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Fooling Some of the People All of the Time

Here's another arena in which a little bit of transparency (as a means to oversight) would go a really long way. In what looks like a really terrific book -- Fooling Some of the People All of the Time: A Long Short Story -- investor David Einhorn tells the story of corporate malfeasance and government looking the other way. (Wonder why? Read the book but I suspect this might have something to do with it.

Einhorn says:

The story you are about to read exposes the grim realities of unchecked corporate misconduct by a bad company and the failures of proper regulatory oversight. . . . The story I am telling is one that has been surprising and unexpected - even to me. I think it is important and needs to be told. This book reveals some serious problems in the regulatory landscape that I am in a unique place to discuss. I care that the SEC and other regulators seem to have stopped enforcing laws against corporate malfeasance. I care that company officials can lie with impunity on public conference calls. And I have been appalled that the government officials overseeing the lending programs that Allied has defrauded are so indifferent and unwilling to act even when presented with clear evidence of abuse. The overall lack of law enforcement is startling.

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grey line divider Written by Ellen Miller on April 29, 2008 - 9:04am.
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House Passes Contractor and Federal Spending Accountability Act

From Danielle at POGO:

Breaking news: the House has just passed H.R. 3033 (the "Contractor and Federal Spending Accountability Act"). The bill, introduced by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), would essentially formalize POGO's Federal Contractor Misconduct Database by establishing a government database with centralized information on federal contractors who have broken the law and violated federal regulations. As of now, there are almost no safeguards in place to prevent irresponsible contractors from receiving future taxpayer dollars. The proposed database would allow procurement officials to become more informed about a company's corporate history before making contracting decisions.

This is a huge victory for taxpayers that will improve contractor accountability. POGO strongly supported Rep. Maloney's legislation, which now goes to the Senate, where Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) has already introduced a companion bill.

 

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grey line divider Written by Ellen Miller on April 23, 2008 - 7:02pm.
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Lots Sunshine in Alaska

From Jacob Wiens at POGO:

This week, the state of Alaska launched a website that tracks every state expenditure of over one thousand dollars, as reported on today's NPR Morning Edition. This makes Alaska the tenth state government to provide such a service to its taxpayers. On a side note, Alaska also has the lowest individual tax burden of any state in the U.S.

Alaska calls its website "Checkbook Online." According to the state, this service "...is part of a national trend for governments to develop websites that allow constituents to view financial information in searchable formats. Such websites are widely considered to improve transparency into the financial operations of government."

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grey line divider Written by Ellen Miller on February 7, 2008 - 6:16pm.
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A Little More Accountability, Please

Three watchdog groups have sent a letter to House appropriators urging more oversight of the oil and gas royalties owed to the federal government.  Friends of the Earth (FOE), Project on Government Oversight (POGO), and Taxpayers for Common Sense (TCS) sent the House Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations a letter calling on the appropriators to set aside additional funding to hire auditors to oversee what they called the Department of the Interior's (DOI) troubled oil and gas royalty programs.

DOI made two increases to the offshore royalty rates over the past year.  Those rate increases are ridiculous the groups say if effective auditing and enforcement functions are not in place to keep the oil companies honest, who over the past decade have been forced to pay almost $600 million in settlements for shortchanging the government in royalty payments.  Since 2000, DOI has cut the number of auditors by 45 or 15.7 percent (from 287 to 242). As the groups say in their letter, "With fewer watchdogs minding the store, oil and gas companies have fewer incentives to pay up."

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grey line divider Written by Ellen Miller on February 7, 2008 - 2:14pm.
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New Reports Shine More Light

Two new reports shine light on waste, corruption and the buying of influence in Washington.

Earlier this week, U.S. PIRG released a report showing how the federal government continues to waste tens of billions in the process of outsourcing work to private companies. "Forgiving Fraud And Failure: Profiles In Federal Contracting" reports on how the feds continue to work with companies that did shoddy work and or were found to have committed fraud.

