On Friday, August 1, 2008, the Clerk of the House must launch a public database on the Clerk’s web site for travel and gift disclosures and personal financial disclosures filed by lawmakers. This action is mandated by the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act.

Earlier this year, under mandate from the same ethics reform bill, the Senate launched a searchable database of travel and gift disclosure forms. Users can also download the entire database in XML format.

By the end of the week, we should be able to see what disclosure looks like on the House’s side.

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The House Appropriations Committee has an online interface for members to submit their earmark requests. I haven’t been able to find it anywhere on the public portion of the committee’s site, but Rep. Peter DeFazio gives us a good idea of what the interface must look like–click here to see what information goes into an earmark request. My favorite bits: “Briefly describe the activity or project for which funding is requested (please keep to 250 words or less, subcommittee online submission will not accept more)” and “Description of project’s legal authorization (e.g. Transportation Bill, Energy Bill, etc.) … Not all projects are legally authorized and authorization is not a prerequisite for funding.”

Yesterday was the deadline for members to submit their fiscal year 2009 earmark requests, and Roll Call reported that…

In a sure sign that earmarks remain as popular as ever, an overload of pork requests clogged the House Appropriations Committee’s Web site Wednesday, forcing an extension to the request deadline to next week.

The cynicism of Rep. Jim Moran appears to be well founded. Instead of a one year moratorium, how about making all those online earmark requests to the Appropriations Committee instantly public?

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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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The Senate Office of Public Records launched an enhanced database for lobbying disclosure on New Year’s Eve, one that allows users for the first time to search previously unsearchable fields like “specific lobbying issue.” What this means is that you can plug in a bill number — say S. 681, the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act — and find out that 19 organizations disclosed lobbying on the bill, including top political donors Citigroup, Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young, Exxon Mobil and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Perhaps it should be expected that the Swiss Bankers Association also has an interest in the legislation…

Pam Gavin, SOPR’s Superintendent of Public Records, says that about 90 percent of the 2007 mid-year lobbying reports are fully searchable, and going forward in 2008, 100 percent of them will be. She also helpfully pointed out that the whole database is now downloadable, year by year–the data is available here.

Note: If you’re having trouble seeing the new site, you might want to empty your cache.

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Our friends at CREW are providing a fantastic resource for reporters, bloggers, citizens and government document junkies–GovernmentDocs.org: An online compendium of scanned images of documents acquired from government agencies through the Freedom of Information Act by (right now) a handful of nonprofit groups (including the correspondence logs that Anu’s been acquiring for our RealTime project). Documents that once would have been filed away can have second and third lives online, where they can be read, annotated, tagged, and otherwise scrutinized by anyone who signs up to create an account.

CREW also uses OCR technology to make the images word-searchable; the results aren’t always perfect but they do make the documents easier to navigate.

CREW’s release is online here, and, full disclosure: Sunlight Foundation supported the creation of the site.

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A lot of Internet and politics experts have been sitting around waiting for someone in the 2008 presidential race to emerge as the next Net candidate in the mold of Howard Dean. After last night it appears that that candidate has been found. Ron Paul, a backbench 9-term congressman who previously sought the presidency on the Libertarian ticket in 1988, raised over $4 million online yesterday to set the record for most money raised by a presidential candidate online in a 24 hour span. The amazing thing about this haul of money is that it was not organized by the campaign but was instead a supporter generated “cashmob”. (The supporters actually referred to it as a “money-bomb”.) The Paul campaign took advantage of their supporter’s enthusiasm by creating the most transparent campaign finance decision possible: to publish in real-time each online donation as it happens. By making their campaign finance transparent the Paul campaign encouraged their supporters to do their own work by showing them exactly what they were accomplishing. It’s Howard Dean’s bat on crack.

Not only does this enable supporters to keep track of their tally for the work they are doing it also brings the attention of those who would normally ignore the Paul campaign site. Last night I found myself, in no way interested in Ron Paul the candidate, watching the total amount of money raised tick up as the names and hometowns of donors flashed across Paul’s campaign site. What I was seeing was a campaign giving control to its supporters and letting them be the story.

Araba Sey and Manuel Castells write that, “by changing the direction and the content of the flow of information through the use of the Internet, the range of political actors is broadened, new avenues of collective mobilization may appear, and a different format of debate may take place, transforming the political scene that had been framed by the one-way communication systems of the mass media era.” Jerome Armstrong at MyDD explains how the Paul campaign is tacitly encouraging this kind of behavior:

Look how, on his website, how Paul pushes his supporters out onto the social networking platforms of Technorati, del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Stumble Upon, and Newsvine.

Its a brilliant tactic, because rather than having to develop these costly platforms that take up valuable time, or rely upon closed vendor systems that use laggard technology, the campaign just uses the existing infrastructure built by others for that specific vertical. There is no RonPaul2008.com community. Instead, it exists out on the web, outside the campaign website walls. So rather than all their own supporters talking to eachother, they are forced to congregate in places where others that don’t support Paul gather. Evangelize. Outreach.

