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 ...
Civil rights groups want details on immigrant fingerprint program
As Arizona turns up the heat on illegal immigrants, civil rights groups are demanding the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) release details about a rapidly expanding federal program that helps local police identify illegal immigrants for potential deportation. The Center for Constitutional Rights and two other groups filed a lawsuit on April 27 attempting to force ICE to turn over data about its “Secure Communities” program after failing to get the information through a Freedom of Information Act request.
“This program has very little public scrutiny. There’s very little known about the way it operates,” said Sunita ...
Local officials say they’re in the dark on dangerous freight rail traffic
Sixty-two cities in the United States have been deemed "high threat urban areas" by the Department of Homeland Security, meaning they’re susceptible to attack by terrorists targeting railroad tank cars loaded with chlorine gas or other deadly poisons. Under a 2007 law, freight rail companies were ordered to analyze their operations in these and other areas and select the "safest and most secure practicable" routes for hazardous cargo.
The analysis is complete, according to the Federal Railroad Administration. But some elected officials and emergency responders say they’re being kept in the dark. "Regulations issued last year give the ...
Gov’t Database of Bad Doctors Blocks Public From Seeing Names
In the mid-1980s, incompetent and negligent doctors were moving freely between states, with state licensing boards and hospitals largely oblivious to lawsuits or disciplinary actions in other locations that might have flagged bad providers.
In response, Congress passed the Health Care Quality Improvement Act of 1986, which created the National Practitioner Data Bank, a repository of information that includes malpractice payments, license revocations and loss of clinical privileges for physicians, dentists, nurses, pharmacists, physical therapists and other professionals. “The NPDB is primarily an alert or flagging system intended to facilitate a comprehensive review of health care practitioners' professional credentials,” says ...
Description of Citizenship Database Available – If You’re Willing to Pay Nearly $112,000
After taking nearly four years to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request, the U.S. immigration agency is demanding $111,930 for records that describe what is in a government database of claims for U.S. citizenship – not the actual database itself.
Balking at the agency’s request, the non-profit group that filed the FOIA says the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is acting contrary to President Barack Obama’s openness directive, creating “arbitrary cost barriers” to what should be public information, and may be illegal.
The Transactional Records and Access Clearinghouse, a Syracuse University-based research ...
Public Blocked From Key Parts of U.S. Dam Inspection Data
In the middle of the night on Nov. 6, 1977, the Kelly Barnes Dam near Toccoa Falls, Georgia, gave way, unleashing a wall of water that killed 39 people. In a report, federal investigators blamed the failure on a combination of factors, including heavy rains and a breach in the 38-year-old earthen dam’s crest that had been followed by progressive erosion.
The disaster prompted President Jimmy Carter to direct the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to begin inspecting the nation’s “non-federal high-hazard dams,” according to the Association of State Dam Safety Officials. The findings of this inspection ...
Continue readingGSA Tracks Contractors Work in Database Off-Limits to Public
Given the half-trillion dollars spent on federal contracting every year, its comforting to know that the U.S. government has a massive database that tracks contractors past performance.
Too bad it cant be tapped by the public. Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), says this is like not allowing a parent to see their childs report card.
The Past Performance Information Retrieval System (PPIRS) is managed by the General Services Administration.
According to the GSA, the database aggregates a vast amount of information from disparate sources into ratings that can be used to quickly distinguish ...
Ten Million CIA Documents Require In-Person Visit
The Central Intelligence Agency maintains more than 10 million pages of declassified, post-World War II documents, covering everything from the birth of the CIA to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The documents are publicly available - assuming one is willing to drive to the National Archives complex in College Park, Maryland, sit at one of four computer terminals in the library, and print dozens, hundreds, or thousands of pages.
Steven Aftergood, who runs the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, argues that the documents, accessible through the CIA Records Search Tool (CREST), should simply be put ...
OSHA Workplace Samples: Millions of Records Out of Reach
An estimated 49,000 Americans die prematurely of work-related exposures to toxic substances every year. Mindful of this sad fact, and having served as director of health standards for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Dr. Adam Finkel filed a Freedom of Information Act request with OSHA in 2005, seeking the results of millions of air and wipe samples taken at workplaces around the country. Finkel planned to analyze the data and eventually post it on the Web in a format that would allow users to learn the types and quantities of compounds to which they or others may have ...
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