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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Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice
A new book from O’Reilly media, entitled Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice, discusses the possible ways government can utilize the power of citizen engagement to become more efficient and transparent. The collection of essays features well-known visionaries such as Carl Malamud, Beth Noveck and Tim O’Reilly.
Open Government includes chapters by Sunlight’s Ellen Miller, Bill Allison and Micah Sifry. Their chapters deal with everything from the role of transparency in countering the weight of monied interests to the need for useful and open government data. The forces of co-innovation and transparency must be in government moving forward and this book brings together some illustrative case studies about how to proceed. Follow this link for a sample of the first eight chapters.
Here’s a nice excerpt from the preface:
What is open government? In the most basic sense, it’s the notion that the people have the right to access the documents and proceedings of government. The idea that the public has a right to scrutinize and participate in government dates at least to the Enlightenment, and is enshrined in both the U.S. Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution. Its principles are recognized in virtually every democratic country on the planet.
But the very meaning of the term continues to evolve. The concept of open government has been influenced—for the better—by the open source software movement, and taken on a greater focus for allowing participation in the procedures of government. Just as open source software allows users to change and contribute to the source code of their software, open government now means government where citizens not only have access to information, documents, and proceedings, but can also become participants in a meaningful way. Open government also means improved communication and operations within the various branches and levels of government. More sharing internally can lead to greater efficiency and accountability.
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The Irony and the Solution of Lobbying Disclosures
If you read Monday’s New York Times story about how many lobbyists are de-registering in the face of new filing requirements and how some may still be lobbying without technically violating the law, I can understand if you came away confused about a) the general value of transparency, b) the effectiveness of making lobbyists disclose their activities and c) my own role as a one-time lobbyist for Sunlight, since the reporter used my own personal experience as the peg for his story. I suppose the point was to suggest some kind of irony—transparency advocate hiding her activities from the public? Well, let me give you some more background than was included in the Times piece.
Although not required by law, when Sunlight was founded in 2006, I registered as a lobbyist to demonstrate that the public good is served by lobbying disclosure. I didn’t have to do this since I was at most spending 2-3% of my time meeting Members of Congress or their staff, and the law only requires people who spend more than 20% of their time on lobbying to register. But, since I was occasionally having meetings on Capitol Hill to discuss our transparency agenda, I thought I should err on the side of more rather than less disclosure. I still believe that but I figured out pretty quickly how meaningless current lobbying disclosure law is – I was never asked who I met with, what I discussed in my meetings, or even how much time I spent with a lawmaker or her staff. The information I filled out didn’t really tell anyone anything substantial. There was little real public good served. Anyway, I had almost nothing to report—perhaps a handful of meetings at most.
Then along came the Obama Transition team with their strong disposition against holding meetings with registered lobbyists. Talk about irony. For the first time in my decades in Washington I actually found an Administration sympathetic to my long-held agenda about government transparency. The last thing I wanted to do was have being a registered lobbyist become a barrier to talking to the administration about improving transparency. So, since I was under no legal obligation to register (because I spent so little time on Capitol Hill directly), I deregistered in the last quarter of 2008. (Sunlight has two registered lobbyists on staff – John Wonderlich, our Policy Director and Nisha Thompson, our online organizer. Our third lobbyist is Lisa Rosenberg who is a consultant to us.)
This might look like a case of perverse consequences—tougher rules against lobbyists leading someone who was doing a modest amount of lobbying to unregister as a lobbyist in order to have more lobbying-type conversations with decision makers! But here’s the point: When I was registered, the filing requirements were so weak you had no idea who I talked to on the Hill or in the White House, what I talked to them about, or what my positions were. Lobbyist registration and disclosure as it is currently structured is pretty much a joke. All kinds of people in and around Washington buy and sell influence over the process; the 14,000 registered lobbyists are just the tip and shoulder of the iceberg. Big campaign contributors, corporate and union executives, celebrities, and my favorite, “strategic advisors” like Tom Daschle who use their long careers in Congress to guide lobbying firms without actually going up to the Hill to lobby themselves, are all players in the influence-peddling business. The current disclosure laws—which exempt anyone who spends less than 20% of their time lobbying—hide more than they expose.
So let me state here and now. When, as we advocate, the lobbying disclosure laws are reformed to cover all lobbying, and require prompt disclosure of who is lobbying whom for what and for how much, I’ll be the first to sign up.
Our lobbying laws should be detailed and timely enough to keep pace with the influence peddling they are designed to track. We need to amend the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (LDA) to require that all individuals engaging in direct issue advocacy with lawmakers, staff and the executive branch, as well as those who bundle campaign contributions to federal candidates above a threshold amount must report within 72 hours of their first lobbying contact under the LDA. If you lobby, you lobby. No more of this ridiculous 20 percent exemption.
All registrants should be required to disclose all legislative contacts with a member of Congress, staff or executive branch employee. Disclosure should include all legislation and regulations discussed and all requests for specific services or government funding. Right now the reporting is so general you have no idea who lobbyists are actually meeting with, or what is being discussed.
All legislative contacts should be reported within 24 hours of any meeting. A reporting template should be set up so that we can report from our iPhones and Blackberrys. Reporting lobby contacts should be a simple and seamless as texting.
