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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LegiStorm Posts Staffer Personal Financial Disclosures
LegiStorm – an insanely useful site of congressional information including staffer salaries and other disclosures – has, for the first time, posted PDFs of the personal financial disclosures that some staffers are required to file. For every member of Congress, at least one staffer must file a personal financial disclosure. If a staffer is making the maximum pay, as some chiefs of staff do, they must file a disclosure. Staffers hold a lot of power on Capitol Hill and are often overlooked as recipients of undue influence from outside groups. LegiStorm notes this in their press release:
Most disclosures are relatively mundane and appear to demonstrate those staffers have no discernible potential conflicts of interest, Friedly said. However, hundreds of staffer disclosures reveal ties to interest groups and lobbying firms, either as a past job, a spouse’s work or a future employment agreement. Others reveal lucrative side jobs, adding as much as $100,000 or more to their federal pay.
In an article in Roll Call, LegiStorm’s Jock Friedly explains the importance of publicly disclosing this information on the Internet:
While Member financial disclosures are relatively easy to find online, getting ahold of staff disclosures is much harder, Friedly noted, since it usually requires a trip to Capitol Hill.
“Currently, there’s no way to get this information if you’re a blogger out in California,” Friedly said. “It’s really making things possible that weren’t possible before.”
Friedly also expects some negative feedback due to posting these documents. LegiStorm has been criticized in the past for posting disclosures by staffers, most notably the disclosure of their salaries, by those who feel this information is private and personal. Our fearless Executive Director Ellen Miller makes the transparency argument in Roll Call today:
But in the age of the Internet, full disclosure and transparency can only come when things are published online for the entire world to access, argued Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a group that advocates using the Internet for transparency.
Miller argued that senior staffers have “a huge influence over Members of Congress” and should expect to have their lives scrutinized a bit more than the average American.
“They are senior-level officials of government,” Miller said. “They knew this requirement when they took this job. … It’s nothing that wasn’t available before. This just makes it more available.”
Go check out the new database here.
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And the Insanely Useful Web Sites Predict the Winner of the GOP Senate Leadership Scramble to be…
Following up on Paul’s insanely useful look at Sen. Jon Kyl, who will replace departing Sen. Trent Lott as minority whip, here’s a slightly different look at those jockeying to move on up in the leadership and take over Kyl’s old job as Republican conference chairman (I’m using the Washington Post’s list of likely contenders).
If Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison rises in the hierarchy, 20 former staffers of hers who are now lobbyists can say they once worked for the person responsible for the Senate GOP’s message operations (compared to three for Sen. Richard Burr and none for Sen. Lamar Alexander — so far at least). Hutchison has the most robust leadership PAC, called KPAC; in 2007, it has raised $632,952, of which $549,250 has been contributed by individuals, with the balance coming from other PACs. Burr has raised $215,500 — most of which comes from other PACs, according to the latest FEC filing. Just $15,000 of the donations to the Next Century Fund came from individuals. Alexander’s leadership PAC, the Tenn PAC, has raised $15,000 so far in 2007.
If you’re just following the money, you might infer that more people with more at stake on Capitol Hill have a vested interest in Hutchison moving up as opposed to Burr or Alexander. That holds for earmark recipients as well (see below the fold for more…)
Via GovTrack.us, we know that Alexander and Hutchison are both appropriators; Burr isn’t. Looking through the various appropriations bills tracked at Taxpayers for Common Sense, we see that Hutchison got a dozen earmarks in the Senate Agriculture bill worth $2.7 million; Alexander got one worth $1 million, and Burr got two (along with co-requester Sen. Elizabeth Dole) worth $825,000. In Defense (since not all of the bills have gone to conference, I’m just using the Senate versions for consistency’s sake), Hutchison landed 17 earmarks worth more than $38 million; Alexander got six worth more than $22 million, and Burr got five worth $8 million (all three jointly requested multiple other earmarks with other members). In the Energy and Water bill, Hutchison got eight earmarks worth more than $12 million; Alexander got two worth about $1.5 million, while Burr got one worth $300,000. EarmarkWatch.org makes it easier to check the earmarks in the Senate Labor, Education & HHS bill — Hutchison, with co-sponsors, stuffed it with 26 earmarks worth $6.5 million; Alexander, all by himself, got 10 earmarks worth $3 million, while Burr got 5 worth $750,000 (four of which were co-sponsored by Dole).
