Sunlight Foundation

Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and allies from the week:

Last Friday evening’s June 26th program, CNN’s Lou Dobbs broadcasted a piece by correspondent Louise Schiavone about the Cap and Trade Energy Bill that the House of Representatives was to vote on and pass later that evening. Schiavone interviewed Jake Brewer, Sunlight’s engagement director, who said, “This is the kind of bill that’s going to affect our economy on a massive scale, our climate, our national security, and is not the kind of thing to be taken lightly. The opacity of this process is — to be perfectly honest, it’s infuriating.” Schiavone then stated erroneously that Sunlight opposed the bill. For the record, Sunlight has no position on the content of the bill itself, but advocates for the Congress to put all non-emergency legislation online for 72 hours before voting on it. The transcript can be read here, and the video is below.

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As ProPublica just pointed out on Twitter, the White House today released staff salaries, as they do each year.

Since 1995, the White House has been required to deliver a report to Congress listing the title and salary of every White House Office employee.

What’s unique about this year’s report is the data that accompanies it, helpfully presented in a sortable chart, which is itself downloadable.

Using Google Spreadsheets, I made the following chart, to see whether my first impression was correct: that many White House staffers were concentrated at either $30 - 40,000 per year, or around $160,000. Turns out my first impression was wrong, and that there’s a fairly even distribution.

This is a step in the right direction, where a simple explanation, accessible chart, and exposed data all combine to give a useful look at something that’s required to be made public.

(Note — please interpret this chart as a stab at making sense by an amateur, and should not represent Sunlight’s visualization work, which far, far exceeds my own.)

But this is his bank, so it is his problem.

Sen. Daniel Inouye pressured the Treasury Department and the FDIC to approve a bailout contract with Central Pacific Financial, a bank Inouye founded and where he held most of his wealth. The bank was also in trouble with the FDIC and did not appear to meet criteria for bailout funds:

The bank, Central Pacific Financial, was an unlikely candidate for a program designed by the Treasury Department to bolster healthy banks. The firm’s losses were depleting its capital reserves. Its primary regulator, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., already had decided that it didn’t meet the criteria for receiving a favorable recommendation and had forwarded the application to a council that reviewed marginal cases, according to agency documents.

Two weeks after the inquiry from Inouye’s office, Central Pacific announced that the Treasury would inject $135 million.

…

The bank faced long odds. More than 1,600 banks submitted applications to the FDIC in the three months after the program was announced, according to a report by the FDIC’s inspector general’s office. The agency forwarded 408 applications to Treasury, which approved only 267, or roughly 16 percent of the total.

Central Pacific’s situation was even bleaker because it was in trouble with the FDIC. Regulators had raised concerns about the bank earlier in the year. The bank would soon sign an agreement with its state regulator and the FDIC requiring it to raise an additional $40 million in capital and to improve its management practices.

Not the greatest endorsement of the bailout process. Of course, they aren’t going to tell you how this contract was approved on FinancialStability.gov.

Also, why does it seem that all senators who’ve been in office for 30 or 40 years act like they can do whatever they want.

Are you a lawmaker in Washington wondering whether you are involved in a scandal or under investigation? Well, we’ve made a very simple game for you to play to help answer that question. Just follow the flow chart below to find out which lawmakers are embroiled in scandal and for what offense.

In total, the chart shows twenty-three lawmakers (21 congressmen and 2 senators) currently involved in a scandal. Most of these lawmakers are currently under investigation by either a congressional ethics body or the Department of Justice. In the case of Rep. Sanford Bishop, the state of Georgia is investigating an earmark he obtained for an organization employing his step-daughter and her husband.

Follow the chutes and ladders of ScandaLand below:
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After yesterday’s discussion about discussion drafts, the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions released a draft of their version of the public option — but only the Politico received a leaked version. This would be one of those things that should just be directly posted to the Committee web site. It would help the public understand the ongoing legislative process and provide context to the eventual bill that we hope would be read by lawmakers.

Vivek Kundra, federal CIO, and Macon Phillips, White House new media director, unveiled Office of Management and Budget’s IT dashboard this morning at the Personal Democracy Forum Conference in New York City. And the PDF attendees gave him a well-deserved standing ovation.

The dashboard was built to monitor more than $70 billion in government information technology spending, showing all contracts within every agency, and is one of the features of the redesigned USASpending.gov, re-launched early this morning.

