Making Government Transparent and Accountable
The Sunlight Foundation uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable. Underlying all of our efforts is a fundamental belief that increased transparency will improve the public's confidence in government
The Sunlight Foundation Blog
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Tools for Transparency: Google Fusion Tables
Just look at any one of Sunlight’s projects and you’ll realize that it takes a mountain of data to help keep government open and transparent. From district information to campaign expenditures to lobbying dollars, making sense of large data sets is an intensive, concerted effort.Many of your own projects use dozens of spreadsheets, take up thousands of rows of data and live somewhere on our laptop, accessible only to you. This works to a point, but in an era of sharing, collaborating and web-based storage, it isn’t an optimal solution.
Google Fusion Tables is an experimental project from Google Labs with the goal of making sharing and collaborating on large sets of data much simpler. Fusion Tables isn’t focused on the traditional database system that requires “complicated SQL queries and transaction processing,” but is rather focused on “fusing data management and collaboration: merging multiple data sources, discussion of the data, querying, visualization, and web publishing.”
Google Fusion Tables allows you handle large amounts of data: you can upload files of up to 100 MB in formats like Excel, CSV and KML. You can also programmatically update, delete, query and visualize data using their API. Plus, you can merge your own data with existing public sets, allowing you to add further value and context to your own information.
While Fusion Tables is an experimental Google project, it shows great potential in allowing the less technically savvy to easily leverage large data sets while communicating and collaborating much more effortlessly.
For more information, check out the video and related links below -
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Bill Would Place Agency Reports to Congress Online
Rep. Steve Driehaus (D-OH) recently introduced legislation that would make it a lot easier for the public to access thousands of congressionally mandated reports. These reports are created when Congress requires agencies to give an accounting of their actions or plans for addressing a particular issue. Once received by Congress, the reports become House or Senate documents, and often provide valuable insight into what the federal government is (or should be) doing.
House documents, according to the Clerk of the House, originate from congressional committees and including annual reports of executive departments, investigative reports made to congress, presidential messages, and other similar publications. (House or Senate documents should not to be confused with House or Senate reports, which are prepared by congressional committees on proposed legislation and issues under investigation.) Rep. Dreihaus’ bill applies to congressionally mandated reports only.
Not all congressionally mandated reports are available online. Electronic access would put more eyes on each document, thereby enhancing their usefulness as oversight documents. My colleague John Wonderlich earlier wrote about how these reports can inform committee oversight plans. Rep. Dreihaus’ spokesman Tim Mulvey explains that “The reason Congress passes laws mandating these reports is so the American people can understand how their government works, and where it may not be working so well.” Driehaus, who sits on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, believes this bill could play a vital role in educating the public on what the government does.
At the beginning of each Congress, the Clerk of the House generates (pursuant to House Rule II) a report entitled “Reports to be Made to Congress,” which lists all congressionally mandated reports. It cites the law or resolution in which the requirement may be contained and placing under the name of each officer the list of reports required to be made by such officer.
While the report itself is available through GPO (here’s the 235-page report submitted in the 111th Congress: [PDF]) all of the reports it identifies are not. The GPO makes an effort to make these documents available online, but they don’t get everything. In addition, even when the documents are online, they are often difficult to find. For a closer look, check out the GPO’s index of congressional documents and search engine.
The Access to Congressional Mandated Reports Act, or H.R. 6026, would resolve several problems. The bill requires the director of the Office of Management and Budget to create a central website that will let the public access congressionally mandated reports. The legislation would mandate improved search functionality so that people can find the documents, allow people to be notified when a particular document becomes available, and require public access to the report within 30 days. In addition, OMB would be required to issue regulations to the agencies on how they should submit reports, which must be in electronic format.
Rep. Dreihaus has the right idea. Reps. Towns and Clay agree, as they’ve co-sponsored the legislation. Congressionally mandated reports (with few exceptions) should be available online, and I would add that congressionally documents should be published online as a general rule. Creating deadlines for the reports to be available, requiring electronic formats, and improving access to the public are all excellent ideas.
