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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The Little Things We Take For Granted
So, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer announced that they were going to place the final health care bill online for 72 hours prior to consideration yesterday. Where did they decide to do this? Twitter. And no one raises a hackle at all. It’s just accepted that this is a valid announcement of an important transparency policy. What better way to demonstrate how far Congress has come in terms of social media use and transparency than to have the Speaker of the House announce a transparency policy on a widely-used social media site.
It wasn’t too long ago that lawmakers weren’t even allowed to officially use Twitter, let alone any social media site, to communicate with everyone else. The Sunlight Foundation was at the forefront of changing that policy starting in 2007 and culminating in rules changes in 2008. John Wonderlich summed this all up way back when:
In May of 2007, the Sunlight Foundation released the Open House Project report, which included an entire chapter on the issue of Franking Reform. That chapter, prepared by David All and Paul Blumental, has guided our advocacy and discussions of web use restrictions since then.
Those discussions simmered until earlier this summer, when tensions between Members of the Franking Commission briefly escalated (the part of the Committee on House Administration that handles Web restrictions). This summer’s discussion caught some media attention, and unsettled some web-savvy Representatives, and ultimately engaged both parties’ leaders in the House.
The Sunlight Foundation capitalized on the chaos, creating the first twitter-based petition in the site letourcongresstweet.org, which amassed twitter-based signatures, and displayed vigorous support for updated rules from online communities across the political spectrum.
While House officials maneuvered publicly, the Senate passed similar reforms with a bit less fanfare. As recently as last week, agreement looked unlikely from the House committee, with Roll Call reporting that an attempt at negotiations ended in “an emotionally charged hearing and a breakdown in negotiations.”
That’s why we were suprised and delighted to get word from the Committee on House Administration that a new agreement had been reached. This measure wasn’t just a slight rewrite, however. The new guidelines represent an enormous change, one which has new media staff from both parties glowing.
And now we just take for granted that serious policies are announced over Twitter. Personally, I think that is awesome.
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Pelosi & Hoyer Say Final Health Care Bill To Be Online For 72 Hours
Last week, Jake wrote that “it is utterly imperative that the final version of the bill be online for the public to view for at least 72 hours.” The House Majority just announced that they will do just that (via #HealthReformNow):
Pelosi and Hoyer say final health reform bill will be online for 72 hours before House vote so Members and Americans can review #hcr
This is a great development and another big win for those who have called for the bill to be available to the public for 72 hours throughout this whole process. The Sunlight Foundation has called for the health care bill to be available to the public for 72 hours at each point that versions have come to the floor. In each of these instances the majority has acquiesced and posted each version, from the House bill to the Senate bill, for at least 72 hours prior to consideration. Those of you who have signed the Read the Bill petition and put the pressure on Congress to be this transparent have been vital in ensuring that we have access to this major bill before lawmakers consider, debate and vote on it.
Earlier this week, Ellen explained the importance of the 72 hour requirement:
Think of posting something on line for 3 days as a ‘safety valve’ – a final chance for citizens, media, lawmakers and lobbyists alike to look at the whole package giving everyone one last opportunity to raise questions and concerns about the bill. If readers are in an advocacy mode they have time to mobilize others in support or opposition, and/or take action in whatever form they see fit.
There is no measure more important to debate in the open than health care, and this is a moment when we all need to be champions for public, online disclosure and engage with our government. With 72 hours, the buck can actually stop with citizens the way our Founders intended. We know that Congress do it because congressional leadership has already done so at other critical points in this debate.
Of course, we still need to make sure that this promise is kept and that won’t be done until the bill has been online for 72 hours and then brought to the floor. Let’s keep it up.
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Gillibrand Touts Transparency
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York said today that the final version of health care legislation will be available for at least 72 hours before debate. She also spoke out strongly in favor of transparency for congressional schedules, earmarks, and legislation in today’s conference call with bloggers organized by Blogher, which I moderated on behalf of the Sunlight Foundation.
