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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Senators Grill Stimulus Watchdog on Recovery.gov
Yesterday, Earl Devany, Inspector General for the stimulus, and Rob Nabors, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), went before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs to discuss details of their oversight plan for recovery funds. One of the chief topics was the web site, Recovery.gov. The White House has sold Recovery.gov as a beacon of transparency, a web site a top a hill that will shine down as an example for all government web sites. However, as our Bill Allison has noted in numerous venues, the web site does not offer all of the information or content that it could. This lack of content became a sticking point in the hearing.
Devaney, who answered most of the questions, agreed with many of the senators who complained that Recovery.gov was not all it was cracked up to be. Describing why citizens are going to the web site, which is receiving high traffic, Devaney chalked it up to “curiosity,” but stated that if the web site does not become more interactive and substantive, the public will lose faith in the recovery effort. This applies particularly to interactivity and responses to user comments, Devaney stated, and that the recovery oversight board needed to get out in front of this faster.
In achieving the goal of interactivity, Devaney said that he is talking to outside groups and individuals who have ideas about how to sort through millions of comments and respond appropriately. He also stated that he is willing to meet with any of “the smartest people” to talk about this.
Sen. Tom Coburn raised pointed questions regarding the accessibility of the data, contrasting the data search functions and presentation on Recovery.gov to that of USASpending.gov, the federal site tracking all federal spending. Coburn’s biggest issues were the lack of multiple search capabilities on Recovery.gov and why USASpending.gov wasn’t used to display the recovery spending. Nabors responded that the public has a unique interest in the recovery spending and that the information needed to be brought to the public in a speedier fashion than USASpending.gov could deliver. The idea behind Recovery.gov is to provide real time tracking of recovery spending. In his “wildest dreams,” Nabors declared, he would want to be able to track overall spending, as in what is displayed on USASpending.gov, in real time.
Coburn pointedly asked when the “ideal” Recovery.gov would be online. Devaney, under pressure from Coburn, answered, “Yes,” after Coburn asked him if the site would be complete in a year.
One of the more interesting suggestions came from Sen. Claire McCaskill, asking Devaney if he had considered hiring unemployed journalists to provide investigative capability along with context and storytelling to Recovery.gov. Devaney, in what seemed like a happy surprise to McCaskill, stated that he had two interviews scheduled with journalists the very next day. McCaskill responded, “Great minds think alike.”
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Congress Passes Stronger Authority for TARP Special IG
Yesterday, the House followed the Senate by passing a bill to provide the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) broader authority to investigate and more specific reporting requirements. In the disclosure and reporting department, the bill mandates quarterly reports to Congress from the office of the Special Inspector General and the posting of all reports on TARP recipients online within 24 hours after issuance. Good for Congress for passing this bill.
I should say how this bill came to my attention. Congressman Erik Paulsen, an original sponsor of the bill, wrote a pat-on-the-back blog post for The Hill today, but he never mentioned which bill the House had just approved. Luckily, the congressman is on Twitter so I just tweeted him and asked and he got right back with the bill number–S. 383, by the way. It really is that easy to talk to a congressman nowadays. (It’s also helpful if the answer you want is under 140 characters.)
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More Like This Please
The Washington Post has an excellent profile of Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). According to the Post, Barofsky is the genuine real deal when it comes to providing oversight and achieving accountability for the money spent on bailing out the banks. And he isn’t afraid to ruffle some feathers in maintaining integrity and independence:
Barofsky had a simple message: The government should require any bank receiving taxpayer dollars to explain how it is spending the money.
The official, Neel Kashkari, disagreed. So Barofsky, the special inspector general for the program, said his office would do it instead.
“I don’t think Treasury’s done enough,” he said. “Frankly, I’m not terribly concerned if anyone in Treasury actually thinks we’re being too aggressive. That’s our job.”
The episode illustrates why lawmakers and watchdog groups say Barofsky is emerging as the primary check on waste and fraud in the six-month-old financial rescue effort. But Wall Street executives and Treasury officials criticize him as an overreaching zealot scaring banks from joining the financial rescue, and even his supporters wonder whether his office has sufficient resources to adequately oversee such a gigantic program.
The Special Inspector General’s office has been allocated $50 million for what could be a decade’s worth of work. It is vital to have someone with Barofsky’s dedication to oversight and transparency in charge of this operation. The fact that he quotes from “The Simpsons” and his favorite band is The Clash just makes it that much better.
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Political Influence in Bailout to be Investigated
Numerous outlets have reported, and catalogued here, that political influence – campaign contributions, lobbying – has been part and parcel of the bank recovery (bailout) plan passed by the Congress and carried out by the Treasury Department. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that bailout recipients spent $114 million on political influence over the course of 2008. According to the Los Angeles Times, the special inspector general for the bank recovery Neil Barofsky is beginning an audit into political influence in the bailout.
