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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Weekly Media Roundup – April 13, 2009
Each weekday, Sunlight’s communications team collects all the press mentions of Sunlight and of our grantees. Instead of just keeping that to ourselves, we thought we’d try something new by highlighting some of the more interesting mentions and sharing that with you each week. (You can also check out our Delicious page and our Press Center to see who’s writing about us.)
Elizabeth Brotherton at Roll Call (subscription required), Associated Press Managing Editors, Paul Krawzak with CQ Politics and Deb Price with The Detroit News wrote stories about about U.S. House of Representatives lawmakers posting their earmark requests for the 2010 budget on their Web sites as new transparency guidelines required. Bill Allison, Sunlight’s senior fellow, researched the disclosures. Journalists used Bill’s research as the base for their articles, including many regional papers reporting on earmarks requested by their respective congressional delegations.
National Journal’s “Tech Daily Dose” blog reported that the Center for Responsive Politics’ site OpenSecrets.org is going “open data” this week. For the first time in their 26-year history, CRP “is making its most popular data archives fully available to the public for download for free,” The Journal writes. Sunlight helped fund CRP’s OpenData initiative to make millions of records available under a Creative Commons license, The Journal adds.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg with The New York Times wrote about President Obama’s promise to bring transparency to the federal government. She notes the administration is finding that fulfilling the pledge is easier said than done. Technological hurdles, privacy concerns and the Washington’s entrenched culture of secrecy have so far proven hard to overcome. Stolberg lists several steps the Obama team have successfully taken, the streamlining of a health care summit over the White House Web site and the setting up of Recovery.gov to help track the stimulus package. She quotes Ellen Miller, Sunlight’s executive director, as saying the site is “an amazing potential model of how information is made available to the public.”
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Campaign Cash Coincidences? Murtha Gives Earmarks to Murtha Donors
Lobbyists, campaign cash and earmarks: Roll Call’s Tory Newmyer, with help Taxpayers for Common Sense, shows ($$) the correlations:
Every private entity that Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) favored with an earmark in this year’s defense bill recently has given political money to the lawmaker, according to an analysis of House Appropriations and federal elections records by Roll Call and Taxpayers for Common Sense.
PACs and employees of those 26 groups together have contributed $413,250 to Murtha since the beginning of 2005. He collected nearly a quarter of the sum — $100,750 — in the two weeks leading up to March 16, the original deadline for lawmakers to file their earmark requests.
Murtha’s not alone in this. Anu ran contribution numbers from earmark recipients favored by Rep. James Moran, a fellow appropriator, for the current election cycle: companies that are in line to receive some $24 million in earmarks contributed $75,800 to Moran’s campaign committee. We didn’t even get around to running the numbers for his leadership PAC yet. [Update: After running the PAC numbers, Anu found that contributions figure rises to $99,900...]
Yesterday, Newmyer did a fine piece on the web of connections between earmark recipients and a trio of appropriators (Murtha, Moran and Rep. Peter Visclosky) running through lobbying firm PMA Group.
Some of my Sunlight colleagues have been fooling around with a tool that makes it easy to trace these kinds of connections for individual earmarks, which we’ll be releasing soon — stay tuned.