I do have a few minor quibbles. OMB has experience issuing regulations to make this kind of effort succeed, but it would be unconventional for their regulations to apply to independent agencies or the legislative or judicial branches. Similarly, it is more common for the Clerk or the Library of Congress or some other entity under congressional control to house congressional documents, instead of OMB, which is an arm of the President. Nevertheless, this legislation is a smart move in the right direction toward making government more open, transparent, and accountable.
Eric Naing contributed significantly to the writing and researching of this article.
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Tools for Transparency: Scribd – making documents accessible
We’re big fans of Scribd here at Sunlight. For a while now, we’ve been posting transparency related documents to the platform while leveraging their widgets to embed congressional fund raiser information on our Party Time website.
So, what is Scribd? Much like YouTube, Scribd relieves users of the burden of hosting large files in varying formats while adding a social layer on top. Users can also research existing documents, download them, add them to their own accounts and engage the community through commenting, ranking and sharing.
Many of us are sitting on files we’ve obtained through government offices, FOIA requests and other publicly available sources. Hosting these files ourselves can be cost prohibitive, difficult for others to find and may exist in formats unusable to some. Scribd takes the pain out of hosting and sharing these documents.
Making our documents accessible is important enough that, as Crunchbase notes, Barack Obama, the New York Times, Meg Whitman and others use this service to share their content.
While having the President posting files to Scribd is a great start, it’s not nearly enough. Every government office and agency, and every appointed and elected official needs to make public documents accessible to the public. Posting these docs in an archaic format on a government server doesn’t exactly fulfill this civic duty, but when these documents are posted in a format that everyone (with an Internet connection) can use, download, share and comment on, well, that’s a different story.
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Has Maxine Waters found a way around the Federal Election Campaign Act?
My colleague Lindsay Young reports on what appears to be a unique fundraising strategy employed by Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. Rather than raise the bulk of her campaign funds from political action committees and individual donors, Waters sells space on mailers to candidates and political causes she’s endorsed*, sometimes for as much as $45,000.
The endorsements show up on “slate mailers,” essentially campaign literature sent out by Waters to her constituents listing approved candidates and appropriate votes on ballot initiatives. A Federal Election Commission spokesman told us that selling endorsements is “exempt from the definition of ‘contribution’ and ‘expenditure’ under the Federal Election Campaign Act.” In other words, the bedrock principles of campaign rules that apply to candidates–limitations on the amount of donations and the kinds of contributors–don’t apply.
So Dave Jones, who’s running for insurance commissioner in California, paid Waters $25,000 for her endorsement. Under California election law, he can raise money directly from labor unions and businesses, as well as individuals. So the labor union AFSCME, for example, gave Jones $12,900. Roxborough, Pomerance, Nye and Adreani LLP, a law firm “dedicated solely to providing businesses with a broad range of legal services in all facets of civil litigation with a primary focus on business, insurance, employment, and wage and hour litigation,” donated $6,500. As did Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff LLP, a law firm specializing in personal injury suits. Those three donations more than cover Jones’ purchase of Waters endorsement, but all three would be impermissible at the federal level–neither law firms nor labor unions can donate directly to federal candidates. This is not to say that those three donations, out of the thousands that Jones received, went directly to Waters, only that all money is fungible, and Waters benefits by selling an endorsement to a committee that takes contributions that her own campaign can’t take directly.
What would stop a politician from selling an endorsement for $1 million?
*–Updated to fix a misleading wording. The process that Waters’ campaign uses in putting together slate mailers is described here (scroll down).
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Statelight: Transparency in a Box, Pt. 3
As we set the stage for advocating on local and state transparency issues and highlight some policies issues of note, inevitably the question comes:
How exactly do you go about learning more about policies in your state?
Whether you’ve already picked a policy focus, want to learn more about what role open government policies could play in your state, or are just chasing curiosity, you need to answer this question. To make your search for answers clearer — more transparent if you will — we’ve laid out a series of questions for you to ask to help get you started with your research.
ONE: What issue area do I focus on?
In our last episode of Transparency in a Box, John laid out three issue areas that will be of interest to many state advocates: ethics and campaign finance, budget transparency, and legislative data. Depending upon which policy you choose there are different resources that outline the answers to a crucial question for your research:
What information does the government currently provide about this policy? Or, what’s knowable from your government?
