According to this AP article, the Justice Department is maintaining that the White House Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
The argument for this seems to be that the OA is not an agency" as defined by FOIA. But in the past year, the Office of Administration has processed 65 FOIA requests, as AP reports. The OA also replied to one of our FOIA's this year asking for correspondence logs, although a letter sent to us stated that OA conducted a search and found no OA records responsive to your request."
This Justice ...
Continue readingLetters from Defense
We just received few of the letters we had requested from the Department of Defense from the January batch of correspondences. We received only a partial response to the FOIA where we had selected specific letters from the correspondence logs.
The other letters will come in if we manage to convince DoD that we are entitled to a fee waiver or shell out the money.
The letters we have are here. Most of them are about congressional travel requests that were made to the DOD. More interesting ones, including ones about whistleblower complaints and those related to contracts are being ...
Continue readingSeeing for myself on earmark disclsosure
I'm going through the version of the bill N.Z. posted, and came across this language on page 68:
(2) that the information in clause (1) has been available on a publicly accessible congressional website in a searchable format at least 48 hours before such vote.
Clause 1 requires all congressionally directed spending in bills -- earmarks, tax breaks, etc. -- be "identified through lists, charts, or other similar means including the name of each Senator who submitted a request to the committee for each item so identified..."
That would seem to contradict point two from the list of objections N ...
Continue readingCongressional-DoD correspondence visualization
Why should the Sunlight Labs guys get all the fun? I loaded the subject lines of the correspondence logs referenced immediately below into Many Eyes, which our co-conspirator Josh Ruihley used to create our Earmarks Visualizations. So what words turn up most frequently in the subject lines of letters members write most frequently about to the Office of the Secretary of Defense? Al Qaeda? Military contracts? National Guard? Body Armor? See for yourself.
Continue readingDoD correspondence log converted from pix to spreadsheets
I'm posting, in an Excel spread sheet, the congressional correspondence logs covering the first three months of 2007 that we got a while back in a less than user friendly format from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Here's a sample of what we got in response to our FOIA -- a .tif or tagged image file format -- I picked one at random, but we have a CD-Rom with 189 files just like it.
Anu turned the files over to Scott Wells, our multi-talented office administrator, who used a program called ocrad (it runs on Linux) to convert ...
Continue readingOut of Compliance: Nonprofit with ties to Stevens’ PAC, Tardy on Paperwork and Fees to the State of Alaska
An Alaskan nonprofit foundation that raises money to make the records and mementos of Sen. [Ted] Stevens' career in public service" has failed to file registration documents or pay fees since 2004, according to the Alaska Department of Law. In response to a FOIA request to the department for all documents filed by the Ted Stevens Foundation (recently renamed the North to the Future Foundation), we received papers filed in 2003 and were told by department officials that none had been filed since then.
Any organization that is raising funds in the state of
Does the EPA collect SF-LLLs?
Browsing through the 2008 Senate Interior and Environment Appropriations Bill on the Taxpayers for Common Sense site, I noticed that one of the largest amounts ($11 million) was earmarked to the National Rural Water Association a non-profit organization that provides training and technical assistance and gives out sub-grants to water providers in rural areas. They receive grants from the USDA and the EPA.
Earlier in our search of the elusive SF-LLL forms, I had sent out a FOIA request to the Environmental Protection Agency asking for:
Coburn goes after lobbying by contractors, requests lobbying disclosures from Pentagon
Citing 31 U.S.C. 1352, the federal statute that bars contractors and grantees to use federal funds to lobby the government, and requires them to disclose any lobbying they've done in connection with winning a contract or grant (that's the elusive SF-LLL we've been tracking), Sen. Tom Coburn has written to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates requesting, among other things, SF-LLLs (good luck, Senator!). The full letter is attached; here's an excerpt...
As you know, federal law (31 U.S.C. 1352) requires recipients of federal funding to complete a form, know as SF-LLL, to ...Continue reading
Random notes while tracking SF-LLLs
So I've been going through FedBizOpps, looking for solicitation notices that specifically mention the elusive lobbying disclosure SF-LLL, and coming across some interesting bits of federal business. This solicitation from the State Department, for example, suggests why Anu has yet to receive any correspondence logs from the agency:
The Freedom of Information Document Management System (FREEDOMS) serves as the lynchpin for the [State] Department's Information Access Program. As such, it tracks and manages the workload of all requests made under any of the information access laws or executive orders mentioned above. FREEDOMS was originally purpose built and implemented ...Continue reading
Great use of correspondence logs
The Center for Investigative Reporting and the Los Angeles Times used some of our correspondence logs to track down letters members of Congress were writing to federal agencies requesting funding for certain projects. Here's a link to the LA Times story.
CIR's Will Evans mentions Real Time and posts some of the letters CIR received here.
Continue reading
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