Last year, the federal government spent $422 billion outsourcing work to private companies, a 100 percent increase since 2000, all with precious little oversight. U.S. PIRG reports that loose rules, lack of competition, and limited accountability are the problems. PIRG's suggestions: increase the disclosure of contract information; increasing competition among multiple bidders; and strengthening the screening of bad actors.

Our friends at POGO have been refining their "Federal Contractor Misconduct Database", a valuable tool for investigative journalists and citizens who want to see the rap sheets on companies our government hires. The fact that these contractors are also large campaign donors just rounds out the equation.

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grey line divider Written by Ellen Miller on October 5, 2007 - 3:22pm.
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Where's Our Harry Truman?

During the build up to World War II and throughout the war, Harry Truman built a reputation investigating overspending and profiteering involving defense contracts. Truman found that favoritism and not merit was the basis for the awarding of huge arms contracts, with the biggest companies with the political influence getting all the contracts. Truman visited military bases and armament plants, finding gross mismanagement of defense dollars. He enlisted other senators to go on tour with him, and this ad hoc watchdog effort soon led to a formal investigation. Becoming known informally as the Truman Committee, the investigation exposed waste and corruption throughout the war effort, saving the country $15 billion.

Matt Taibbi, writing for Rolling Stone, looks like a one-man Truman Committee, exposing in graphic terms what can only be described as the shocking corruption, sleaze and criminal mismanagement by private American companies contracting with the federal government to do work in Iraq. "How is it done?" Taibbi asks. "How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini?" He proceeds to show how sleazy yet politically connected contractors wasted what they didn't steal of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars meant to supply the troops and rebuild Iraq. Politically connected con men "went from bumming cab fare to doing $100 million in government contracts practically overnight," Taibbi writes. Contractor fraud in Iraq has been in the headlines since the early days of the war, but Taibbi's expose is especially graphic.

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grey line divider Written by Ellen Miller on September 12, 2007 - 8:47am.
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Widgets, Blidgets and Nods

As we recently reported, MAPLight.org and OpenCongress.org recently launched widgets to make it easy for anyone to keep track of the presidential money race, current bills and legislative issues on their site or blog. What good is political information if it's relegated to to just one Web site? As John wrote on the Open House Project blog, widgets and other new forms of data visualization help spread the information further and faster.

There's clear interest in adopting these widgets to surface information about the federal government in new ways and we love some of these early adopters. TechRepublican just recently incorporated the MAPLight.org presidential fundraising widget on its site and NTEN is planning on using
using MAPLight.org's new API.

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grey line divider Written by Ellen Miller on August 30, 2007 - 9:01am.
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Cool New Features at OpenCongress.org

The crazy-smart folks at the Participatory Politics Foundation who do all the hard work at OpenCongress.org are ready to show off two new 'widgets.' One is for tracking bills and the second lets you track issues in Congress. The bill tracking widget allows you to display the status of any bill in the Congressional pipeline, as well as link to news and blog coverage of that bill.

The issue widget lets you select from one of more than 4,000 different issue areas, and display either the most recent bills or the most-viewed bills in that issue area for your community. We figure this ought to be pretty useful to folks who follow issues, rather than specific pieces of legislation.

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grey line divider Written by Ellen Miller on August 16, 2007 - 2:54pm.
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Transparency Grants

The Sunlight Foundation offers “transparency grants” for organizations that are using new “Web 2.0” technology to further the organization’s mission of making information about Congress and the federal government more accessible to the American people. Our goal is to support groups and individuals who are going beyond the traditional, single subject public disclosure database, and who are interested in creating cutting-edge tools to enable the media, bloggers and citizens to sift, share and combine government information in ways that are useful for them.