The answer to this question will vary by state and issue. If you’re interested in learning about how to determine what the situation is in your state for ethics and campaign finance, jump down to TWO. If you’re looking to do research on budget transparency, jump to THREE. And for your legislative data needs, head to FOUR. For general open government resources, jump to FIVE.
TWO: How can I figure out what information is available for ethics and campaign finance?
Where to look: Your state likely has a department of government that oversees campaign finance laws, either as part of the office of its Secretary of State or Board of Elections. (For a good example, check out Michigan’s site for Lobbying Disclosure.) Personal Financial Disclosures can be harder to find and are sometimes available from a statewide ethics office. (See Florida’s example. ) For a beginning look at your state’s code of law, the Library of Congress provides some great links, though you may need to do an additional search to find out your state’s ethics regulations. And while not a perfect resource, you should also play with CREW’s Ethics in Your State tool. Although the corruption rankings are two years old, you’ll find helpful resources for groups working on ethics and campaign finance in your state along with media resources that might help give you a greater sense of your state’s situation.
What to look for: You can focus on one of the three policies below or search for information on all of them. In each instance, you’ll want to find out whether these things are actually available and if so, how much information is provided to the public and how much is online:
- Personal Financial Disclosures
- Campaign Contributions
- Lobbying Disclosure
How this policy is enacted: Campaign finance policies are determined by the passage of laws or by executive orders. Finding this sort of information will do a lot to tell you about why things are the way they are now, which is important to understand if you’re interested in working to make this policy more transparent.
THREE: How can I figure out the transparency of my state’s budget?
Where to look: Your state’s budget portal. If you’re unable to find what you’re looking for there, try looking for more information on your governor or comptroller general’s website. Although you should always go the source (i.e. your state’s official website) there are other sites that can help inform your search and understanding. For instance, check out this resource from the Center for Fiscal Accountability, which hosts useful links and news about budget transparency, listed by state. The Sunshine Review also posts a guide to budget transparency listed by state.
What to look for: Are budget proposals posted online in addition to actual expenditures? How timely or complete is the publishing? Does your state have an open website for its budget/spending?
How this policy is enacted: Many states (but not all) have an online budget portal that shows how money is spent. These portals could be enacted by law, but are more likely based on an initiative from your governor or your comptroller general who can build such a site when made a gubernatorial priority.
Related to this portal is the general process by which your state sets its spending priorities. This system can vary from one state to another, but generally involves your governor submitting a proposal for a budget and your legislature eventually approving it. The actual process, from submission to approval, is incredibly complex with a number of open and secret negotiations.
FOUR: How can I figure out what legislative data my state publishes?
Where to look: The official source of legislative information in your state, most likely your state legislature’s website, which you can find quickly on this comprehensive list. (Thanks, Wikipedia!) The Library of Congress also publishes a resource on state laws that should help your search. Each state page includes links for that state’s bills and legislative session laws. The Open States Project is also working on collecting a variety of legislative data for each state and may be a good source for research or collaboration.
What to look for: Keeping in mind that there are variety of ways to interpret “legislative data transparency” (which John goes into more detail with in his post), two to focus on:
1. Look to see if your state legislature posts its bills, amendments, and votes online. See whether the information is searchable and what the timeline is that your state uses for posting these documents online. Does your legislature note whether bills have to be online before a vote? If so, how long before?
2. You should also check to see how the state is making its legislative data available. This is the more technical side, but it’s crucial to creating innovative web platforms that can aggregate and share bills, votes, and amendments. Most states display bills and other legislation in HTML; others post actual data files in order to empower more advanced analysis and reuse. For a great example of open government work in this field, see the New York State Senate, a leader in making raw data available to developers.
If you’re having problems searching for information on this subject on your legislature’s website, you may have to turn to your search engine of choice. Use a combination of keywords including your state’s name and phrases like “legislative data,” “general assembly data,” “data system,” and “online.” Your search results may turn up a free resource (see Rhode Island’s example) or a proprietary one. Look for contact information from an associated government official to learn more.