Sen. Gillibrand has been a longtime advocate for transparency, which Paul Blumenthal has blogged about here, here, and here.
The call was part of a series sponsored by Blogher to connect bloggers directly with legislators. Other lawmakers who have participated are Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Sen. Amy Klochubar, Rep. George Miller, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Jeff Merkely, and Rep. Cynthia Lummis. Many have spoken out about transparency.
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Pelosi Addresses e-Parliament Conference
Speaker Pelosi yesterday spoke on a panel to kick off the World eParliament Conference 2009, in the US House of Representatives.
Her prepared remarks are available here, and include the following:
“In the history of American democracy, there was a time when a message could travel only as fast as a horse could gallop or a ship could sail. Today, a message from the American people to their representatives in Congress travels as fast as a citizen can twitter, blog, or post to Facebook…
Led by the innovation and enthusiasm of young people, Americans and Members of Congress are holding a running conversation – in real time. There is no greater tool to increase transparency than the internet. Now, Americans can watch committee hearings, check votes, read bills, and review financial disclosures–all online. Next month, they will be able to see exactly how Members of Congress are spending their office funds, and at the start of next year, they will be able to watch and search our House floor proceedings in real time.
Clearly, Sunlight agrees that “there is no greater tools to increase transparency than the Internet.”
Also, “watch[ing] and search[ing] floor proceedings in real time” will be a welcome addition to the current real-time web presence of the House.
Speaker Pelosi also engaged in a long aside during her delivered remarks yesterday, invoking the distinction between disclosure through office-hours-basement-binder-public-inspection and disclosure in real time, online, expressing an explicit preference for the latter.
Ellen is presenting this morning, and I’ll also be tweeting from much of the event.
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House Health Care Bill Online
Earlier today, the House unveiled the final version of their health care reform bill. You can view the full bill here. The bill contains a time-stamp (look in the bottom left-hand corner of the bill) noting its introduction occurred at 10:05 am on October 29, 2009. We’ll be counting the hours before it is brought to the floor for consideration. Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised that the bill would be made available online for at least 72 hours prior to consideration. Considering the House is not set to take up the legislation today or tomorrow, the bill will have been available for the public to read for over 72 hours.
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Ask House Speaker Nancy Pelosi About Health Care
Tomorrow morning at 11:30 a.m. Eastern, the Sunlight Foundation joins Blogher in moderating a conference call with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about health care. Blogger participants will have the chance to talk to Pelosi directly and ask her about issues deeply affecting their lives.
Pelosi has already committed to posting the final version of health care legislation for 72 hours before it comes to a vote. I hope to ask her how she plans to handle the longer term issue of lobbying disclosure reform, given what we’ve seen in recent weeks with the health care lobby wars going at full blast.
To sign up to ask your own question, click here. Or if you’d like me to ask something, please let me know in the comments section below.
This call is the fourth in a series, which has also included Rep. George Miller, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rogers, and Sen. Amy Klochubar. All have spoken out about the importance of transparency in the health care debate and beyond. Here is Rep. Miller, exerpted from a transcript of a call last week:
Nancy Watzman: And I’d like to ask you a very quick question as representative of the Sunlight Foundation which cares very much about transparency in government. I’m wondering what will you see transparency playing in this, you know, in the debate and what role you think it should play?
George Miller: Well, you know, I think it’s a very important part of this debate. As you know when we finally passed the three bills prior to the August break they were up on the Internet.
My Committee site, my personal site got an exceptional number of hits from people who either read it or in fact downloaded it. It was quite amazing the number of – numbers of people who downloaded it.
And I assume the other committees and the speaker site and other sites in the Congress got those same kinds of requests. As we now near the end of this process, when this bill is finalized, I mean, as I said earlier we’re going to go to the Congressional Budget Office, we’ll get new costs and then we’ll have to make changes according to that.
