Salmonella in peanut butter. E. coli in cookie dough. Tainted Serrano peppers. Fetid Chinese seafood. All these recent problems fell within the domain of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which shares food inspection responsibilities with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The USDA inspects meat, poultry and some egg products while the FDA monitors everything else. Food-safety advocates say the USDA is more forthcoming about its inspection activities and are prodding the FDA to do better.
Almost two years ago, Washington, D.C.-based Food & Water Watch filed a lawsuit against the FDA after it refused to release ...
Earmark seeking DC lobbyist fetes Coloradans
Louis Dupart, a lobbyist who has successfully sought earmarks from Colorado politicians, will host a fundraising breakfast on Feb. 24 for Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., the second event for a Colorado lawmaker he's scheduled this month.
The event occurs in the middle of earmark season the time of
year when members of Congress decide on their funding requests for the
next fiscal year and submit them to the two Appropriations Committees.
House requests have to be submitted by March 19.
Dupart and his colleagues at The Normandy Group, a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firm that ranks appropriations and ...
Recovery.gov: Completely Tracking One-Fifth of the Recovery Act
In his State of the Union Address late last month, President Barack Obama declared - to great applause - that there were two million Americans working now who would otherwise be unemployed if not for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the stimulus.
Three days later, the same night that Recovery.gov released a slew of new data on individual projects funded by the stimulus, the site Web ticker that tracks the total number of jobs reported by recipients dropped from 640,349 to 599,108.
Did we suddenly lose 40,000 jobs? And didnt the President say that ...
A jobless recovery for lobbyists?
Perhaps the most interesting tidbit from the Center for Responsive Politics illuminating analysis of lobbying in 2009, which found a 5 percent increase in the amounts that businesses, trade groups, unions, nonprofits, universities, state and local governments and, of course, lobbying firms themselves reported spending, was this bit:
In a seemingly counterintuitive development, the number of companies or entities that reported lobbying the federal government in 2009 (15,712) increased slightly from the year before (15,049).But the number of actual, registered federal lobbyists decreased, falling to 13,742 in 2009 from 14,442 in 2008. Potential reasons for ...Continue reading
Great data available, but only if you pay up
One of the little-publicized gems on Data.gov comes to us from the Commerce Department's National Technical Information Service.
This office is a clearinghouse of government-funded scientific, technical, engineering and business-related information that provides access to 3 million publications covering 350 subjects. In January, the service added its database to Data.gov, with a description that reads: "The Database represents billions of dollars in research. The electronic file dates back to 1964. NTIS adds approximately 60,000 new records per year to the Database, most records include abstracts and are available in full text. Contents include research reports, computer ...
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 ...
Continue readingThe Data Mine Launched by The Center for Public Integrity and Sunlight Foundation
President Obama's Open Government Initiative urges federal agencies to make high-value data publicly available at www.data.gov. But agencies too often are reluctant to release information, or choose to release it in a hard-to-use format. Today, the Center for Public Integrity, in partnership with the Sunlight Foundation, launches The Data Mine, an online series that will highlight inaccessible or poorly presented information from the federal government. From the CIA to the CDC, well be looking at data that needs to be public, with regular posts on the Center's and Sunlight's websites. Well describe each data set ...
Continue readingAmtrak: Winner by default in high speed rail contest
Last month the Obama Administration announced which high speed rail projects across the country will receive portions of the $8 billion in Recovery act funds dedicated to advancing high speed technology in the country. However, the largest single beneficiary of the spending did not directly receive a dime. Amtrak, the federally funded rail company, will benefit from $4.5 billion worth of improvements to the infrastructure that its trains run on. That's in addition to the $1.3 billion in stimulus money the company received last year for capital improvements. The nearly $6 billion will supplement the annual appropriation ...
Continue readingSenate committee calls for tighter regulations on property, bank accounts of foreign politicians
The subcommittee's 325-page report found that U.S. bankers, lawyers, real estate agents and escrows overlooked foreign political officials moving millions of dollars into the country. For years, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, the 40-year-old eldest son of Equatorial Guinea's president was using U.S. banks to move $110 million. Obiang Mangue, also the Minister of Agriculture and Forestry of the oil and timber rich western African country, used U.S. financial institutions, including Wachovia Bank, Citibank, Union Bank of California and Bank of America to move money through five shell companies, attorney-clients and other accounts.
Continue readingPotential Murtha successor Norm Dicks knows the favor factory
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