TransparencyCamp has come and gone, but the ideas that sprouted at TCamp are just beginning to come to life.
Steve Spiker from OpenOakland shared his insight about the transparency movement in the TCamp wrap up video below, “We’re saying things need to be different in our country and that’s only going to happen if you care enough to persist on it.”
The transparency community understands that progress starts at TCamp but it doesn’t end when you go home.
Continue readingIntegrating the US’ Documents
A few weeks ago, we integrated the full text of federal bills and regulations into our alert system, [Scout](https://scout.sunlightfoundation.com). Now, if you visit [CISPA](https://scout.sunlightfoundation.com/item/bill/hr624-113) or a fascinating [cotton rule](https://scout.sunlightfoundation.com/item/regulation/2013-10114), you'll see the original document - nicely formatted, but also well-integrated into Scout's layout. There are a lot of good reasons to integrate the text this way: we want you to see why we alerted you to a document without having to jump off-site, and without clunky iframes. As importantly, we wanted to do this in a way that would be easily reusable by other projects and people. So we **built a tool called [us-documents](https://github.com/unitedstates/documents)** that makes it possible for anyone to do this with federal bills and regulations. It's [available as a Ruby gem](https://rubygems.org/gems/us-documents), and comes with a [command line tool](https://github.com/unitedstates/documents#usage) so that you can use it with Python, Node, or any other language. It lives inside the [unitedstates project](https://github.com/unitedstates) at [unitedstates/documents](https://github.com/unitedstates/documents), and is entirely public domain.
Continue reading2Day in #OpenGov 5/21/2013
NEWS:
- Former New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg (R) locked down a gig in the private sector. He will serve as CEO of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, a major Wall Street trade group. (The Hill)
- Florida released a new smart phone app to coincide with the current session of its legislature. The app, which has been downloaded nearly 3,500 times, allows users to find and share bill summaries, meeting notices, information about their legislators, and more. (Government Technology)
- Former Montana governor Brian Schweitzer (D) is rumored to be considering a Senate run, but he hasn't let that stop him from taking a new job in the mining industry. Schweitzer is going to chair the board of the Stillwater Mining Company. He was first elected to Stillwater's board only three weeks ago. (Washington Post)
- In an effort to investigate information leaks about North Korea the Justice Department delved deeply into the life of Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen. The DoJ obtained his telephone records, tracked his movements through State Department security badge records, obtained a search warrant for his personal email account. (Washington Post)
- An investigation of subsidies given by the DC government to property developments over the past decade shows that more than a third of the $1.7 billion in breaks doled out by the city went to ten developers that donated huge amounts of campaign cash during the period. (WAMU)
- Russia is stepping back from it's 2012 "letter of intent" to join the Open Government Partnership, instead saying that it will pursue open government "on its own terms". Russia's questionable record on corruption, press freedom, and more had made its interest in the OGP slightly quizzical to begin with. (Open Government Partnership)
- State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company is officially jumping into the political arena with a new PAC. While the company has a long history of giving from it's employees, it had previously been one of only nine companies in the Fortune 75 without a federal PAC.(Roll Call)
Why does the IRS regulate political groups? A look at the complex world of campaign finance
The controversy over the Internal Revenue Service's handling of applications for non-profit status from Tea Party groups has put a spotlight on a subject with which we at the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group are all too painfully familiar: The migraine-producing complexity of the nation's campaign finance system. To shed some light on the ongoing debate, we've decided to share what we know.
As often is the case with systems worthy of Rube Goldberg, it's easier to draw than to describe.
Update on FedBizOpps data
Earlier this week I wrote about a discrepancy between the data in FedBizOpps and the data in USASpending.gov. It was my understanding that all contracts awarded by the government (worth over $25,000) and their solicitations would be reported to FedBizOpps and that the number of the contracts awarded would be in the same neighborhood as the number of contracts that the government reports to USASpending.gov. Instead, I discovered that in 2012 there were only 8,138 award notices and 18,546 solicitation notices in FedBizzOpps, while there were 178,375 contracts reported on in USASpending.gov. At the time of writing that post I was still waiting on a definitive response from the Office of Management and Budget or the General Services Administration.