Through its projects and grant-making, Sunlight serves as a catalyst to create greater political transparency and to foster more openness and accountability in government. To apply for a transparency grant from the Sunlight Foundation, contact us for guidelines. To apply for a mini-grant ($1,000-$5,000), click here.
To date, Sunlight’s major transparency grants have included:

  • $100,000 to Capitol News Connection (http://www.cncnews.org/): to fund an interactive widget that will allow citizens, via public radio stations’ Web sites throughout the country, to ask lawmakers specific questions and get responses

  • $25,000 to Center for Citizen Media (http://citmedia.org): to develop an Election Year Demonstration Project Web site to cover everything that can be reported on a congressional election, with an emphasis on drawing on the talents and ideas of local citizen journalists

  • $55,000 to Center for Democracy and Technology (http://www.cdt.org): to support its OpenCRS project (http://www.opencrs.com) which harnesses the power of the Internet to promote the distribution of Congressional Research Service reports to the public

  • $100,000 to Center for Independent Media (http://www.newjournalist.org): to support an effort to establish a national branch of its New Journalist Program in Washington, DC for training of political news bloggers who will cover Congress, federal agencies, the presidency, Supreme Court and the influence of lobbying, the national press corps and campaign finance

  • $369,177 to Center for Media and Democracy (http://www.prwatch.org): to continue investment in the joint Sunlight Foundation/Center for Media and Democracy wiki on Congress – Congresspedia

  • $117,000 to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (http://www.citizensforethics.org): to fund the launch of its Open Community Open Document Review System, which provides an online review process that enables people across the Internet to review, tag, comment on and rate the importance of government documents received by CREW through Freedom of Information Act requests

  • $927,928 to Center for Responsive Politics (http://opensecrets.org): to create databases on lobbyists, 527s, personal financial disclosures and travel, and to expand its campaign finance databases

  • $384,714 to The Focus Project’s OMB Watch (http://www.ombwatch.org): Grants to OMB Watch support a project to define a proactive agenda to modernize and increase public disclosure of government information and the organization’s FedSpending.org Web site. This project combines data from the Federal Procurement Data System and the Federal Assistance Award Data System to create a free, searchable database of federal government contracting and spending

  • $277,000 to MAPLight.org (http://www.maplight.org) to provide core funding to support the organization’s newly launched Web 2.0 federal search engine that interactively exposes the links between dollars donated by interested parties and congressional votes

  • $157,000 to Metavid (http://metavid.ucsc.edu): to create an open, online platform that contains a video archive of public domain U.S. House and Senate proceedings built completely on open source tools

  • $50,000 to the National Institute on Money in State Politics (http://www.followthemoney.org): to support the development and implementation of several APIs so programmers can access and display in their own applications the Institute’s data on campaign contributions to political campaigns at the state level

  • $10,000 to NewAssignment.Net (http://newassignment.net): to support its launch and work to spur journalistic innovation by grouping veteran journalists and passionate amateurs in online, collaborative reporting efforts

  • $10,000 to NewsTrust.net (http://www.newstrust.net): to support its work to harness social wisdom to aggregate and highlight quality online journalism about elected representatives, with a focus on accountability, corruption and transparency in Congress

  • $10,000 to The Project on Government Oversight (http://www.pogo.org): a one-time grant supported its investigative reporting and blogging on the “revolving door” between the government and the private sector.

  • $25,000 to People for the American Way’s Young Elected Officials Network (http://www.pfaw.org): to support a track on government transparency and accountability at its Young Elected Officials Network annual training and networking conference

  • $10,000 to Public Resource, Inc. (http://public.resource.org): in support of the development of a series of conferences on open government

  • $200,000 to ReadtheBill.org (http://readthebill.org): to provide initial funding for the public educations efforts of this new organization, the leading advocate for open floor deliberations in the U.S. Congress, to require legislation and conference reports to be posted on the Internet for 72 hours before floor consideration

  • $35,000 to Room Eight (http://www.r8ny.com): a grant to this blog, which covers New York politics, supported the expansion of its nonpartisan coverage of the 29 New York congressional members, including their legislative and budgetary activities and earmarks

  • $222,000 to Taxpayers for Common Sense (http://www.taxpayer.net): to enable the organization to develop a comprehensive plan to integrate and advance the use of the Internet and related technologies into their overall work.


