tag Archive: Transparency

S.1 In Action: Senate Ethics Committee Reports

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I've spent a lot of time on this blog deriding the Senate Ethics Committee - and the frivolous complaints leveled by Sen. John Ensign against the current ethics process - for failing to investigate Senators who have allegedly violated the trust of their office (or the law, in the case of Sen. Ted Stevens). Thanks to the recently passed ethics bill, S.1, we finally get some transparency in the Ethics Committee and some statistical information about the committee's activities. The Committee is now required to issue an annual report of activity. Here are some highlights:

Number of alleged violations received in 2007 (from any source): 95 (not including the 16 carried over from 2006)

Number of alleged violations dismissed in 2007 (including 7 cases carried over from 2006): 86 (71 for lack of jurisdiction; 15 for failure to provide sufficient facts)

Number of alleged violations which resulted in a preliminary hearing: 16 (includes 9 matters carried over from 2006 and 5 matters that have carried into 2008)

Number of alleged violations that resulted in adjudicatory review: 0

Number of alleged violations dismissed for lack of substantial merit: 11 (includes 7 matters carried over from 2006)

Number of matters resulting in disciplinary action: 0

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An Empty Gesture on Earmarks from Bush?

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In tonight's State of the Union address, President George W. Bush reportedly will announce that he will issue an executive order telling federal agencies to ignore earmarks unless they are part of future appropriations bills. Earmarks now are specified in the committee reports that accompany, but are distinct from, the legislation. Here's a bit from a White House flier (attached) announcing the new policy:

The Executive Order will provide that with regard to all future appropriations laws and other legislation enacted into law, executive agencies will not commit, obligate, or expend funds on the basis of earmarks from any non-statutory source, including requests included in congressional committee reports or other congressional documents, or communications from or on behalf of Members of Congress, or any other non-statutory source, except when required by law, or when an agency itself decides that a project or other transaction has merit under statutory criteria or other merit-based decision-making.
That last "or when..." raises one question for federal agency heads: Does the decision to fund each and every earmark in a committee report in order to avoid the wraith of outraged Appropriations Committee members who control your budget fall under statutory criteria or other merit-based decision-making? Mark Tapscott calls the new policy a "Bush earmark cave-in," while Glenn Reynolds says "it's the right thing to do."

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New FOIA Law Signed

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In all the festivities surrounding the New Year's holiday, you might have missed President Bush signing the Open Government Act of 2007 on Monday without comment, the first reform of the Freedom of Information Act in a decade. David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Center for Citizen Media, hails the act for expanding the definition of who is representative of the news media. "This change would significantly benefit bloggers and non-traditional journalists by making them eligible for reduced processing and duplication fees that are available (to members of the media)."

The Associated Press reports that the new law "is aimed at reversing an order by former Attorney General John Ashcroft in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, in which he instructed agencies to lean against releasing information when there was uncertainty about how doing so would affect national security."

(Updated: The Associated Press reported on the new law; the First Amendment Center did not issue a statement as previously reported.)

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Public Accountability Is Going Down

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File this under "Two steps forward, one step back."

Secrecy News highlights a change in disclosure policy by several federal defense intelligence agencies in anticipation of last week's launching of USAspending.gov. Claiming that online disclosure of their unclassified contracts would compromise security, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) asked the Department of Defense for and received permission to keep the documents secret. "I appreciate your concerns that reporting these actions to the publicly accessible website could provide unacceptable risk of insight to your individual missions and budgets," wrote Shay D. Assad of the Under Secretary of Defense in a December 7 memorandum (pdf). "But when it comes to intelligence spending, there will actually be a net loss of public information because categories of intelligence contracting data that were previously disclosed will now be withheld," writes Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News editor.

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Major Victory for Transparency

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This afternoon, our friends at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) got a major victory for all who care for openness and transparency. 