Continue readingIn Washington, After the Oversight Must Come Reform
News that individuals at the IRS improperly targeted certain groups for scrutiny thrust DC’s “House Cleaners” into high gear. Indignant talking points have been drafted, hearings have been announced, and heads will roll. (Already, Acting IRS Commissioner Steve Miller was forced to hand in his resignation). But what happens after the dust settles and is swept away? In terms of public policy about campaign finance transparency, there could be a silver lining, but only if the outrage is channeled into reform efforts. So far, hearings have been scheduled by Representatives Issa and Cummings of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee (who would do well not to lose sight of the “reform” mission embedded in the name of the committee) Representatives Camp and Levin of the House Ways and Means Committee, Senators Baucus and Hatch of the Senate Finance Committee, and by Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation’s Levin and McCain—the latter the “maverick” reformer who hasn’t put his name on a significant piece of reform legislation since the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. Each of those Members should acknowledge—during their hearings and beyond—that underlying the IRS actions is the real and dangerous problem of political organizations masquerading as social welfare organizations, impacting elections with hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money expenditures.
Continue readingThe Fix-Rate: Integrity Action’s New Transparency and Accountability Impact Metric
Earlier this week Integrity Action’s Fredrik Galtung launched his working paper ‘The Fix-Rate: A Key Metric for Transparency and Accountability’ (PDF). Yesterday my colleague Lee Drutman and I had an interesting conversation about this work with Fredrik, and I wanted to share some thoughts about the Fix-Rate.
With this paper Fredrik and Integrity Action take the position that the anecdote-heavy evidence base linking transparency and accountability interventions needs some more concrete measures. To that end, ‘Fix-Rate’ proposes a metric for measuring impacts, and offers examples of its use in a variety of national and municipal contexts, largely focusing on improvements in public service provisioning and infrastructure projects.
Continue readingOver 170k Award Notices Missing From FedBizOpps
As part of our recent procurement initiative, I've been playing around with the data present in FedBizOpps, ( or FBO.gov) -- it’s the single point of entry for posting all government solicitations, award notices, and various other informational notices regarding government contracts. In short, all contracts awarded must be reported here. What is immediately striking is that the number of awards posted to FedBizOpps does not come even remotely close to the number of awards in USASpending.gov -- the database that tracks contract spending. FedBizOpps reports a mere 8,138 contracts awarded for 2012, while USASpending reports 178,375 contract awards for that same year. Common sense tells us that the number of contracts in each database should match. The fact that they don’t is a mystery at the moment, but the problem could be due to broadly defined exceptions, or even poor reporting and oversight as we've seen in other cases involving government reporting. In order to see specifics in the data and run an analysis, I extracted the data into a postgresql database. The data source I used is an XML file on fbo.gov's FTP server, which seems to include data from the last 13 years.
Continue readingIRS creates big stir targeting small fry
Lost in the widening scandal over the IRS targeting of conservative political groups: The fact that most of them were not the big political players of 2012.
Continue readingIRS Debacle Shows Need for Clearer, not Fewer Rules
The IRS’s admission that it targeted groups with conservative sounding names for scrutiny will no doubt be held up by some as “proof” that the agency can’t be trusted with determining whether organizations claiming to be “social welfare” organizations are actually political organizations in disguise. In fact, just the opposite is true. The agency needs to apply clear and unequivocally neutral rules to its determinations about whether a group is in fact a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization, entitled to tax exempt status but not required to disclose its donors, or whether it is a political organization, also entitled to tax exempt status but not allowed to keep its donors secret. Using a shortcut, like whether a group had the word “tea party” or “patriot” in its name to aid in making that determination is dead wrong for an agency that must be scrupulously nonpartisan.
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