Our friends at the Center for Responsive Politics have asked for help identifying "mystery PACs" -- political action committees that are probably tied to an individual member. Members of Congress form leadership PACs to raise money for other candidates, mostly, enhancing their status within the caucus. There's no requirement for a member to disclose a leadership PAC, or for th PAC to admit a connection to the leader.
I started with the Penguin PAC because I like Penguins. The first thing I did was to look at the original filings at the Federal Election Commission Web site (each CRP PAC ...
Continue readingFCC Correspondence Logs
Here are the two Federal Communications Commission spreadsheets, converted from PDF to excel. The first one is for January and February and the second for March.
Continue readingFOIA on a Floppy
Here's a picture of the most recent addition to the stack of FOIA clutter on my desk.
Luckily, Bill's computer still has a floppy drive so we could read the word document sent to us on a 3.5-inch diskette by the Department of Transportation. Responses to our FOIA request for congressional correspondence logs from Transportation have been trickling in slowly because each agency within the department has been replying separately.
The Department of Transportation is not the only government entity that's technologically challenged. The list is long. But the two responses we have received from the ...
Continue readingOALJ correspondence log now online
It took a little longer than I thought it would (in part because I was also doing other things, in part because I kept letting the full content of the documents disctract me) to create the it, but here, attached, is a log of correspondence from members of Congress to the Office of Administrative Law Judges of the U.S. Department of Labor covering the months of January and February: OALJ Log.
When Anu and I started this project, our sense was and still is that constituents should be aware of what members of Congress do in Washington. In addition ...
Continue readingCongressional Correspondence Log update
Anupama's on the phone with yet another FOIA officer clarifying the nature of our request for correspondence logs listing letters from and responses to members of Congress, in an electronic format. It's amazing how many responses we've gotten that miss the mark of the request. Agencies send us actual letters rather than logs, or handwritten logs of correspondence, or (in one case) what looks like printouts of some form of spreadsheet scanned into PDF documents (absolutely useless for our attempts to turn what we get from the agencies into a searchable database of correspondence). I'm going ...
Continue readingAn interview with a former Alaska lawmaker on the Veco scandal
Air Force Logs of Correspondence
We received a response from the Air Force yesterday for the congressional correspondence logs, both for our first request, for logs in January and February, and the second, for March.
After reading the list, I emailed the Air Force and asked for copies of some of the letters and responses for some on the list. On the March list, there a bunch of letters written by members of Congress to the Secretary of the Air Force regarding the CSAR-X contract given to Boeing. (That's the same issue that McCain wrote the Air Force about.) Although it ...
Continue readingCoast Guard “never requested” Deepwater SF-LLLs
The Coast Guard responded to one of the first Freedom of Information Act requests I made (described here) for an SF-LLL--the disclosures that contractors have to file when they lobby the government in connection with a contract. I asked for any SF-LLLs filed in connection with Deepwater, the multi-year contract to design a new generation of ships and systems for the Coast Guard. Integrated Coast Guard Systems, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Northop Grumman, won the contract. Both companies lobbied Congress and the Coast Guard over the program (see page 19 of this form or page 7 of ...
Continue readingBureaucratic-ese
There's almost a Lewis Carroll-like quality to the following passage in the Federal Register, (54 FR 52307-8, for those keeping score at home), in which the Office of Management and Budget published its interim rule for complying with the Byrd amendment, which barred government contractors and grantees from using federal funds to lobby (it became effective Dec. 23, 1989):
Costs made specifically unallowable by the requirements in the guidance are not made allowable under any of the provisions of these Circulars. Conversely, costs that are specifically unallowable under the provisions of these Circulars are not made allowable under the ...Continue reading
Going Back To An Earlier Post…
on the letter Senator McCain wrote to the Secretary of the Air Force: Here's a copy of it, from the Project on Government Oversight web site. I'm trying to get Air Force's reply to this as well, which again the Senator's office refused to release.
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