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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Mike Stern Uncovers “Treasury’s Lobbying Loopholes”
Mike Stern has found some answers to the question of how, and on what terms, did “Mark Patterson, the former Goldman Sachs lobbyist who now serves as chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, [] join the administration without a waiver of the Obama Executive Order regarding former lobbyists.”
Mr. Stern’s FOIA request to Treasury turned up 2 internal memos detailing what Mr. Patterson could — and could not — work on. But this raises further questions in Mr. Stern’s mind. How did Treasury come up with its list of verboten activities? Why doesn’t the ban on Mr. Patterson’s activities encompass all the tasks he performed for Goldman Sachs, as disclosed in its Lobbying Disclosure Form?
I must add, why wasn’t this done through a publicly disclosed waiver in the first place? I’ve found it hard to get answers from Treasury about other issues related to TARP, so I wonder if this is part of a pattern of behavior.
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New Batch of White House Visitor Logs Released
Last Friday, the White House released a new batch of visitor logs covering last October, fulfilling a pledge they made last month. Over here at the Sunlight Labs, we took the logs and added them to the handy online, searchable database we created last month, so that you can see for yourself who is coming to the White House and why.
This is the first full month that has been release by the administration and adds almost 100,000 new records for October. As we mentioned back in January, this is a positive step by the Obama administration, and we are happy to see that they are committed to releasing this data in a timely basis.
We still don’t know how many records are being withheld, and for what purposes. It would be nice for the White House to release at least a number, and ultimately a justification (read: national security) for why those names have been redacted. None the less, this is still part of a much larger, unprecedented level of transparency on behalf of the administration.
One of the other problems with the White House visitor logs is that there is no real accurate way to ensure that if you see a “Samuel L. Jackson” in the logs, it’s actually the actor. It could just be another Sam. That’s why we caution you, when you are reading through the records and doing your own independent research not to jump to conclusions. Otherwise, happy hunting!
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Disclose Lobbying Contacts to Reduce Distrust
It’s time to require lobbyists to disclose each contact they make on behalf of a client with my Administration or Congress. — President Obama in his State of the Union speech.
Today, there are over 13,000 registered lobbyists working in Washington to influence our elected officials and government employees. These 13,000-plus lobbyists spent $2.5 billion on lobbying in the first three quarters of last year (fourth quarter totals are still being tallied). All of this monied influence and we have no idea who they meet with or what they discuss. Sunlight has called for the disclosure of lobbyist contacts for quite some time now. It’s both heartening and surprising to see the President call for the same thing.
Why should lobbyists disclose their contacts to the public?
President Obama explained it very well in his State of the Union last night, “We face a deficit of trust – deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years.” These “deep and corrosive doubts” stem, not only from fears of quid pro quo deals struck behind closed doors, but from the belief that there is associational bias in the lobbyist-lawmaker relationship. In a legal essay on lobbying disclosure, Anita Krishnkumar, a law professor at St. John’s University, writes, “…[T]he public perceives that lobbyists receive special face time with elected officials. Irrespective of where that face time occurs — in scheduled meetings, on a train ride, over a game of power, or on the golf course — it creates opportunities for lobbyists to persuade elected officials of their clients’ positions, opportunities that ordinary citizens do not have. In other words, the public’s concern is not just that elected officials will engage in blatant vote-selling to lobbyists, but, more subtly, that they will be partial to the causes of lobbyists’ clients because they spend a lot of time in lobbyists’ company.”
The fears that people have about the relationship between lawmakers and lobbyists can begin to be reduced by the simple disclosure of lobbyist contacts. This disclosure would allow us all to see lobbyists requesting earmarks, writing bills and distributing information. We’d also be able to track lobbyist meetings in the run-up to congressional hearings and floor votes. This would allow for the full story of the legislative process to be put into the public record.
There is no doubt that lobbying is protected by the First Amendment right to petition the government. The massive growth in the lobbying sector, however, has raised serious concerns about policy capture by monied interest groups. It’s time that Congress enact real lobbying reform by requiring the disclosure of lobbying contacts. In a post last night, Ellen Miller explained what real lobbying reform would look like, “Sunlight believes strongly that such disclosures should be made electronically, published promptly and maintained online in a downloadable, searchable, sortable format. We believe that disclosure should include all legislation and regulations discussed and all requests for specific services or government funding. Legislative contacts should be reported within 24 hours of any meeting. In addition, the requirement that contributions by registered lobbyists be reported semiannually should be amended to require contributions be reported within 24 hours of being made.”
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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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Why You Need to Download the Real Time Congress App for iPhone now
As a former Capitol Hill Communications Director, I can tell you that access to real-time information on what is happening on the Hill can make or break a successful advocacy campaign. Information is power, and the Sunlight Labs new Real Time Congress App for the iPhone gives users access to instantaneous in-the-know information in the palm of your hand. By pulling together RSS and XML feeds from the party policy committees, leadership offices, news outlets, bill texts and the alphabet soup of analysts (Think CBO, OMB, CRS et al.), the coders at the Labs have created a rich and valuable user experience for anyone who is interested in what is happening in Congress.