How this policy is enacted: Legislative data is controlled by legislative procedure and changes to existing policy may require a change of your assembly or chamber’s rules, or may also be able to be changed by an initiative of the technical staff of the legislature.
FIVE: Where can I learn more about general states-related open government stuff?
There are number of resources scattered around out there, but a good place to start is to check out the work of organizations within your state. This directory of state and national organizations is a great place to find out about who’s already working on issues in your state and what issues they focus on. My colleague, Sarah, is also compiling a review of state transparency efforts. Check back to see how your state is doing.
While not an open government site, per say, this digest of state laws, hosted by the Library of Congress (mentioned above) is a great “one-stop” source for state-specific government sites. Head here when you’re looking for pages listing your state’s bills, legislative session laws, and other odds and ends.
OpenMuni Wiki is a collaborative platform where people share case studies and best practices for open government policy and advocacy. Although the site started with a more local focus, it has since expanded to include state-level concerns and should be turned especially when you’re looking into open standards for government data. If you’re looking for even more ideas or inspiration from the work others are doing around the country, OpenMuni offers a great list of like minded efforts. Poking around these groups will show you the lay of the open government land and again provides the opportunity to collaborate on ongoing transparency projects. Similarly, check out CityCamp to see how folks working on a municipal level are actively gathering public officials, citizens, and experts of every sort together to problem solve local transparency issues. Getting involved with a CityCamp can be a great way to connect with people already in the field.
This post only gives you an tiny view of all the work being done to get transparency for different levels of governance. There is still a great need to organize for change on a state level, and to be successful these transparency initiatives need to communicate with one another. If you do decide to join an open government group or to craft your own initiative, post your efforts where others can find and connect with you and your work. We host an open government projects page so that you can archive your work, ask questions of your peers in the field, and check out the work others are doing, though connecting with folks over Govloop or OpenMuni will be useful to you, too.
Have a favorite open government site that I missed? Please (!) share it with us below. (Extra points if it has a state focus.)
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Tools for Transparency: Live Streaming to the Web
Photo: jdlasica from Flickr
For many, the “live web” was a meaningless concept until the aftermath of the 2009 Iranian presidential election when protesters used Twitter as a means to push messages past the censors to the web in real-time while grabbing headlines across the globe. When you can learn about an event as it’s actually happening, waiting an entire news cycle for the media to type up the latest makes the information feel about as stale as yesterday’s paper.
Live streaming video takes this instant digest of news to an entirely new level, one that will have a lot of impact on accountability in politics. From town hall meetings to rallies to protests, live video creates a visual record of our elected politicians and allows citizens to participate in events from afar without filtration.
Here at Sunlight we’ve taken live streaming and added further context with Sunlight Live. We’ve covered the recent GOP meeting with business lobbyists, financial reform and the health care debates. Using Ustream, we’ve added contextual content and data streams and a way for the audience to interact with each other, providing further context to the debate.
Of course if you want to take the initiative and get local, services like Qik, Ustream and Kyte allow you to stream events to the web. All you need is a smartphone and a clear view.
Live streaming services are becoming more and more accessible to the general public and when used with the right combination of tools can provide for a powerful approach to accountability.
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What’s in a name?
It’s getting towards the end of summer and we’re getting a little silly here at Sunlight. The news is full of stories of politician’s hidden agendas, summer hideaways, and navel gazing — pretty typical fare for late August. We’ve taken our cue and looked deeply into politicians names to see if the letters themselves spell out a hidden message.
For example, it’s not surprising that Sarah Palin is commenting on the New York mosque controversy when the letters in her name, slightly reordered, spell out “Sharia plan.” Charlie Rangel’s fate has been sealed now that we know his name translates into “Clang! Liar here.” And American workers should hold tight to their paychecks because Joe Biden’s secret message is the slightly ungrammatical “I need job.” No sense can be made out of Harry Reid’s “hair dryer”, but perhaps Republicans should know that Michael Steele portends “ethical melees.”
Our media friends don’t escape, either. Perhaps pointing to the closing of affiliate offices around the country, the Washington Post must take its few “waning potshots.” Its competition at the New York Times is merely a bunch of “write monkeys.” Meanwhile, bloggers at the progressive Daily Kos generate “solid yak” while the conservative Red State is a “tad terse.”