A federal judge ruled that the logs kept by the Secret Service of visitors to the White House and the Vice President's residence are public records and subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. The Bush White House had been fighting the release of the documents in an effort to hide evidence and details of visits from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and prominent religious conservative leaders. The White House insists that the logs are presidential records and should not be public, and wants the Secret Service to destroy its copies of the logs once they are turned over to the White House. They were wrong.

In sum, according to CREW: "As a result of today's ruling, records of visits to both the White House complex and the residency of the vice president are now publicly available through the FOIA."

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What Documents Can Tell Us

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Earlier this week, the Associated Press profiled the phenomenally successful career, by Washington standards at least, of Ed Gillespie, now Counselor to the preisdent, and former and likely future mega-lobbyist. The catalyst for the story was the AP getting a hold of Gillespie's 18-page financial disclosure report he submitted to the Office of Government Ethics as a White House staffer.

The document reports "assets of between $7.86 million and $19.4 million when he began working at the White House in June, illustrating the wealth available to those at the top of Washington's lobbying industry." Gillespie got rich as a founding principal of Quinn, Gillespie & Associates, a lobbying firm he started in 2000 with former Clinton White House counsel Jack Quinn. The firm has been hugely successful, having earned $18,000,000 in income in 2006 and almost $9,000,000 so far this year.

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Legal Defense Funds

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Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal by Rep. Jim McDermott of a ruling that he acted improperly by passing on to reporters a recording of a 1996 telephone call where Republican leaders talked strategy in regard to the ethics case pending against former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). This week's decision also leaves standing a previous court ruling saying that McDermott would have to pay $60,000 in damages and $800,000 in legal bills to now House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), who had sued the Washington Democrat in 1998.

The question is, how is McDermott going to pay? CQ looked into whether he can use a legal-defense fund to help pay Boehner and it seems possible. It turns out that McDermott is one of six House members who maintain active legal defense funds, reporting contributions this year. CQ says that the rise in these separate accounts funds is a result of an increase in Justice Department and Federal Election Commission investigations.

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Sen. Ensign Still Opposes Transparency

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Sen. John Ensign continues to block the campaign finance electronic filing bill that Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Russ Feingold have been attempting to pass all year. The bill, which the Sunlight Foundation has fought hard to get passed, has 41 cosponsors including 16 Republicans (including Sens. Bob Bennett, Lamar Alexander, and John Cornyn among others). Despite this not being a partisan issue, Ensign insists on blocking consideration of the bill by offering an irrelevant and controversial amendment, which initially came from the offices of Sen. Mitch McConnell, to require outisde groups filing ethics complaints to disclose their funding sources. This has been noted as unconstitutional law and is an absurd requirement to demand.

Is the Senate Ethics Committee truly overburdened with cases? Sen. Ensign says that complaints in the Senate can be written "on a beverage napkin or written in crayon." I'm not sure what number of ethics complaints are submitted by drunks and children (or some combination of the two) but it can't be that high. In fact, the only known ongoing Senate Ethics Committee investigation was started by the Senate Republicans when they filed a complaint against Sen. Larry Craig for pleading guilty to possibly, maybe, perhaps being gay. Ellen just linked to a list of potential ethical issues facing a number of Republican Senators that could be investigated. If outside groups can file these complaints so easily - in crayon and on a beverage napkin - why isn't the Ethics Committee investigating anything?

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The Office of Congressional Ethics

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Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Mass.) and Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the chairman and ranking member of the House ethics task force, will soon recommend that an independent "Office of Congressional Ethics" (OCE) be created to initiate ethics complaints against House members. If done properly, the OCE will serve to shore up the House Ethics Committee, long a toothless watchdog of House Members who seem more willing than ever to cross ethical lines. The New York Times editoralizes about this today.

One of the key features of the OCE is that if complaints against lawmakers are ultimately dismissed, the dismissals would have to be publicly disclosed. As Rep. Capuano said, "Transparency is the key to the whole thing. People have to know that the ethics process is working." We don't know the details of the required disclosure yet, but we at Sunlight would respectfully remind Mr. Capuano that real transparency means timely disclosure in an easily accessible format on the Internet.

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