Forgive my enthusiasm for this new app, but it really is something special and elegant. Forget the fact that the platform will be expanded and new data sources will be added and the app will be expanded. I know that I am channeling my inner Don Draper here when I say that this new app brings me home again, and by home, I mean the Longworth House Office Building.
The Real Time Congress application for iPhone will keep journalists, Hill staffers, bloggers and interested citizens up to date on what is happening in Congress, in real-time. Its ease of use and sleek design promise that end users will continue to go back to the app for unfiltered information on Congress so they can make their own informed decisions on what is happening in the Capitol.
Our goal at the Sunlight Foundation is to change the way that citizens collect information about their government, and then help them to use that information to change the way they interact with their government. This new app shows how powerful new programs and smart phones can accomplish that goal. I’m just a little jealous of my former colleagues on the hill—I kind of wish I had this when I was working over there.
We’re pretty proud of the app and it’s free to you as the user. It is worth noting, however, that it wasn’t free for us to create. It did take weeks of development, and so any contribution toward this application and all the others we hope to create in the future on your behalf is greatly appreciated.
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Lobbyists Help Write Senator’s Amendment
Further dispatches from the Fifth Branch of government provided by the Washington Post:
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is likely to postpone offering an amendment (pdf) next week that would bar the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, according to sources familiar with the matter.
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The maneuvering comes as The Washington Post has confirmed that two Washington lobbyists, Jeffrey R. Holmstead and Roger R. Martella, Jr., helped craft the original amendment Murkowski planned to offer on the floor last fall. Both Holmstead, who heads the Environmental Strategies Group and Bracewell & Guiliani, and Martella, a partner at Sidley Austin LLP, held senior posts at EPA under the Bush administration and represents multiple clients with an interest in climate legislation pending before Congress.
As reported in McClatchy, the lobbyists are very honest about the whole thing:
“This is what lawyers in Washington do every day of the week, is to take a look,” Holmstead said. “It happens all the time on almost every piece of legislation. Before language is introduced, it is almost always shared with people on all sides of the issue.”
All the more reason for even more transparency in the interaction of lobbyists with our elected officials.
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Extent of Lobbyist Contributions Remains Unknown
The National Journal recently launched a new “lobbyist and advocacy” blog, which gathers together 60 experts from some of Washington’s top lobbying firms and advocacy organizations focused on campaign finance, government transparency and public accountability. Here’s our take on this week’s question: should lobbyists be banned from giving campaign contributions?
While many a lobbyist might be happy to have an excuse to stop writing checks, a ban on lobbyist campaign contributions wouldn’t really give them one. A lobbyist’s clout is measured not just in how many dollars are forked over personally but how much he or she can bundle. Unfortunately, how many dollars lobbyists actually control remains a murky mystery.
Consider this: so far in the 2010 elections, lobbyists have contributed $10.7 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That’s only a tiny fraction of what most PACs and executives associated with industries contribute. For example, the health care sector alone has given $38.4 million; the financial sector, $78.2 million; and the communications sector, $23.3 million.
When you start digging into the data, you find some interesting patterns. A recent joint investigation by the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Responsive Politics found Sen. Max Baucus had collected campaign cash from 11 major health and insurance firms–and their outside lobbyists as well. (You can see a visualization of this here.) The same investigation showed that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., collected lobbyist “bundles” from 14 major health care organizations. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., actually led the list, with 22 organizations–though much of that money was directed at his presidential campaign last year. (see the full list.)
Meanwhile, new Federal Election Commission (FEC) regulations requiring disclosure of bunding leave far too much to be desired. This report by the Associated Press used data from the Sunlight Foundation’s Party Time project (politicalpartytime.org) to show that hosts for at least 195 congressional fundraising invitations had yet to be disclosed as fundraisers by the candidates who benefited.
We need better disclosure of how lobbyists raise and contribute campaign cash. A first step would be strengthened bundling rules that capture more activity. Disclosure should also happen in real time, on-line rather than in periodic reports often filed months after bundling activity has taken place.
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Lobbyists and Republicans Huddle As Financial Reform Ball Moves Down Field
Roll Call reports that House Republican leadership met with approximately 100 lobbyists to hash out strategy to defeat financial regulatory reform:
In a call to arms, House Republican leaders met with more than 100 lobbyists at the Capitol Visitors Center on Tuesday afternoon to try to fight back against financial regulatory overhaul legislation.
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“The message was [House Financial Services Chairman Barney] Frank and the Democratic majority are ruining America, ruining capitalism, and stand up for yourselves,” said a lobbyist who attended the meeting. “They said, ‘Look, you all oppose this bill, but only a few of you have come out publicly.’”