If you’ve been on Digg this year you’ll notice the proliferation of Ron Paul related Diggs. Paul is also the only candidate who appears to be using Meetup, a highly successful strategy of the Dean campaign. But a big factor is the simple decision to make his campaign finance haul transparently available in real-time is truly an empowering decision for his supporters. Allowing access to previously privileged information to those who may care the most enables greater activity across the board in support of the candidate.

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The prosecution has rested in the trial of Brent Wilkes, the contractor on trial for bribing former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham. The last paragraph of this Washington Post story notes that Wilkes’ defense will be that he was merely playing by the rules of the Congressional Favor Factory (now open 24 hours a day!):

[Wilkes' attorney Mark] Geragos said in his opening statement that he plans to show that Wilkes was only doing business as it is normally done in Washington, not trading favors for contracts. He is set to begin calling witnesses on Thursday.

If that’s the case, I will be just as eager to read about the defense’s presentations as I was about the prosecution’s, which included details of expensive meals and trips to distant vacations spots, including Hawaii. If Geragos is looking for examples to back up his claim, he might want to check the Center for Responsive Politics’ travel database, available here, to see that members of Congress and their staff took more than 30 trips to Hawaii since July 2005 (when federal agents made headlines by raiding Cunningham’s home), 137 trips to Las Vegas, 23 trips to Jamaica, and 48 trips to Aspen, to name a few.

Which is not to say that everyone who takes a trip is in the same league as Cunningham (or that every sponsor a Brent Wilkes), but note that interest groups tend to sponsor travel of members who oversee their industries. For example, Rep. Collin Peterson (whose office has taken more trips than anyone else’s since CRP started keeping track) seems to travel on the dime of trade groups representing agricultural interests — 11 of the 14 trips he took were sponsored by groups like the Dairy Farmers of America, the American Sugar Alliance and the Texas Farm Bureau.

Peterson is the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee.

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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.

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In the week since we launched EarmarkWatch.org, more than 400 citizen researchers have dug into earmarks, answering hundreds of questions, making dozens of comments, and shedding light on everything from what in the world is a naturally occurring retirement community (it’s considered to be a low-cost approach to facilitating healthy aging) to finding a potential family connection in a New Jersey museum earmark (the museum is housed in a mansion that was once the residence of the sponsoring member’s father). They’ve asked why Congress needs to earmark $1,000,000 to buy wool socks for the Marines and how exactly New York City’s American Museum of Natural History is going to spend $1,000,000 on Advanced Research to Further National Security Goals.

We had 25,000 page views last week (the aforementioned sock earmark was the most-looked-at), more than 100 posted comments or additional research (it looks like the $3,000,000 for a Flat-Rack for the Marine Corps was the most commented on, and no, I didn’t know what one was either), and one last factoid that makes me feel there are lots of kindred souls out there: The bulk of our intrepid earmark researchers are doing most of their digging at night. So am I — EarmarkWatch.org is exciting, educational, and endlessly entertaining.

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Wondering where the Senate Defense earmarks are in EarmarkWatch.org? Though our collaborators and friends at Taxpayers for Common Sense have compiled a list here, one thing you’ll notice is that, unlike the House Defense earmarks contained in Earmark Watch, the Senate disclosures don’t list the actual recipient of the earmark, but rather generic project names. So while we know that Sen. Maria Cantwell and Sen. Patty Murray earmarked $2 million for “U.S. Army Extended Cold Weather Clothing System [ECWCS] Hand Protection System” (gloves, presumably), we don’t know who will be making those gloves, whether the glovemaker hired lobbyists or had its executives contribute to Cantwell and Murray’s campaigns, or were otherwise hand-in-glove with their earmark bestowers.

That’s because of a slight change in wording that was made in the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, one that the Senate, apparently, prefers–and which all but does away with meaningul earmark disclosure. Read on for more details…

…Taxpayers for Common Sense found a surprise in the text of the new law that will keep some of the most sought-after Senate earmark information out of public view until just before bills hit the floor.

The law excuses Senate committees from publishing online at an early stage of the process earmark lists that include the names of sponsors, the recipients and the purposes of projects.

Instead, at the committee approval stage, the only data required to go online are certifications that members have no financial interests in their own earmarks.

It was a minor change in wording that made a big difference between the version that became law and the version the Senate passed in January. The earlier version would have required committees to publish all earmark information online immediately.

As it stands, complete earmark information will not have to be put online until 48 hours before bills reach the floor.

That’s quite a difference, and what it means in practice is that Senators’ earmarks will not receive meaningful public scrutiny–by the time the public learns of the earmarks, the bills will already have become law. For this Senate, this short-circuiting of public disclosure is a feature, not a bug:

Jim Manley, a Reid spokesman, insisted that the change was minor.

“In the course of finalizing the ethics law, we refined various provisions to make them rational, workable and cohesive,” Manley said. “The final version provides ample public disclosure of earmarks in a workable fashion.”

Workable for whom? Taxpayers and constituents? Or our elected servants in Washington who don’t want us to be able to check up on our employees?

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