Monday’s explosion that killed 25 miners at Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia came at a mine that had been flagged by inspectors for a series of violations – 3000 since 1995 and more than 500 in 2009 alone.
How does that compare to other mines? Because of the way the federal government releases the data, we can't say.
Data on safety inspections is published in the Department of Labor’s Mine
Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) Web site, where users can find information
on mine safety, inspections and violations. But getting to it is the hard part ...
New Gov’t Contractor Integrity Database Will Be Off-Limits to Public
For the first time, the government will centralize information detailing whether a contractor was terminated, disbarred or suspended from a federal contract or grant, in addition to any civil or criminal convictions linked to contracting work. The FAPIIS database will track any administrative agreements that a vendor signed to avoid getting suspended or disbarred, and will show “determinations of non-responsibility,” when a contractor showed a lack of integrity or poor performance.
The database information is off-limits to the public. Contractors, federal officials and Congress members are the only ones who can access it.
“There’s certain information that should be ...
Introducing Recovery Explorer
More than a year has passed since President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Federal agencies have been distributing some $787 billion appropriated by the act to jump start the economy. According to Recovery.gov, the Web site that tracks spending under the act, about 40 percent of that money has been spent, sent around the country in the form of contracts, grants, loans, tax benefits and entitlements.
The huge spending bill included funds for a mechanism to track spending under the bill, but getting a sense of which agencies have awarded the most money, or which ...
Stimulus Spotlight: What we’re finding in Recovery.gov data
A research group that played a key role in the Manhattan Project is one of the biggest recipients of contracts from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Battelle Memorial Institute, a non-profit based in Columbus, Ohio, co-manages research and innovative technologies for the Department of Energy. Four separate arms of the organization have received more than $844 million. Two of them, UT Battelle and Brookhaven Science Associates, were set up with universities as 50-50 partnerships for research purposes.
According to recent Recovery.gov data, the organization used stimulus funds to support 142 jobs in the last quarter of 2009.
The ...
Stupak 11 post: What we got wrong
We set out to look at how leadership--of both parties--persuades rank and file members to vote their way. In the 111th Congress, we've seen enormous discipline on both sides of the aisle on a series of high profile votes. Our hunch is that the leadership of both parties has something to do with that, and understanding what levers they have--whether it's funding earmarks, supporting their campaigns with money, appearing at fundraisers or through other means that we still can't track with the current state of congressional disclosure--is something we want to follow in the coming months.
We ...
Correction and update on our Stupak 11 Post
We have made more corrections to the report we did on the Stupak 11. First, the simpler errors. We have learned that there are additional errors in the spreadsheet we posted along with the story--there were a total of four numbers that were overstated by a factor of ten. This led to us erroneously listing Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper among the five members whose earmark request totals increased for fiscal year 2011--her earmark requests actually declined. We deeply regret the error, and thank Rep. Dahlkemper for pointing it out.
We also overstated on the spreadsheet Rep. Steven Dreihaus's earmarks--the correct ...
The bailout is investing again
The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) has started to grow again, after the Department of Treasury announced in December of last year the bailout would be coming to a close. Earlier this month, the Department of Treasury invested $21 million in small business loans with more investments to come that could total as much as $15 billion.
The money is being spent to purchase securities backed by the Small Business Administration in yet another effort to stimulate lending in the economy. The $15 billion dedicated to this program is considerably smaller than other TARP programs, such as the Capital Purchase ...
Cao, two other Republicans ignore House GOP earmark moratorium
Rep. Joseph Cao, R-La., is one of at least three House Republicans to ignore his caucus's ban on requesting fiscal year 2011 earmarks. Cao requested projects totaling more than $500 million for his district.
He joins perennial earmarker Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, and Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, who also requested earmarks despite the Republican moratorium.
Cao was the sole Republican to vote for the original House health care bill in November 2009; at the time, Bloomberg.com characterized him as "the Democratic
majority’s most reliable Republican," noting that the freshman Republican won in a district where President Barack ...
Editor’s Note: Correction to Stupak 11 post
A note about our story, "After health care vote, Stupak 11 request billions in earmarks." For Rep. Charles Wilson, D-Ohio, we had inaccurate amounts for both FY2011 and FY2010 in the Google spreadsheet, available here, that accompanied the article. Wilson has requested $84 million in earmarks for FY2011, up from $62.3 million in FY2010. The spreadsheet originally listed these numbers as higher by a factor of ten, which threw off our calculation of the total amount of earmarks requested. We rechecked that number and the rest of our other numbers, and have since corrected the post.
Rep. Wilson's ...
How to easily set up a campaign finance database
No one does federal-level campaign finance better than the Center for Responsive Politics, and for the last year or so, they've outdone themselves by making all of their databases--millions of records that a staff of human beings tirelessly cleans up--available, for free, in their entirety.
The only downside? The scale of CRP's research is so wide that we're talking dozens of frequently-updated tables with hundreds of fields. Downloading each CSV and importing into a database with fields properly named and sized is tedious and time-consuming.
The Sunlight Foundation has written a simple script that allows reporters and ...
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