Does anyone on Capitol Hill have any interest in releasing these types of visitor logs? Over 100 lobbyists go to meet with House Republicans. House Republicans number one-hundred ninety-eight. Not all of them were likely in this meeting, so in all likelihood we had a 1:1 or greater ratio of lobbyists to lawmakers. Who knows who these lobbyists are?
Of course, this doesn’t just apply to this particular meeting between Republicans and their allies, but also to Democratic lawmakers and their lobbyist sit-downs. The White House has a policy of releasing their visitor logs to the public. Congress should consider letting the public know what lobbyists and industry executives they are sitting down with when they discuss legislation.
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Too Little, Too Late
The following appears in the National Journal’s new “lobbying experts” blog launched last week. I will be posting there regularly.
I’m what you might call a connoisseur of lobbying disclosure records. Over the years I’ve perused them when doing investigative research about any number of subjects, from lobbying around reform of the Food and Drug Administration to obscure real estate tax provisions. Instead of getting the who, the what, the why, the where, and the when of what actually happened, I typically end up extremely frustrated. The information available is always too little and comes too late.
First, in the “too little” department: it’s an open secret that the current exemption allowing people to avoid registering as a lobbyist if they spend less than 20 percent of their time involved in lobbying activities for a specific client means that there is a cadre of “stealth lobbyists” out there who are not reporting.
The most infamous example is Tom Daschle, who recently took a job as a senior policy adviser in the government affairs division of DLA Piper. Just as in his previous job at the firm Alston & Bird, Daschle is not expected to register as a lobbyist. Instead, he will simply be giving “advice” to clients. As my colleague Lisa Rosenberg (herself a lobbyist, for the Sunlight Foundation) pointed out recently, Daschle’s “frequent trips to the White House belie his claims that he is not attempting to influence policy on behalf of his clients. His clients, and their lobbyists, benefit from his access to key decision makers as well as his strategic advice on how best to influence lawmakers.” Until this loophole is closed, writes Rosenberg, “Daschle and untold numbers of former elected officials, corporate CEOs, and presidents of labor unions can act as stealth lobbyists–often with greater access and influence than the majority of registered lobbyists, and almost always without leaving a trace of what they are saying, who they are saying it to, and on who is paying them to say it.”
Then there’s the fact that even those who file as lobbyists are required to provide so little information. Consider this form filed by Clark & Associates for the firm’s work on behalf of the American Bankers Association. Here I see that the firm lobbied on the economic bailout bill–but all I can find out is that lobbyists contacted the “U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate.” There are, of course, 435 members of the House and 100 members of the Senate, and from this form I don’t have a clue which ones in particular received visits, phone calls, or other communications from these lobbyists. Lobbying disclosure rules must be strengthened to include more detailed information about whom lobbyists contacted.
Now on to the matter of “too late.” Right now lobbyists file their disclosure forms only once a quarter, often months after the lobbying actually happened which means journalists, bloggers, and researchers are suffering from a big disadvantage when trying to track influence on any given issue. Given today’s technology, there’s really no reason for this. As I wrote last week, the Sunlight Foundation’s vision of lobbying disclosure nirvana would be a central website, where lobbyists can file reports on their activities and the public can easily find what they report, at a maximum of 72 hours after a lobbying contact has occurred.
The public needs information about who is lobbying our government about what. But with the state of lobbying disclosure today, we’re not getting anything close to information on-line in real-time, the way it ought to be.
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Why Look At Former Staffers Turned Lobbyists?
Throughout this year I’ve spent quite a bit of time looking at the connections between powerful players in the health care debate and their former staffers turned health care lobbyists. The reason to highlight these connections is simple: it shows how outside organizations get the ear of key lawmakers.
You and I can’t hire a the former chief of staff to Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, but America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) can. Nor can we hire Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s former chief of staff, but a dozen health care companies can. These people have connections that worth more than gold in Washington. They have the ears of the players in Washington.
Roll Call did some more reporting on this and brought us some crucial information on these lobbyists. In particular, I’d like to point to one relationship that I’ve written about more than once. That’s Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s former chief of staff Kelly Bingel. Here’s a visualization that we created showing Lincoln’s connection to Bingel. And here’s what Roll Call has to say:
In the case of key fence-sitter Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti lobbyist Kelly Bingel is said to have the ear of her former boss. Bingel declined to be interviewed for this article, but a former colleague called her “first on the list” of the Senator’s callbacks.
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“She’s Sen. Lincoln’s alter ego,” a former colleague said.
Organizations with a stake in legislation know that the best way to get the attention of lawmakers is to poach their most connected, most knowledgable staffers and hire them as lobbyists. The ordinary constituent can’t call up a senator and lobby them on a policy issue, but their close buddy and former employee can. Just look at this quote from the Roll Call article:
“It is helpful. We have lines of communication open,” a lobbyist and former Senate Democratic staffer said. “We have access to lay out our argument.”
Without that access you can’t get anything done.
(Most of our coverage of health care lobbyists and the revolving door can be found here.)