Talking heads Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann become “Lib yell roil” and “Oink! Blather Men.” What would Jon Stewart say about this? His blend of humor, wit, and sarcasm translates into “Rant! Jest! Ow!”
To find out the hidden meaning of Anderson Cooper — it’s really kinda odd — check out this anagram finder. We’d love to see what you find in the comments.
This blogpost is brought to you by luminous enchiladas, a waxed curly sheik, and child owner john.
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Statelight: Transparency in a Box, Pt. 2
As Nicole wrote last week, we’re digging into state level transparency, in order to share what we know, and to help empower activists around the country to create more transparency in their governments.
We have chosen three priority issues to begin with, and today I’m looking at why we feel like those issues are good places to start for state-based advocacy. They are: Ethics and Campaign Finance, Legislative Data, and Budget Transparency.
Ethics and Campaign Finance: While this category could include a variety of different things, I think first of a few pieces of information — campaign contributions, personal financial disclosures, and lobbying disclosure that each play a fundamental role in creating accountability in government.
When campaign contributions are disclosed in public, we can better understand the motivations of our elected officials, who spend an increasing amount of time raising funds for electoral campaigns, rather than attending to their official duties. Personal Financial Disclosure forms, while they may sound wonky, are one of the best safeguards we have against conflicts of interest and bribery — without them, it would be all too easy for officials to give in to the temptation to conduct public business with private gains in mind. Finally, lobbying disclosure gives an essential view to the work of moneyed interests, who all too often have disproportional influence in public decisions.
In finding the right balance for ethics disclosure, privacy and speech rights need to be weighed against the public interest in disclosure.
Budget Transparency: Budget transparency can really involve two related issues — first, how the state prepares and makes a plan for spending priorities, and second, how the state ends up actually spending funds. There is enormous interest in tracking spending across the country, which shouldn’t be surprising, given the size of the sums involved, and the budget crisis so many states are facing. Technology is also changing our expectations for budget transparency, just as it’s becoming easier to display more detailed information about expenditures, contracts, and grants, in real time.
Pitfalls in working on budget transparency include complicated budget terminology, the unreliability of underlying budget reporting mechanisms, and potentially proprietary information contained in contracts.
Legislative Data: Legislative data transparency can also mean a variety of things. For the purposes of this work, we’re thinking especially of two. First, access to the data that legislatures release about their work. Sites like GovTrack.us and OpenCongress.org rely on legislative data to share bills, votes, and amendments. Unfortunately, they also have to piece together information that should be posted online in a way that encourages reliable and timely reuse. This problem — governments posting information and ignoring their role as data providers — permeates state legislatures as well as the US Congress, and is one we’d like to help solve.
Second, legislative data can refer to whether or not bills, amendments, and votes are posted online. Too often, bills are considered without a meaningful period for public inspection, and votes and amendments aren’t posted at all. At the federal level, Sunlight has long called for 72 hours for all non-emergency legislation, and is working to put votes and amendments online (among other things). State legislatures all face similar questions, and activists can have a real impact on what they decide to release.
For both sorts of legislative data transparency, the public stakes are clear: when legislatures share their workings better online, citizens will be closer to the work being done in their name, and representation will work better.
Opposition to legislative transparency often comes in the form of a reluctance to do anything differently, a majority party (or committee chair) that is unwilling to give up their privileged access to information, and all to often, budget restraints.
We’ll be highlighting great work being done in each of these areas soon, in the ensuing posts in this series, that Nicole laid out last week.
If you’re interested in getting started with transparency advocacy in your state, feel free to get in touch with our organizing team at organizing@sunlightfoundation.com. If you’re not sure where to start, Laurenellen will have a post soon with advice to get you started.
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The dysfunctional way we view campaign contributions and corruption
I ham-handedly tried to explain why Tom DeLay got off-the-hook yesterday when I stated that his ideology overlapped perfectly with the corrupt actions of former super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. What I meant is that it was impossible to distinguish whether DeLay’s positions, for example, on labor laws for the Marianas Islands, were influenced by the trips and dining he was provided by Abramoff–via money laundered through a nonprofit–or whether that position stemmed from his conservative belief in free markets with little to no regulation. Prosecutors couldn’t figure it out and there was no evidence to go by except for DeLay’s statement that he was simply following his ideological beliefs. The money spent on him held no sway over his ultimate decisions, he argued.