During the presentation, Kundra mentioned that launching a platform that will allow the government to tap into the best thinking and the best ideas. And Phillips added that it’s just the beginning. Kundra also admitted that announcing that the federal data will be available online to the public has spurred government bureaucrats to start cleaning it up, proving the rule that sunlight is the best disinfectant. The initial dashboard is for IT expenditures only. And I’d add, however, that if you want the data on the government investments in General Motors or AIG you’ll need to go to SubsidyScope.com.

In the question session, Andrew Rasiej, PDF co-founder and Sunlight senior technology advisor, asked Kundra if we should redefine “public” as “searchable, accessible and readable online. Kundra replied with an affirmative absolutely “yes.” As Jay Rosen, N.Y.U. journalism prof,  tweeted, “What we’ve been watching with CIO Vivek Kundra at #pdf09 is the undoing of the opacity agenda of the Bush years, right before our eyes!”

NextGov.com’s Gautham Nagesh noted today that the site’s new visualization tools are a definite improvement. “It’s now possible with just a few clicks to see how much money an agency has invested in IT projects and what percentage of those projects are behind schedule or over budget,” Nagesh wrote.

We are told that OMB will be holding a press conference this afternoon at 3:30 (Eastern Time) to highlight the redesigned USASpending.gov and the IT dashboard.

Check it out!

As always, the Center for Responsive Politics ferrets out the story behind the story when it comes to big votes in Congress. Lindsay Renick Mayer at CRP’s Capital Eye blog flushes out their analysis of the correlation between how members of the House of Representatives voted late Friday on the Waxman–Markey Cap and Trade Energy Bill and special interest contributions they’ve received.

CRP looked at the contributions all lawmakers received from the energy sector and other business and industry interests, coming from political action committees and employees of these industries since 1989 (to their candidate committees and leadership PACs).

Those lawmakers voting “no” on the bill received on average over $274,000, and those voting “yes” received $124,000.

Environmentalists gave on average $21,000 to the lawmakers voting yes, and only $3,000 to those that voted no.

Looking at those numbers makes you wonder how the bill passed. No surprise that the greens got grossly outspent…That’s normal. The surprise, I guess, is that they won this round despite of it.

CRP also broke down how members of each party voted and how much they’ve received from whom. Similar patterns emerged. Those who voted yes received less from energy and other industries and more from environmentalists, and those voting no received more from industry and less from the greens.

Here’s a link to CRP’s complete a list of how the lawmakers voted and how much they’ve received since 1989.

The fight now goes to the Senate. Will the contribution patterns be as indicative there as it was in the House? Sounds like a pretty good bet.

Last week, I took a look at the circle of former staffers turned health care lobbyists that surround Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus. The Senate Finance Committee is one of the two central committees in the Senate charged with formulating health care reform legislation. Knowing the connections to the health care lobby of all committee members provides us with a glimpse into whom may have access to shape the forthcoming legislation. In continuing with mapping Baucus’ connections, below you’ll find a map of all the committee Democrats and their connections, through former staffers turned health care lobbyists, to various health care lobbies:

The map shows only ten of the thirteen committee Democrats, as OpenSecrets.org does not report any staffers turned health care lobbyists for Sens. Jay Rockefeller, Jeff Bingaman or Bill Nelson. These ten Democrats are connected to a total of 20 former staffers turned health care lobbyists. Sen. Baucus leads all of the committee Democrats with five health care lobbyist connections and Sen. Chuck Schumer and Tom Carper both have three connections.

These 20 staffers represent approximately 91 different organizations, often overlapping in the clients they handle. The overlap usually occurs when the health care lobbyists are employed at the same firm. This can be seen clearly with David Castagnetti, Sen. Baucus’ former chief of staff, and Kelly Bingel, Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s former chief of staff. Both Castagnetti and Bingel work for Mehlmen Vogel Castagnetti Inc. and handle nearly all the same clients.

The organizations represented by these 20 health care lobbyists include some of the biggest opponents to center piece of President Obama’s health care plan: the public option. These include the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, PhRMA, and various pharmaceutical, medical device and insurance companies. The Senate Finance Committee is seen as the biggest obstacle to the public option.

When it comes to money from the health care and insurance industries, Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic nominee for president, leads the pack. For senators who have not run for the presidency, which requires raising exhorbitant amounts of money, Sen. Baucus is ahead of other committee Democrats with Sens. Schumer and Kent Conrad following close behind. See the table below:

For Senate Finance Committee Democrats, the connections to the health care industry are wide and deep. Campaign contributions are high and staffers easily jump ship to lobby their former bosses. The impact of these influence measures are sure to be felt in the debate over the form of health care reform.

