My conversation with Department of Trasnsportation contracting officer Bob Robel (see the Moblity Technologies, Inc. post immediately below) also yielded some interesting information on standard form LLL, which contractors are supposed to file "for each payment or agreement to make payment to any lobbying entity for influencing or attempting to influence an officer or employee of any agency, a Member of Congress, an officer or employee of Congress, or an employee of a Member of Congress in connection with a covered federal action." (Covered federal action here refers to a federal contract or grant.)
Anu and I have been trying ...
Continue readingFHWA discouraging FOIA requests from potential contractors?
Here's a little information on something we started looking into last February:
When a federal agency needs a contractor, it publishes a presolicitation notice on a site called FedBizOpps to alert businesses that a formal solicitation is coming. These presolicitation notices -- here's one -- describe what the contract would call for, often adding that additional information can be gotten through the Freedom of Information Act:
Any requests for business information not posted should be requested under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) guidance.
There are several variations on the theme -- this one tells bidders, "All FOIA requests for the previous ...
Continue readingSmart reforms to deter congressional conflicts
I wish I'd notice this earlier: Taxpayers for Common Sense and the National Law and Policy Center sent a joint letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Minority Leader John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell calling for better personal financial disclosure.
The whole letter is worth reading -- it serves almost as a primer on recent congressional scandals -- and all the recommendations are excellent, but if I had to pick just one, it would be this one:
2. Better Disclosure of Business Partners and Joint Investors: While current rules call for disclosure of ...Continue reading
Defense correspondence logs
Here's the correspondence logs we received from the Department of Defense recently. We received about 100 pages of documents in PDF format that we converted to text.
Continue readingOGE working toward electronic filing of financial disclosure forms
Members of Congress aren't the only ones to file publicly available personal financial disclosure forms; so do presidents, cabinet secretaries, high ranking officials, and others throughout the upper echelons of our government. Just as with the legislative branch, the public must be afforded the opportunity to determine whether administration officials have potential conflicts of interest.
The agency responsible for collecting these forms is the Office of Government Ethics (OGE); they collect paper forms SF 278 (which are maintained by OGE and available to the public) and disseminate paper OGE forms 450, which are filed by lower level employees, are ...
Continue readingCongressional financial disclosure forms now online
Today is the day that members of Congress must make their personal financial disclosure forms public. The Center for Responsive Politics has them up here. PoliticalMoneyLine, a division of Congressional Quarterly, has them online, in big, state-by-state PDFs. The House is here, the Senate here.
Continue readingDefense Contractors Reap Windfall in 2005 Earmarks
By Larry Makinson and Anupama Narayanswamy
The nation's top defense contractors were also the biggest beneficiaries of congressional earmarks in 2005, an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation has found. Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics led the pack. Those four corporations collected a combined $1.09 billion in earmark awards. Overall, the top 20 corporate recipients of 2005 earmarks were all defense contractors.
The analysis was based on the database of earmarks from 2005 produced, and posted online, by the federal government's Office of Management and Budget. OMB collected the data from the agencies responsible for ...
Continue readingTracking another mystery PAC
I kind of like digging into these -- some people do crossword puzzles, I like figuring out which member goes with which leadership PAC. BillPAC, on page three of its March 13, 2006 amended Statement of Organization, provides the following address for its treasurer, Jeff Reeder: 10970 McFarland Rd., Mercersburg, PA 17236. I ran the address through the U.S. Postal Service's 9-digit zip generator -- 17236-9642 -- and plugged that into Project Vote Smart's 9 digit zip search. The address is in Rep. Bill Shuster's district.
Again, none of this constitutes definitive proof -- but when I call Mr. Reeder ...
Continue readingFree PACER docket search from Justia
I stumbled across this site by accident, but I'm glad I did -- a free search that allows you to look up federal court cases without logging into the Pacer system. It seems to be a little more user friendly than the U.S. Party Case Index. To get the actual court documents, however, you'll still need a PACER account and will still have to pay eight cents a page to view filings...
Continue readingOMB will track phonemarks, but last-minute-marks present more of a problem
Christin T. Baker, the associate director for communications in the Office of Management and Budget, voicemails and emails that OMB already tracks "nontraditional sorts of ways of getting projects funded" in its database, something they'll continue to do in 2008. Here's one example from 2005, gotten by downloading the CSV data from the site into an excel spreadsheet, sorting on the field called "Citation_Source" and looking for the ones that aren't bills or conference reports.
CitationSource: Senator Stevens' colloquy
Reference: Congressional Record S12030
Method: User entered excerpt
Citation Excerpt: The Following Language is from Congressional Record ...
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