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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See Who’s Seeking Tax Breaks on Imports from Congress
House Members proposed more than 800 bills that would provide tax relief–in the form of tariff suspensions–for about 120 companies and organizations during the 110th Congress. The U.S. International Trade Commission, which analyzes the bills, suggests that all told, those bills–if enacted–will cost the Treasury $1.1 billion in 2009. Sunlight (actually, yours truly, all by himself) has slapped together a little database on the bills, showing the sponsors and the beneficiaries, the items to be imported, links to documents and lobbying reports, plus other good stuff (and lots of not so good stuff, including phrases like, “dissolved into a viscose solution and extruded through perforated metal disks”).Tariff bills range from measures that would open the door to low cost footwear from China (affecting about 60 percent of the shoes sold in the United States, according to the International Trade Commission) to measures that will save a Connecticut textile firm the princely sum of $5.40 a year on imported “camel hair, not processed in any manner beyond the degreased or carbonized condition.”
While it’s easy to get lost in the details, a few points about tariff suspensions are worth mentioning: like earmarks, they generally benefit one company or organization; the House instituted new rules to provide more transparency in the tariff suspension process (these greatly facilitated my making of the database); transparency assumes that the press or public actually looks at what’s being made transparent; and, finally, because none of these bills is likely to pass before the current Congress turns out the lights, many of them will probably be reintroduced at some point in the 111th Congress, and we’ll keep tracking them.
Much more on this at Real Time.
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Tariff Suspensions: Download Your Own Data
Thanks to the detective work of the Washington Post, the website of the US International Trade Commission, and the ingenuity of Sunlight’s computer wizards – thank you especially Kerry Mitchell – we’ve been able to put together a spreadsheet of all tariff legislation in the 109th Congress.
You can download it by clicking on the attachment link below. The file is a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, which you can look at directly or easily import into the database program of your choice.
Here’s what you’ll find inside:
- The sponsor of each bill
- The company that asked for it
- The item receiving the tariff suspension
- A link to a PDF document that shows the bill itself and the USITC’s analysis.
You’ll also find a couple of other fields that make it easy to compare things like whether the company that asked for the break was in the same state as the member of Congress who introduced the bill.
We’re doing this because even though the Washington Post broke the story yesterday about how these tariff suspensions can be a backdoor way for members to deliver favors to specific companies, there’s only so much information they could cram into one story.
If you’ve got the data yourself, it’s much easier to do additional digging – for instance checking whether the companies’ PACs or executives made campaign contributions to the member who sponsored the bill. And since 142 members of Congress have introduced these bills, it’s a great local story almost anywhere in the country.
For more background on why this is important, check out the original Washington Post story or other Sunlight blogs on this subject from Bill Allison and me.
Have fun digging through the data and let us know if you find anything interesting. Our guiding motto on this is an old favorite of mine: Don’t wait for Congress to investigate, do it yourself.
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Tracking Tariff Suspensions
As my colleague Bill Allison has already pointed out, a page one story in today’s Washington Post – A Quiet Break for Corporations – pulls back the curtain on the little-known practice of tariff suspension bills introduced in Congress to help specific corporations.
Fortunately the story includes a link to the key source for their information on this, the website of the US International Trade Commission. If you dig through that site to this page you’ll find the complete list of tariff bills introduced in the 109th Congress, along with the sponsor, the date, and a description of the item for which the tariff is being suspended or reduced.
In all, there are just under 800 bills listed on that page, and each one has a link to a PDF file showing the bill itself, the agency’s analysis of its effect, and – most importantly – the name of the company requesting the break.
As the Post discovered, many of these companies have been active donors to the member of Congress who introduced the bill.
Washington Post reporter Joe Stephens and Sarah Cohen, the paper’s database editor, deserve serious kudos for uncovering all this. They clearly spent a lot of time and effort working with the data and mining it for news angles. (For that matter, the USITC deserves a big pat on the back for making this information available on the web.)
But the information the journalists have uncovered is far too valuable to simply appear once in a news story, then disappear – even if the story did wind up on page one of the Washington Post. This is exactly the kind of information that could be a huge resource for reporters, bloggers, curious citizens – even the small businesses (like the ones quoted in the story) that are getting the shaft while the companies with lobbyists and friends on Capitol Hill are getting the breaks.
That’s where Sunlight comes in. We’re currently putting the whole thing into a spreadsheet and database that we’ll post – hopefully within a day or two – here on the website, where anyone can download it and dig in.
UPDATE: It’s up. You’ll find it here.
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Another Kind of Earmark
Joe Stephens reports in this morning’s Washington Post on a practice we wondered about a while back: members of Congress who sponsor “temporary duty suspensions” — cuts in the taxes assessed on a specific imported item. (Thomas, the Library of Congress’s online tool for tracking legislation, lists hundreds of them when you search for the phrase, “temporary suspension of duty.”) Each tariff suspension can cost the Treasury as much as $500,000–that is, it’s a $500,000 tax break targeted to some special interest that asked for the tariff suspension.
Unlike earmarks, members that propose tariff suspensions have to formally sponsor a bill (just by searching Thomas we found, for example, that Sen. John Kerry seemed to favor golf driver heads made of titanium or with plasma welded face plates). But The Post, by looking at analyses of these bills made by the International Trade Commission, was able to identify many of those requesting the breaks:
The practice of not naming companies in the legislation obscures a fact revealed by The Post’s analysis: The biggest beneficiaries of the rising tide of tariff-suspension bills are domestic subsidiaries of foreign corporations. Of the 10 companies that stand to benefit from the greatest number of bills examined in the study, eight are owned by or affiliated with German and Swiss chemical companies.
What’s of most interest to me is just how routine Congress has made the process for asking for these tax breaks:
Traditionally each suspension was introduced as a separate bill. Their popularity leapt 20 years ago when Congress decided to combine most of the unopposed suspension bills into one huge piece of legislation, to be passed quickly and unanimously at the end of each session. Today corporate lobbyists deliver a steady stream of proposed tariff suspensions to congressional aides, who use computer spreadsheets to track the avalanche of paperwork.
The House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee review most of the bills in what members say is an attempt to weed out those too costly to the Treasury. Making the tariff suspensions temporary — usually three years — avoids interference with trade negotiations, aides said.
The process has become so standardized that Ways and Means has drawn up a tip sheet for companies to streamline the procedure. One tip says sponsors should “avoid using trade names for products.” Instead, a product “should be described precisely” in the bill. That can help customs officials in the field identify obscure chemicals. But it also can mask which companies would benefit.
A tip sheet for tax breaks. I wonder how many other helpful publications Congress has for those seeking special favors. In any case, some of those benefiting most from these breaks seem to be active donors to members of Congress as well:
During this session, eight foreign corporations alone have generated at least 277 tariff-suspension bills. The total is undoubtedly higher, since the Post study could not identify the corporate sponsors of many bills.
The analysis shows that various Bayer subsidiaries were the unnamed primary beneficiaries of more than 70 suspension bills covering imported chemicals, including the ingredients for aspirin. Over the next two years those suspensions would cost the Treasury more than $35 million on imports worth nearly $850 million. A Bayer spokesman would say only that Bayer expects other corporations to share in the savings.
Since 2000, Bayer’s political committee has made campaign contributions totaling $951,000, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. In 2005 alone, Bayer and its U.S. affiliates spent $3.2 million on lobbying.
Sounds like Bayer is getting its money’s worth…