    • Mini-grants
    Applications are accepted via this form. To date, our mini-grants have supported:

  • $1,600 to Arizona Congress Watch (http://azcongresswatch.com): for the acquisition of polling data and a clipping service to support its work to report on the activities of the Arizona congressional delegation

  • $2,500 to BluegrassReport.org (http://www.bluegrassreport.org): to fund software upgrades that power its Web site, which educates voters as it highlights the issues of political corruption and transparency in government, particularly in Kentucky

  • $1,600 to Connecticut Local Politics (http://www.ctlocalpolitics.net): for the acquisition of polling data, a video camera and the cost of Web hosting for this nonpartisan, not-for profit blog that covers Connecticut politics from town halls to the state’s delegation in the U.S. Congress

  • $5,000 to Geocoder.us (http://geocoder.us): This site provides free address look-up information based on the U.S. Census, so that users can enter any address or intersection and learn the longitude and latitude coordinates for that location. The mini-grant supports the creation of an API to show congressional district boundaries for all U.S. addresses and the improvement of the site's open source address recognition system. Ultimately, this funding will support the site's ability to ascertain a congressional district from an address without the need to manually look up a zip+4 code on the U.S. Postal Service Web site.

  • 5,000 to Knowledge As Power (http://www.knowledgeaspower.org): to support the creation of a legislator email management and constituent relations communications system to increase transparency between legislators and their constituents by organizing a more effective form of communication between the two groups. This Web mail service pairs with KAP's existing legislation-tracking service, giving legislators and their staff the tools necessary to efficiently manage incoming constituent emails and systematize corresponding responses with personalized or automated letters. Sunlight's mini-grant will support a pilot email management system for one to two congressional offices and the entire Washington State Legislature

  • $4,500 to More Perfect (http://www.moreperfect.org): to support its development of a wiki designed to involve the public in creating and collaborating on laws and policy

  • $5,000 to OpEdNews (http://www.opednews.com): to create a volunteer moderated Web site system that aggregates news articles, blog coverage and links to Congresspedia articles for every member of Congress

  • $5,000 to Pacific Northwest Topic Hotlist (http://www.topichotlist.com): The Pacific Northwest Topic Hotlist aggregates over 100 political news blogs in the Pacific Northwest and organizes several hundred postings by topic, specifically highlighting coverage by local bloggers of legislative issues and their representatives in Congress. This grant provides funding for Web hosting services for this news aggregator site and its accompanying widgets

  • $2,500 to Richmond Sunlight (http://www.richmondsunlight.com): The Richmond Sunlight Web site monitors the activity of the Virginia legislature. Sunlight's mini-grant supports the purchase of an entire session of the Virginia Legislature's closed circuit video broadcast. The video will be then converted to QuickTime, posted on YouTube on a daily basis and integrated into the Richmond Sunlight Web site

  • $5,000 to Speechology.org (http://speechology.org): to support the creation and maintenance of a Web site that will archive video of key political speeches-including debates, State of the Union addresses, convention speeches congressional testimony and campaign advertisements-and facilitate online public critical analysis. Using Speechology.org, citizens will watch, evaluate and comment on the truthfulness of the speeches

  • $2,000 to Utah News Aggregator to support the creation and of a Web news hub service and email newsletter subscription service for bloggers, political activists, legislators, candidates and concerned citizens of Utah. This forthcoming Web site will provide citizens with a full picture of daily politics in Utah, specifically focusing on local blog and mainstream media coverage of political news; congressional news updates, press releases and votes; a calendar of events including legislative meetings and messaging from all viable political parties and candidates

  • $5,000 to WashingtonWatch.com (http://www.washingtonwatch.com): to support its outreach and efforts to determine the average cost, or savings, per individual of each bill introduced in Congress by performing calculations on government estimates compared to the US population