One final thing worth taking a peak at: the Voting Trend Analysis on OpenCongress. Scroll about halfway down each page to learn that Hutchison votes most frequently with fellow Texas Sen. John Cornyn, likewise fellow Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker has the closest vote pattern to Alexander. The oddball is Burr, whose votes most often match Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss. Hutchison and Alexander least often vote with Sen. Russ Feingold, whole Burr votes least often with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. The Democrat all three vote most often with is Sen. Ben Nelson, while the Republican they disagree with most often is Sen. Olympia Snowe. In terms of policy, it doesn’t seem like there’s too much distant between any of the three…
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Insanely Useful Look at Sen. Jon Kyl
Sen. Trent Lott’s reform induced decision to forgo further representation for the people of Mississippi is creating a hole in the Senate Republican leadership team as Lott is the Minority Whip. Lott’s resignation has already caused Republican Conference Chair Jon Kyl to announce his ambitions to be the next Minority Whip and Sen. Lamar Alexander, who lost by one vote to Lott for the position, is also expected to toss his plaid shirt into the race. Seeing as how we have a whole host of resources, many of them Insanely Useful, it seems appropriate to see what these resources have to say about these characters. Let’s start with a cursory look at Sen. Jon Kyl.
In contrast to the retiring Lott, Sen. Kyl is an ardent foe of earmark opacity and has joined his fellow Republicans in fighting for more disclosure and less spending in Washington. Nonetheless, Kyl, like most Senators, still inserts earmarks into appropriations legislation. He is by no means prolific in his earmarking, in fact spending items inserted solely by the Senator total less than $30 million. Taxpayers for Common Sense hosts databases for all the 2007 appropriations bills. This list of Kyl’s earmarks was compiled from the TCS databases.
While Kyl is not a prolific earmarker is certainly a big fundraiser having raised over $15 million for his 2006 Senate race victory. Over the years Sen. Kyl has relied on law and lobby firms – Kyl is a former lobbyist himself – and ideological organizations, the Club for Growth in particular, for big dollar donation events. During the last cycle, Kyl was aided by a fly-in visit from President Bush where Viad Corp. employees showered the Senator with over $30,000 in contributions. Viad Corp. teamed up with the law/lobby firm Snell & Wilmer, which employs no less than 4 former Kyl employees, to sponsor another event that brought in the big bucks for Kyl. Here’s a look at Kyl’s biggest contributors from the 2006 cycle:
Open Secrets also hosts databases on the personal finances and private travel of members of Congress. Kyl isn’t one of the wealthiest members ranking as the 91st richest Senator – or more precisely, the 9th poorest Senator. Kyl’s listed personal finances show him to be worth between $76K and $316K, nothing when compared to the $200 million net worth of Sen. Herb Kohl, the richest Senator. According to the travel database, Kyl has only traveled to attend an American Enterprise Institute retreat in Colorado. His staff makes up for the other 14 trips listed under his name. The OS Revolving Door database also shows that four staffers from Kyl’s office have gone on to become lobbyists.
FedSpending.org shows that Arizona received over $10 billion in federal government contracts, the biggest recipients being Raytheon and TriWest Healthcare Alliance. Both Raytheon and TriWest were cosponsors of the Viad Corp. and Snell & Wilmer fundraiser. These two obviously rely on contracts in this state so they know that the powers the be need to get reelected.
If you find any connections in these databases please add them in the comments. We’ll see what else the databases hold in store for Kyl and his possible challenger(s) for the Minority Whip spot.
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Insanely Useful Sites: GovTrack.us
GovTrack.us is a perfect choice to be our first review as an Insanely Useful Website. GovTrack is one of the original web 2.0 type sources for government information: both an excellent example of a new model of political information distribution, and a compelling story of Web-programming genius expressed as an ambitious civic undertaking.Josh Tauberer, Govtrack’s creator and proprietor, has gone far beyond building a simple tool to help track congressional proceedings; Josh’s creation has become a fundamental fixture in terms of both government information and structured data, a result of his extensive knowledge of both advanced linguistics, and computer programming. Josh’s willingness to volunteer his expertise also led to him helping to form and author the recommendations of the Open House Project, a separate Sunlight project.
Here’s Josh Tauberer briefly telling the story of Govtrack: (click below to play)
http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/files/mp3/govtrack.mp3GovTrack’s user oriented design and creative combinations of different data sources have garnered praise from notable sources, including Peggy Garvin, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and also help make GovTrack useful for a variety of different users.