Stay tuned later this week as we look at the other side of the committee: the Republicans.

Technical Notes: The “Gmap” interface is courtesy of Google and the UCL Google Maps Image Cutter. The graph/map was generated using the Graph library of Nodebox.

On Friday, the House of Representatives passed the cap and trade bill after an incredibly messy process left little time for congressmen and the public to digest the final version of the bill. I think that process taught us a lot about how Congress mangles procedure, but also, in some ways, how Congress is trying to be more transparent, but not quite getting it right.

Looking back at what happened with cap and trade, we see that Congress, inexplicably, released a new version of the bill on a Monday evening before a Friday vote, with an explanation that this would not be the final version. This bill, the printed version, did not have a bill number written into the header, instead it look like this: H.R. ____.

This what we’d call a discussion draft, and it’s something that we’ve been seeing Congress release a lot more lately — likely due to pressure to make their operations more transparent. The managers of the cap and trade bill could have easily not released this discussion draft and dropped the whole new bill on Thursday or Friday. Instead, they released part of the bill on Monday and then 300 more pages on Thursday night. It’s great that Congress is releasing discussion drafts. They increase the ability of the public to peek inside to internal debates as they occur and hopefully have a say in the process. However, the time to publish discussion drafts is not the week a bill is being voted on, it’s when the bill is still being formed in a location with necessary transparency rules, like a committee hearing.

So this brings up an important point: when is the best time to read the bill? In many respects there needs to be a rule requiring bills to be posted online 72 hours prior to consideration for lawmakers and the public to know what is in the bill. But that isn’t the best period for citizen engagement in the legislative process outside of telling your congressman to vote “yea” or “nay”. The real sausage making happens in committees and we are seeing efforts by committees to release discussion drafts and versions of bills that they are working on. This is where discussion drafts are useful — not in final moments before consideration occurs.

Let’s run down areas in the legislative process where citizen engagement can have an impact and what Congress ought to be doing to increase transparency and provide a window for engagement:

1) Committee process - Where the real work gets done. Release of discussion drafts, manager’s statements, chairman’s mark would allow for much greater engagement by citizens in the process and would help other lawmakers and their staff familiarize themselves with the process that created legislation.

2) Prior to consideration - Pass a 72 hour rule so that all bills must be made publicly available online for 72 hours before consideration. While there is less chance for direct input by citizens this allows for organization in favor or in opposition of both the bill and proposed amendments to the bill. This also provides time for lawmakers and their staff to read the bill.

3) Post passage - This would be the area covered by President Obama’s five day bill posting pledge. I don’t think there is too much value here as the President likely already knows whether he will sign or veto a given piece of legislation. More transparency theater than anything else.

The next big debate in Congress will be around health care. Hopefully, Congress doesn’t only provide adequate time prior to consideration for the public to read the bill, but also continues to make efforts to provide drafts to the public during the committee process.

Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and allies from the week:

CNN interviewed Ellen Miller, Sunlight’s executive director, in an article on lobbyists and the need for disclosure of their interactions with congressional lawmakers and other federal officials.

Katharine Q. Seelye at The New York Times reported on the fact that, five months into his administration, President Obama has signed two dozen bills, but he has almost never waited the five days, as he promised during his election campaign. She noted how open government and other watchdog groups have criticized the president for not living up to his pledge. Seelye quotes Ellen as saying it’s less important for the president to wait before signing a bill than it is for the Congress to wait 72 hours before voting on it. “There isn’t anybody in this town who doesn’t know that commenting after a bill has been passed is meaningless.” The article also has an accompanying video.

Politico’s Victoria McGrane reported on how the Senate is considering putting all their office expenses — including staff salaries — online, as well as requiring campaign fundraising reports to be published on the Web. The mere fact that the Senate leadership has conducted a whip count is an encouraging sign for the reforms’ passage, McGrane writes. And she quotes Lisa Rosenberg, Sunlight’s , “They wouldn’t be talking about bringing it up for a vote if it wasn’t pretty solid.”

The Washington Examiner reports on Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington calling on the Obama administration to release the names of health care executives who have visited the White House. “If you are going to criticize other people for secrecy, you better have an open door,” said Melanie Sloan, CREW’s executive director. “They talk about transparency more than they exhibit it.”

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