As the Trump administration ramps up arrests of undocumented immigrants, the number of individuals incarcerated on immigration charges has increased... View Article
Continue readingResearchers try to cope without HHS public medical guideline database five months after its takedown
A nonprofit has launched a hopeful replacement as HHS agency pays for a study on how to disseminate guidelines in the future
Continue readingMajority of states prohibit access to gun records
(Updated 1/19 7:25 a.m.)
Following a New York newspaper's controversial decision to publish the names and address of local gun owners, state legislators are moving to make such information private, even as a Sunlight Foundation analysis shows that in a majority of states, the data are already off the public record.
Forty states plus the District of Columbia do not make data available about who owns a gun or has received a state permit to carry a gun, according to Sunlight's examination of state gun laws. There are ten states that do make data available ...
Continue readingDark money data
Earlier today, we released an analysis of dark money spending in this year's election. For those who want to play around with the underlying data, here is the raw data: Dark Money Groups
Continue readingCFPB launches public consumer complaint database
Despite opposition from the financial industry, the newly minted Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) today launched a public database of consumer complaints about credit cards--including the name of the company issuing the card--received since June 1. The beta version of the database is available for viewing and downloading on the agency's website. The Bureau plans to add to and tweak it in the months ahead with complaints about other financial products, such as mortgages, student and other types of loans, and banking charges and fees.
"No longer will consumer complaints only be known to the individual complainant, bank, regulator ...
Continue readingKoch lobbied on consumer protection database recently defunded in the House
In mid-February, freshman Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kansas, whose top campaign donor is Koch Industries, proposed a successful amendment in an appropriations bill to defund a new public product safety database recently soft-launched by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). Two years ago, when the bill was being debated, Koch lobbied on this specific issue, citing the "consumer reporting database provision" in legislation that passed that year.
In addition, the congressman's chief of staff, Mark Chenoweth, worked formerly both for Koch Industries and as chief legal counsel for Anne Northup, a Republican CPSC commissioner who has opposed the new database ...
Continue readingObama asks Congress for real earmark disclosure
Right now, three years after Congress began trying to make earmarks transparent, I still have to look in three different places if I want to know how much money Rep. James Moran, D-Va., secured for particular beneficiaries in the Defense appropriations act. I have to read a sideways-posted PDF looking for Moran's requests (like the $1 million for the Ground Combat System Knowledge Center and Technical Inspection Data Capture), and match that project name to one of two enormous PDF files (the bigger is 75 MB) containing earmark disclosure letters from members of Congress (right-side up, but not searchable ...
Continue readingFederal toy and product safety database delayed
Several weeks back I wrote about how this easy-to-use database over at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration where you... View Article
Continue readingOur next big goal, The Fifty State Project
While no single developer has the time to volunteer writing a custom scraper for each state, the goal of having data for all fifty states is entirely attainable if we come together and share the workload. This is where you come in. We need your help databasing state legislation.
Continue readingReal Times Clinton Foundation Donor Database
Bill Allison and Larry Makinson of Sunlight created a DabbleDB database of the Clinton Foundation donor list released yesterday. This... View Article
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