Amid growing public consternation with the federal banking bailout, the Treasury Department’s special inspector general has opened an examination of political influence in handing out some of the $350 billion in federal bank bailout funds, The Times has learned.
The audit, which has just begun, is broad in scope but will focus on lobbying activities by financial institutions and what the special inspector general, Neil Barofsky, has called “outside influences.”…
Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, asked Barofsky earlier this week for an investigation into possible political meddling in the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Grassley has been among the most vocal critics of how the program is working.
Barofsky apparently had already decided on such an investigation. He disclosed his plan deep in a 189-page document sent to Congress on Feb. 6, saying he had begun a “general audit reviewing outside influences on the [TARP] application process.”
The investigation hints at what could be a long, drawn-out legal drama. Barofsky, a former federal prosecutor, has his own multimillion-dollar budget and is aligning his office with other federal law enforcement agencies, pledging “robust criminal and civil enforcement against those, whether inside or outside of government, who waste, steal or abuse TARP funds.”
It is imperative that the final audit results released by the special inspector general’s office be made available online as required under the recently passed Improving Government Accountability Act. This act requires, among other provisions strenghtening inspector general offices, that all inspector general reports be made available online 1 day after their release.
The possibility that political influence has effected the bank bailout exists and could be a serious problem for the continuance of the program. Aside from the review that Barofsky is preparing, new disclosure rules need to be enacted for lobbyists engaging with government officials in all bodies and at all levels.
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Dept. of Interior Oil Scandal
Yesterday, the Inspector General of the Department of the Interior released multiple reports revealing widespread corruption in the Mineral Management Services agency, which handles mineral extraction, leases, and royalties for the Department of the Interior. The allegations show employees receiving illegal gifts, graft, filing false statements on ethics forms, using illegal drugs, and having sex with both subordinates in the agency and with agents of oil and gas companies with business before the agency.
Here are some of the allegations:
Lucy Denett, former associate director of minerals revenue management: accused of steering a contract to one of her aides after he retired.
Gregory Smith, former director of the royalty-in-kind program: accused of doing outside consulting work that included using his position to help the company paying him gain access to clients doing work with the royalty-in-kind program; billing Mineral Management Services for trips made in conjunction with his outside consulting work; accepting over $1,000 in gifts from oil and gas companies; using cocaine with a subordinate; having sex with two subordinates, where one episode is clearly a sexual assault.
Eight other employees: Socialized with and received gifts from companies with business before the royalty-in-kind program. Two of these employees are also alleged to have used drugs and had sexual relations with various agents of oil and gas companies with business before the program.
Here’s CNN reporting on the report:
The IG reports are available at ProPublica where Paul Kiel is providing running coverage.
Since 2001, when President Bush took office, the Department of the Interior was beset by problems arising from the appointment of officials who previously worked in or with the industries that the Department is intended to oversee.
Both the Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton, and the Deputy Secretary of the Interior, Steven J. Griles, came from the extraction industries. Norton worked for a law firm that lobbied for a variety of companies, including oil, gas, and metal companies. Griles previously worked for a natural resources company and later provided public relations advice to a variety of extraction companies doing business with the government. Both Norton and Griles wound up caught in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. Norton resigned her post as the scandal encroached into the Department of the Interior, while Griles wound up pleading guilty.
Ethical standards trickle from the top on down. Some of the officials involved in this current scandal expressed the opinion that they “didn’t think ethics rules applied to them because of their ‘unique’ role in the agency and that they needed to socialize with industry representatives for ‘market intelligence.’” The Mineral Management Services scandal has been brewing for a long time and highlights a lack of oversight that occurs when a Department is staffed with individuals who are used to making money from the business they are charged with regulating.
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Gillibrand: Put IG Work Online
The House of Representatives voted on a bill to improve the way Inspectors General perform their work monitoring spending in executive branch agencies. Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand thought the bill might be improved by adding a provision on transparency. Sunlight helped her find an amendment—already part of a bill Senator McCaskill has introduced—that would require that each agency provide a link on its homepage to its IG’s homepage. The amendment also requires that IG reports are posted in a searchable, sortable, downloadable format and be available online no more than one day after the reports are made public. Another piece of the amendment provides that the IG’s website have a method by which the public can report waste, fraud or abuse in an agency.
This amendment shines light on the important work of Inspectors General and it has the potential to save taxpayer money by allowing the taxpayers themselves to report when they think an agency is engaged in wasteful or improper spending. By offering this common sense amendment, Rep. Gillibrand, who already posts her schedule, her personal financial disclosures, and her earmark requests online, can put another notch in her transparency belt. The amendment passed by voice vote, which means that her colleagues also recognized how important and non-controversial greater transparency is. Hopefully more Members of Congress will follow Ms. Gillibrand’s lead when it comes to making their own work more transparent. Ms. Gillibrand and a handful of other Members know that greater transparency builds trust with their constituents, fosters accountability, and simply improves the way our democratic institutions work.