And then when we’re ready to introduce the bill, when the bill’s introduced that bill will be on the Internet for 72 hours. And if there is a manager’s amendment which would be – usually it deals with making relatively small changes but it could be some other issue that pops up.
And if that manager’s amendment – when it is approved by the Rules Committee that will also have to be on there for 72 hours. So in my, you know, ordinarily around here you introduce the bill.
That bill would be on the Internet for 72 hours. During that time you might be putting together a manager’s amendment so – and that manager’s amendment is approved by the Rules Committee.
Another 72 hours would run so you can see here spaces of time, you know, made – whether it’s two 72-hour periods or something – somewhat longer than that. But the final drafts of the bill and the manager’s amendment will both be available on the Internet for that period of time. Speaker Pelosi is committed to that and the rest of the issue is committed to that.
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This Week In Transparency – June 19, 2009
Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and grantees from this week:
In Sunday’s print edition, The New York Times editorialized about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ordering electronic disclosure of lawmakers’ expense spending. They also encouraged the Senate to open up as well. Candidates for the Senate are the only federal candidates who fail to make their campaign finances available online in a timely fashion. “A measure to finally prod the Senate into modern times with electronic campaign filing awaits action, providing Republican obstruction can be defused. That’s not enough. It should be followed up by the Senate also putting expenses on line.” Getting the Senate to pass timely online disclosure is a Sunlight priority.
Also in its Sunday edition, The Virginia-Pilot editorialized about Congress opening up its data online. “Until recently, members of Congress have expended little effort to make their reports viewable online. But recent stories by The (Wall Street) Journal, as well as lobbying by government watchdog groups, apparently spurred lawmakers into action.” The editorial notes Sunlight pointed out that (Pelosi’s) plan calls for the reports to be posted in a “portable document format,” or PDF, file. However, a searchable database would be much more user-friendly, allowing taxpayers to pull up and compare multiple reports.
NextGov’s Aliya Sternstein reports on Sunlight obtaining and posting a version of the RFP for the Recovery.gov redesign. Sternstein quotes Clay Johnson, Sunlight Labs director, “We’re not in government contracting, but we’re in transparency … and it’s crazy that the only place you can get this RFP” on Sunlight’s Web site. “The reason that we’re doing this is so we can inject ourselves into the process and expose it to the public,” Clay said. “We’ll be blogging about the whole thing. This Web site is supposed to serve the people, so let the people build it to their specifications.”
On Tuesday, MAPLight.org and their partner the California First Amendment Coalition achieved a huge victory when the State of California agreed to give the public access to the state government database of how state lawmakers vote. In December, the two groups filed a lawsuit seeking access to legislative votes. In response, the state has set up a database of Senate and Assembly bills and votes that it updates daily. MAPLight is working to combine data on all contributions California state legislators receive with the new database of how each politician votes. “It will combine data on all money given to members of the California state legislature with the newly available database of how each politician votes, revealing patterns of money and influence never before possible,” Ellen Miller, Sunlight’s executive director, blogged about the victory for open government earlier in the week. The Berkeley, Calif., -based MAPLight constructed a similar database on Congress, which The New York Times’ Freakonomics blog highlighted on Tuesday.
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Capitol Words: Pelosi v. Boehner
An analysis using Capitol Words comparing the words spoken by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Republican Minority Leader John Boehner in 2008 shows that the two issues receiving the most discussion by both parties in the 110th Congress were the debate over climate change legislation and off-shore drilling and the debate over the collapse of the financial sector and the ensuing recession.
Of the top fifty words spoken by both party leaders, there is overlap for only eighteen words. These eighteen words include five of the top thirty words spoken during the entire 110th Congress: Energy, Security, Country, Tax, and Oil. All of these words featured prominently in the debate over energy legislation during the summer months in 2008. Other words that overlapped include Economy, Budget, Jobs, Million and Billion, all words spoken during the September-October debate over the federal bailout of the financial services industry.
Also important are the many words that do not overlap. These show the Speaker’s support for the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and the preview of congressional Republicans 2009 complaints about deficits and spending. The natural oppositional nature of being in the minority is also evident in the kinds of words used by Leader Boehner.