And finally, all campaign contributions made and bundled by lobbyists should be reported within 24 hours of being made. All such disclosures should be made electronically, published promptly and maintained online in a downloadable, searchable, sortable format.
And the White House needs to get real. Real time, on line transparency is key to holding lobbyists at bay—not bans on one group of special pleaders while another group gets to waltz in and out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Who else wants to sign up with me?
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Weekly Media Roundup – May 1, 2009
Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and grantees from this week:David Herbert with the National Journal (subscription required) wrote about the grades new media experts from across the political spectrum gave the Obama administration’s Web presence. The experts gave WhiteHouse.gov an average grade of C+. Although they mostly see it as an improvement from the previous administration’s site, many noted that it remained a one-way forum and suggested it be opened to allow comments and other interactive features. Herbert quotes Ellen Miller, Sunlight’s executive director, “This occasional use of interactive tools” is impressive, but “90 percent of the time the site is pretty straightforward, as it was under [George W.] Bush.” Recovery.gov, the administration’s site where citizens can monitor the expenditure and use of recovery funds, fared even worse in the Journal’s poll, averaging a C. The most common gripe about the site, Herbert writes, is that it’s “the view from 30,000 feet,” as Micah Sifry, senior technology advisor for Sunlight and Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) co-founder, told him. Without providing on-the-the ground details, Recovery.gov offers taxpayers few tools for staying on top of where their money is going, reviewers said. Recovery.gov has competition in the form of privately-operated Recovery.org, which has “more granular data and a real search tool, which one assumes we’ll eventually see on Recovery.gov,” Micah explains. “I don’t think it’s fair to compare this site to other Web sites yet, as it’s just weeks old,” Micah added. “Let’s take another look in three to six months, OK?”
Chris Lefkow with Agence France-Presse gained a different take by interviewing academics, technology analysts and nonpartisan groups on the administration’s technology efforts. Lefkow writes that they all said the first “tech president” is off to a good start. Lefkow quotes John Wonderlich, Sunlight’s policy director, “their first pronouncements are very encouraging,” and added that the challenge, however, is going to be the implementation. Andrew Resiej, Sunlight’s other senior technology advisor and PDF co-founder, said the administration been doing as much as it can to fulfill its promises in regards to transparency and technological innovation. “However they’ve been constrained by decades of industrial-age rules and regulations and procurement protocols that are handicapping the speed at which they can implement that vision,” he said.
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Weekly Media Roundup – April 24, 2009
Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and grantees from this week:
Sunday evening, BlogTalkRadio posted an episode of “Talking Gov2.0,” where Clay Johnson, Sunlight Lab’s director, discussed Sunlight, Sunlight Labs and the Apps for America contest. Speaking of Apps for America, Clay announced the winners on Monday. And Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb wrote about the contest, and included a screencast of the winners.
Victoria McGrane with the Politico wrote about the lack of online disclosure of campaign finance data by candidates for the U.S. Senate, and the efforts to rectify this through S. 482, the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act. She mention’s Sunlight’s Pass S. 482, and extensively quotes Lisa Ronsenberg, Sunlight’s government affairs consultant, about the need for the Senate to join the 21st Century.
The National Journal reported on data from the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) that shows last year’s top 20 Political Action Committee contributors to federal candidates poured a combined $22 million into lobbying efforts from January through March — an increase of nearly 20 percent over the same period in 2008.
Anne C. Mulkern with Greenwire (subscription required) used Capitol Words to look at the use of energy- and environment-related words by congressional lawmakers. The New York Times re-posted Mulkern’s piece.
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Weekly Media Roundup – April 13, 2009
Each weekday, Sunlight’s communications team collects all the press mentions of Sunlight and of our grantees. Instead of just keeping that to ourselves, we thought we’d try something new by highlighting some of the more interesting mentions and sharing that with you each week. (You can also check out our Delicious page and our Press Center to see who’s writing about us.)
Elizabeth Brotherton at Roll Call (subscription required), Associated Press Managing Editors, Paul Krawzak with CQ Politics and Deb Price with The Detroit News wrote stories about about U.S. House of Representatives lawmakers posting their earmark requests for the 2010 budget on their Web sites as new transparency guidelines required. Bill Allison, Sunlight’s senior fellow, researched the disclosures. Journalists used Bill’s research as the base for their articles, including many regional papers reporting on earmarks requested by their respective congressional delegations.
National Journal’s “Tech Daily Dose” blog reported that the Center for Responsive Politics’ site OpenSecrets.org is going “open data” this week. For the first time in their 26-year history, CRP “is making its most popular data archives fully available to the public for download for free,” The Journal writes. Sunlight helped fund CRP’s OpenData initiative to make millions of records available under a Creative Commons license, The Journal adds.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg with The New York Times wrote about President Obama’s promise to bring transparency to the federal government. She notes the administration is finding that fulfilling the pledge is easier said than done. Technological hurdles, privacy concerns and the Washington’s entrenched culture of secrecy have so far proven hard to overcome. Stolberg lists several steps the Obama team have successfully taken, the streamlining of a health care summit over the White House Web site and the setting up of Recovery.gov to help track the stimulus package. She quotes Ellen Miller, Sunlight’s executive director, as saying the site is “an amazing potential model of how information is made available to the public.”
