As Congress negotiates a final version of financial reform, one group of lenders has already won a blanket carve out from increased bank regulation — the more than 90 banks and associations of the Farm Credit System, a government-sponsored enterprise that dates back to 1916. The system, which has $30.8 billion in capital, includes about 90 agricultural credit associations that are cooperatively owned, plus five wholesale lending banks.
Rural farm lenders didn’t cause the subprime crisis, and their business practices are above board, says Ken Auer, president of the Farm Credit Council, an association that represents Farm Credit System ...
Quest for EPA documents reveal deliberate misclassification by agency staff
For the past four years, as executive director of Citizen Action New Mexico, Dave McCoy has been hounding the local and federal government for documents.
McCoy alleges that Sandia National Laboratory’s Mixed Waste Landfill monitoring wells are mismanaged by the New Mexico Environment Department, and that the public water supply is in danger of contamination.
He requested documents from an EPA regional office that assessed the state’s oversight of the landfill and after getting little information, complained to the EPA’s inspector general. The watchdog concluded in an April report that some officials deliberately failed to document management ...
Coast guard database makes oil spill penalties nearly impossible to track
The U.S. government has investigated potentially thousands of BP leaks, spills and other incidents but the information is stored in a Coast Guard database that keeps key details such as investigative findings and penalties out of the public’s reach.
More than 8,000 incident reports about BP’s U.S. spills, emissions, and leaks of oil and chemicals have been filed with the National Response Center during the past decade. They range from minor clumsiness such as a tipped drum of jet fuel to the deadly April 21 explosion on BP’s Gulf of Mexico rig. The center ...
Critics say federal student privacy law misused by colleges
Reports of NCAA football violations, lists of who gets free tickets to big games, and disciplinary records of students found responsible for sexual assault are among the records that U.S. colleges and universities have refused to release, citing a federal student privacy law. Last month, a Wyoming community college even went to court to stop a local newspaper from publishing a leaked internal report about a trip the college president took to Costa Rica.
In these examples and many others, the colleges said their hands were tied because of the need to abide by the Family Educational Rights and ...
CPI’s Jim Morris talks about BP’s OSHA violations
Our colleague Jim Morris, who runs Data Mine, our joint project with the Center for Public Integrity, talked about his story on BP's pattern of OSHA violations at its refineries on ABC yesterday. Jim appears at 10:10 in the clip; if the player below doesn't work it's available here.
Probably worth noting that Jim had to request the data under the Freedom of Information Act.
BP blamed in 8,000 spill reports, federal data shows
British Petroleum and its subsidiaries have been the subject of roughly 8,000 reported incidents of spills, emissions and leaks of oil, chemicals and gases into the environment, according to a government database. (download them here).
The National Response Center, which takes reports on oil spills, radiation
leaks, chemical emissions and other environmental accidents, shows dozens of reports stemming from the April 20 explosion at British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon. In addition to the crude oil flowing into the gulf , benzene, ethylbenzene, caustic soda solution and six other chemicals have been released into the water and air, according to incident ...
USDA pulls plug on some farm subsidy data
Identifying some individuals who receive generous federal crop subsidies without going anywhere near a farm has gotten trickier. The Department of Agriculture, which paid $15.4 billion in 2009 subsidies, is no longer centralizing the data that made it easier to pinpoint individuals who receive farm payments through their affiliation in farming corporations, co-ops and other types of business partnerships.
“Recipients can hide behind ‘paper farms’ and reap thousands of dollars in a taxpayers program without being accountable for it,” said Don Carr, a spokesman for the Environmental Working Group (EWG).
EWG has used USDA information to put together a ...
Lobbying data is public but not reliably searchable
The 1995 Lobbying Disclosure Act, requires all lobbyists to file reports with the Clerk of the House of Representatives and Secretary of the Senate and that those two offices “maximize public access” to the documents through “computerized systems.” But the searchable database of every filing by registered federal lobbyists, made available through the Senate’s Office of Public Records, has a major problem: its search engine doesn’t work correctly.
One issue is reliability — searches by a wide array of Center reporters have frequently yielded false negatives or been stymied by system outages. In fact, a registrant search for “American ...
More transparency sought from White House’s OMB in regulation reviews
Under President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, the White House Office of Management and Budget became known as the place where promising new regulations died behind closed doors. So opaque was the OMB review process that a research and advocacy group called OMB Watch materialized in 1983 to “lift the veil of secrecy.”
Ten years later, unhappy with the lack of transparency, President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12866, which sought to “restore the integrity and legitimacy of regulatory review and oversight [and] make the process more accessible and open to the public.”
Seventeen years after that, the question ...
Grab a shovel and help Data Mine dig
From my colleagues at the Center for Public Integrity:
The Data Mine, a project of the Center for Public Integrity and Sunlight Foundation, needs your help to excavate federal data that should be accessible to the public or easier to use. During the past week, Data Mine spotlighted how daily bids for wholesale electricity are kept secret, making it difficult for the public to know if household power prices truly reflect the market, reported on a new lawsuit demanding details about a federal immigration program that helps local police I.D. illegal immigrants for deportation and examined how a new ...
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