Speaker Pelosi used many words that imitated the language of Barack Obama: Future, Hope, and Leadership. These were staples of the Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign. Leader Boehner was, at the same time, showing the combative nature of being in the minority, particularly during a difficult election year. Boehner’s words included Democrat, Washington, and Ethics. These are clearly words used to attack the majority. Speaker Pelosi did not use the word Republican in her top fifty words.
The Republican Leader was also focused on traditional Republican policies of low spending with the words Spending, Prices, Cost and Growth. This definitely previewed the lines of argument coming from the minority in the current Congress.
One other interesting tidbit is the use of words that seem to stress similar ideas but from different angles. For example, Speaker Pelosi uses the word Opportunity while Leader Boehner uses the word Unemployment.
These infographics were created by Kerry Mitchell using data from the CapitolWords.org API and were visualized in Nodebox http://nodebox.net using the “graph” library.
Tell me what you see here in the comments.
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This Week In Transparency – June 5, 2009
Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and grantees from the past week:
Late last Friday, National Public Radio ran a piece by Andrea Seabrook about the Obama administration’s “Open Government Initiative,” a three-part process to craft recommendations on open government. Seabrook quotes Ellen Miller, Sunlight’s executive director, saying the government should make it a priority to get the most important information up sooner. “And, in my mind, you got – priority data is the data that affects the public trust in its institutions. So, you know, personal financial disclosures, lobbying reports – there are many lobbying reports that are found in the Justice Department that have never seen the light of day. That is to say, they’re not online – that being the definition of light of day in the 21st century.”
The second phase of the White House’s Open Government Initiative was a “brainstorming” session where the administration invited the public to submit ideas on how to achieve and sustain an unprecedented level of openness in government. The administration then encouraged participants to vote up or down on the ideas. They received 900 submissions and 33,000 votes on various ideas. House Minority Leader John Boehner’s (Ohio) submission to require Congress to honor a 72-hour public review period before voting on major spending bills ended up as one of the most popular, receiving nearly 1,000 votes. Roll Call (subscription required) and Federal Computer Week quote from Boehner’s statement noting Sunlight’s support for the 72-hour rule.
As normal, major press outlets depended on data from the Center for Responsive Politics to expose the power and influence of big money in Washington. The Wall Street Journal reported that in the first three months of 2009, the financial industry spent $27.6 million on lobbying and made $286,000 in campaign contributions to Congressional lawmakers. One industry goal was to get Congress to amend certain financial rules. So far, The Journal reported, they’ve succeeded in loosening one key accounting regulation and are working to get ride of it altogether. The Washington Post used CRP data to show the growing influence of tech titans Google, Microsoft, AT&T and Verizon. The same article mentions that the Center for Digital Democracy wrote to the White House protesting the Obama administration’s appointment of Google’s top lobbyist to the position of deputy technology officer. “We believe no special-interest connected person should assume a position of vital importance to the country’s future,” they wrote.
(Continue reading…)
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Member Expenses Continued
Earlier this week, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that lawmaker office expenses would be placed online at the earliest possible time. According to House Chief Administrative Officer Dan Beard, that earliest date will likely be August 31. Beard, according to the Wall Street Journal, also stated intentions to make the disclosure more accessible in the future, “Electronic versions of the ink-and-paper reports will initially be posted in PDF format. The House “is examining ways” to enhance the ability to search the documents when it rolls out a new internal financial-processing system during the 112th Congress.”
While this policy applies only to the House, the Senate may be pushed into taking action as well. The Journal is also reporting that Sen. Tom Coburn will introduce a bill to require the online disclosure of Senate office expenses. Majority Leader Harry Reid’s office states that they will look at the issue:
Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.) said Wednesday he would introduce a bill requiring the expense records be posted online in the Senate, as well. Such disclosures are “something that we will take a look at,” said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D., Nev.).
