[Note: this post has been corrected and revised]A
day after Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., and ten other House members
compromised on their pro-life objections to the bill to deliver the
necessary yes-votes to pass health care reform, [Begin
new:]On Monday, March 22, House members turned from the contentious
vote on the trillion dollar national health insurance reform to focus
on more mundane matters--like requesting $84,400 for local geriatric
health care education programs.
That was one of more than 170 earmarks requested by Rep. Bart Stupak,
D-Mich., one of 11 lawmakers who were closely targeted by the
Democratic ...
Bailout watchdog criticizes home loan program
A year after the $75 billion program to reduce mortgage payments under the Home Affordable Modification Program
(HAMP) went into effect, a recent audit report criticized
the outcome of the program as "disappointing." So far, out of the
million trial mortgage modifications, under which homeowners can have their mortgage payment reduced for three months, only 168,000 loans have been
permanently reduced falling drastically short of the 3 to 4 million
initial goal of the Department of Treasury.
According to the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program audit Treasury admitted its goals of the HAMP program have ...
Available on paper: Government records on jobs lost to foreign trade hard to access
In December 2009, Bristol Myers Squib, a biopharmaceutical company with international operations, told employees at two Indiana plants that 75 to 100 of them would need to seek other work. In February 2010, HSBC, the British financial firm that bills itself as the "world's local bank," laid off 20 full-time customer service representatives who processed loan modifications in a Kentucky town named, ironically enough, London. Some 125 workers who built and assembled truck cabs for 18 wheelers at Mayflower Vehicle Systems in Norwalk, Ohio, saw their workplace shut its doors in April 2010.
A few hundred layoffs in a ...
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 ...
The bailout makes a move towards transparency
Today, in a huge win for transparency, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled that the Federal Reserve Board must disclose records containing information about how it intervened to bail out banks during the financial crisis.
Since Bloomberg News filed the lawsuit in November of 2008, the Fed has claimed that if the information is released it could do more harm to the already weakened banks by stigmatizing them, thus hurting their ability to compete.
Supporters of Bloomberg’s lawsuit say the public has the right to know where their money is going. These records tell which ...
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 ...
POIA aims to make public records truly public
According to a procurement officer in the Transportation Department, SF-LLLs, a disclosure form filed by lobbyists when they help their clients pursue contract or grant awards, are filed away with other contracting documents and "kept in a secure place so no one has access to the them." This, despite the fact that, in fine print on the lower left hand side of the document are the words, "This information will be available for public inspection."
All over Washington, paper and electronic records of documents labeled "public disclosure" or "available for public inspection" and the like are inaccessible to the vast ...
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 readingEarmark Season: Republicans up the ante on Democratic for-profit ban
Following the announcement by Rep. David Obey, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, and Rep. Norm Dicks, incoming chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, that members can no longer earmark funs to for profit companies, the House Republicans have adopted a one-year moratorium on earmark requests.
The deadline for House members to submit earmark requests to the Appropriations Committee is March 19.
As of now, neither Senate Democrats or Republicans have announced any changes to their earmarking procedures, so for-profit companies could still receive earmarks and Republican Senators could request earmarks for districts represented by House G.O.P ...
How a grant grew from $35,000 to almost a million
In 2004, the National Park Service gave the George Wright Society, a Hancock, Mich.-based nonprofit that promotes preservation and understanding of natural and cultural resources, a $35,000 cooperative agreement (a kind of grant in which the recipient will work closely with a federal agency to accomplish a public purpose) to host a pair of conferences. Over five years, that initial cooperative agreement grew in value to more than $800,000, and came to include such projects as coordinating the complex travel arrangements for archaeologists to visit Afghanistan (something the nonprofit has yet to do).
The Inspector General ...
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