There’s a lot more to this review; click below to keep reading…
Key to becoming an Insanely Useful Site is the ease of access to the site’s data for an amateur seeker of political information — or in Internet speak, a noob. GovTrack provides numerous tools to help amateurs find information that is relevant to their immediate interests in Congress, whether that be electoral (should I vote for my current congressperson?) or because of a specific interest in a particular bill. Usually the point of entry to government information for an amateur is a desire to learn about who represents them.
So, say I have a member of Congress, which, in reality, I don’t (D.C.), and let’s say I live in Newton, Massachusetts, which means that Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) is my congressman. But let’s pretend that I don’t know that. When I get to the home page of GovTrack I notice in the upper left hand corner that I can search for my representative. If I don’t know his/her last name I can click to a "zoomable district map". The "zoomable district map" — it takes a second to load — is a Google mash-up map with every Congressional district visible and clickable. I can zoom into Massachusetts and see that Newton is within the boundaries of the 4th CD of Massachusetts and therefore I am represented by Rep. Frank.Now that I’ve found my Representative I can click through to their individual page. GovTrack’s individual member pages are incredibly detailed and use supplemental information often not found on member’s official Web sites or easily accessible through the THOMAS Web site. Each individual page contains a list of recent votes, a link to past votes, sponsored and cosponsored bills, speeches on the floor of the House, committee membership, and links to campaign contributions and video clips. For someone simply searching for a way to easily track their member of Congress, GovTrack provides RSS feeds of all information related to your representative and the ability to receive e-mail alerts on your member of Congress’ activity.
If you want to go deeper into the Congressional process you can follow the committees on which your member of Congress sits. For this example, Barney Frank is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. The committee’s page holds similar information about the committee that is available on member pages. Each committee page provides a list of members on the committee with pictures, all bills before the committee, all bills that have been enacted into law and bills that have not been enacted. RSS feeds and e-mail updates are also available for the committee. Unfortunately, quite a good deal of committee information is simply not released to the public either at all (committee votes) or in a timely fashion (committee transcripts), so GovTrack is not able to track these important pieces of committee data.
The best part about these member and committee pages is the intuitive design of each one and the ease of understanding the information. The data is not cluttered and confusing, as THOMAS often can be, and the information is presented in a thoughtful way, so that the amateur can find the information they need without wading through piles of irrelevant and aggravating information or doing multiple unsuccessful searches.
Legislative Detail
While GovTrack’s greatest asset is its accessible presentation of information and ease of use, the expert and political professional will find numerous features useful that the amateur may not be seeking.
The bill pages are an excellent example of GovTrack’s accessible presentation directed at expert users. For example, GovTrack presents bills with highlighted text to show which changes have been made as the bill makes its way through Congress. The recent bill for relief after the bridge collapse in Minneapolis is a perfect example. As you can see the colors red, yellow, and blue respectively denote removed text, changed text, and inserted text into the bill. GovTrack also provides all previous versions of the bill with highlighted text so you can track changes from introduction to passage. This allows any researcher or political expert to immediately look at a bill that they are following and know what was changed without having to spend fifteen minutes or an hour parsing the text.Another great feature of GovTrack for researchers is the ability to search votes all the way back to 1993. If you are trying to compile or compare information on particular members of Congress and their voting records, GovTrack is clearly the place to do your research.
A favorite feature is the ability to search by subject terms. While, unfortunately, you can’t add your own, there are a large number of subject terms to search by. Tracked events alerts are available for each subject term and are very useful for a busy researcher or blogger who needs immediate updates on bills in their issue area of choice.
Always important to anyone doing political work professionally is the ability to check primary sources. Each bill page provides a link to the original text on THOMAS if you need to check the information presented on GovTrack to that provided by the Library of Congress. (For example, just this morning we used GovTrack to find S.1, followed the link to THOMAS, and used THOMAS to find a good .pdf version for printing.)
The massive number of RSS feeds on vote, member, and bill information is also a great asset of GovTrack. Finally, GovTrack provides an RSS feed on all upcoming committee hearings. This is an excellent feature if you need to keep up on what’s happening on the Hill in coming weeks.Web Developers and Tech Enthusiasts
For developers and tech enthusiasts, GovTrack.us is a vast experiment in the political application of structured information. By converting the THOMAS versions of bills into RDF and XML, the data gains new uses, more easily mixed with other data sources. For example, OpenCongress.org takes GovTrack’s bill data and combines it with news feeds and blog coverage from technorati to provide further cultural context for legislative action. Whereabill.org uses GovTrack data to physically locate the bill in the Capitol complex, and highlight it on a google map.
APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are the techincal mechanism by which database proprietors permit other servers to access their information. A well known example would probably be google maps. If you’ve ever used a "store locator" when shopping, and had the location appear in a google map, then the site where you entered the search also sent a query to the google maps database, and then combined your entry with the results from the google maps result.
GovTrack accesses APIs to function, and also creates APIs to empower other sites to build on the data sets that Josh is creating. For example, the zoomable district maps page is built on an API, and is then available as a new API for others to use.
Political and legislative information are becoming more useful as they become both more standardized, and also more decentralized (and easily distributed). These developments only happen when new data standards are developed and utilized, and the information released in its most useful form, without copyright restriction. GovTrack is a huge leap in that direction, implementing well conceived data standards and empowering web designers to integrate congressional data into their projects.
Written by John Wonderlich and Paul Blumenthal
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Sunlight Collects Value Added Information Resources
Where can I find information on the contracts awarded to Northrop Grumman Corporation? Once I’ve found that information, where can I find the campaign finance and lobbying information for Northrop Grumman Corporation? Have members of Congress have accepted private travel from Northrop Grumman Corporation or a related association? Is there a profile of those members of Congress? Can I edit that profile with what I might find? Did that member say anything about Northrop Grumman Corporation in the Congressional Record? Are they mentioned in a committee report? Did they benefit from an earmark?
Web sites presenting different kinds of political, civic, and legislative information are distributed throughout the internet. While broad Web searches can be effective, they can also be time consuming and lead to sites of questionable reliability. With the debut of Sunlight’s Insanely Useful Web sites page (always listed in the tabs at the top of every Sunlight page) we're developing a collection of value-added government information databases on the Web.
We're going to be reviewing these sites to help you understand how these databases work and what they offer to the amateur researcher and the experienced Web geek. Our reviews, and the feedback that you give to us, will be given to the developer as feedback to help make these sites even more insanely useful.
Insanely Useful Web sites seeks to bring together on one-page links to government information databases that provides visitors data presented in an open, dynamic fashion. This will not only enable researchers a one-stop shop for all their needs, but will also help demonstrate how government information can be presented in a Web 2.0 world.
All of the sites listed are created to offer information in a new way and utilize the technologies and tools used across the Web today. There is a wiki for Congress; databases with open APIs and RSS feeds on bills and votes; campaign finance information mashed-up with congressional voting data to highlight the connection between the two; searchable lobbying information; a user-generated database for executive branch e-mails related to the U.S. Attorneys Purge scandal; a site, chock full of interactive functions, that tells you how much each individual bill will cost you; and many more. Ultimately, these Web sites enable citizens to be able to better connect to their government through better and more accessible information and through the ability to interact with that information.
Considering the exploding nature of government information of the Web, we fully expect this list of Insanely Useful Web sites to continue to expand. Some of you out there are creating new Web sites that utilize government information in ways that no one has thought of yet and we'd like to know about it. Do you have a wiki, a database, or a mash-up that uses and presents government information in a new fashion or enables citizens to engage with the data? Send us the Web sites you are working on and maybe your work will wind up in the Insanely Useful Web sites, too.
Whether you're working with Congress to create robust public information access online (perhaps by participating in the Open House Project, independently designing your own Web sites, or working for a government agency, we'd love to hear about your work with government information sources. Surveying the landsape of political information resources online fits perfectly with the Sunlight Foundation's mission, since Internet technology will clearly play a fundamental role in creating a more transparent and accountable government, and these Web sites demonstrate the transformative potential of information techology in the world of government.
Written by Paul Blumenthal and John Wonderlich
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Insanely Useful Websites
Sunlight is starting to update and clean up (and eventually redesign) our Website and today we are posting the first installment: Insanely Useful Websites for government transparency. The sites listed here replace and dramatically update our old "resources" section.
How do you warrant a mention here? All these sites provide a broad range of information available to track government and legislative information, campaign contributions and the role of money and power in politics. Many of these resources apply the Web 2.0 ethos to sift, share and combine this information in innovative ways — often times by mashing data together from disparate sources to maximize the usability of that information.
This is not a complete list of government data-related or government-sponsored Web sites. We'll start working on that list soon. We're open to having our readers help us to put together these lists, so send us suggestions at info at sunlightfoundation.com.
