Improving federal lobbying laws is the focus of a new report released by a task force of the American Bar... View Article
Continue readingDeterring Corruption by Improving Disclosure
Late last week, PMA lobbyist Paul Magliocchetti was sentenced to 27 months in prison and a $75,000 fine after pleading... View Article
Continue readingLobbying Laws Need to Capture All Who Lobby
Sunlight’s new Lobbyist Registration Tracker is a great new tool to let users track who is lobbying about what issues.... View Article
Continue readingMake Lobbying for Foreign Interests More Transparent
Sunlight will be making a big push in the 112th Congress for improvements to lobbying disclosure. As part of that effort, we will also call for amendments to the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the law that requires anyone who lobbies the U.S. government on behalf of a foreign interest to register and report his or her activities with the Justice Department. FARA requires fairly detailed information from lobbyists, including the names of the government employees or Members of Congress contacted and the dates of each contact. (This fundamental information is not required by the Lobbyist Disclosure Act and is a reporting loophole Sunlight aims to close.) Unfortunately, many details regarding the work of foreign agents is hidden from public view because it is buried in unsearchable PDF documents. Sunlight and ProPublica have teamed up to put some of the FARA data in electronic form, but full transparency demands that FARA forms be electronically filed and all data reported made publicly available in searchable, sortable, downloadable databases.
Continue readingKeeping Track of Who Is Lobbying Congress
In the wake of an annual GAO report that some lobbyists have failed to register upon employment by a client,... View Article
Continue readingLobbying 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 ...
White House and Influence Reform Anew
We just received a fact sheet from the White House, which outlines some of the policy goals suggested in President... View Article
Continue readingThe Business of Not Lobbying
This is outrageous. National Journal’s Under the Influence blog has a piece up on a new lobbying shop whose selling... View Article
Continue readingPreview of New White House Lobbying Policy
The White House today announced significant changes being crafted in how the administration will regulate stimulus lobbying, in a new... View Article
Continue readingWhite House Lobbying Meeting: Public Debrief
Colleagues Daniel Schuman and Lisa Rosenberg and I just returned from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where a meeting was... View Article
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