A similar argument can be made for lawmakers who receive campaign contributions from lobbyists and employees of firms who receive earmarks from said lawmakers. Take deceased Rep. John Murtha as an example. Murtha could repeatedly state that all that concerned him was getting jobs and infrastructure into his economically depressed district. Same goes for Rep. Don Young, former Sen. Ted Stevens and former Sen. Robert Byrd. All the campaign contributions they were getting didn’t matter when they signed off on earmarks for their contributors because they were just looking for viable job-creating projects. You can’t necessarily prove that anything illegal happened.
All of that brings us to the Op-Ed by author and lawyer Scott Turow in today’s New York Times. Turow does the best job possible explaining the dysfunctional ways in which our legal system views and deals with campaign contributions. One person can be convicted of bribery for offering a $1,000 contribution in exchange for a vote while Rod Blagojevich walks free on a hung jury over charges that he held up funding for a children’s hospital over campaign contributions and so on and so on.
Our legal system accepts that the transmission of campaign contributions in exchange for official acts is illegal bribery, yet it fails to properly police this practice. This is mainly due to the circumstances described above. How do you prove that a contribution was intended as a bribe when the action may have taken place despite the contribution? It’s impossible. So you get a system where we scold people for the appearance of corruption or improper influence, but don’t do anything about it. Take this example that Turow lays out:
For example, in June 2009, the court decided a case involving Massey Coal and its chief executive, Joe Blankenship. (Coincidentally, Massey was the operator of a coal mine in West Virginia that exploded in April, killing 29 miners.) In 2004, after Massey had lost a $50-million fraud verdict to a rival coal company, Mr. Blankenship spent $3 million supporting the successful candidacy of Brent Benjamin to the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, where Massey’s challenge of the fraud verdict was going to be heard.
Although Mr. Blankenship’s spending eclipsed the contributions of all of Judge Benjamin’s other donors put together, the judge subsequently refused to remove himself from Massey’s appeal. Unsurprisingly, the court voted to overturn the verdict against Massey, with Judge Benjamin providing the deciding vote.
The case eventually came to the United States Supreme Court, which by a 5-to-4 vote decided Justice Benjamin should have recused himself because of the “disproportionate” influence Mr. Blankenship’s money had in the election. Nonetheless, the court pointedly refused to require the same from other judges who received less grandiose campaign assistance from lawyers and litigants with cases before them.
Moreover, the court appeared persuaded that nothing criminal had occurred, even though its ruling concluded that it was “reasonably foreseeable” at the time that Mr. Benjamin would decide the Massey case and that Mr. Blankenship had a “vested interest” when he spent the money. Given that logic, who can blame Mr. Blagojevich — or Wanda Brandstetter — for asking, “Why me?”
The court ruled that the judge was corrupted, but that no law had been broken. This is the sort of dysfunctional world of campaign funding that we live in.
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What to say about DeLay?
Really, what is there to say? After a six-years the Department of Justice dropped their investigation into former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s connection to the Jack Abramoff scandal. There are a few things left to say:
1) It’s really hard to convict someone whose ideological proclivities happen to overlap with the nefarious actions of Washington’s former super-lobbyist Abramoff, who was also the target’s close friend.
2) The laws written to punish official corrupt activity are very difficult to enforce. Gathering evidence is also incredibly difficult. Absent complete idiocy by the target–Jim Traficant, Randy “Duke” Cunningham, Bob Ney, Michael Myers, William Jefferson–it is difficult to prove that corrupt activity took place.
3) The Public Integrity Unit at the Justice Department made some serious progress by obtaining convictions on corruption related charges of numerous targets, but they also completely screwed up along the way. The Ted Stevens charges were thrown out and the unit could never pin down either DeLay or John Doolittle. They also over played their hand by entering and seizing documents from William Jefferson’s congressional office.
