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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White House Visitor Logs Show Large Lobbyist Presence For Head of White House Health Office
Upon assuming the presidency Barack Obama set about creating an office within the White House to spearhead his effort to pass health care reform legislation. The White House Office of Health Reform was to be headed by a long-time health reform player in both the public and private sectors, Nancy-Ann DeParle. According to White House visitor logs, seventeen lobbyists for key interests working on health care reform held eleven meetings with DeParle through 2009.
These lobbyists represented a cross section of interests from those who would ultimately oppose legislation to the outwardly supportive. The majority came from health industry groups that were, if not hostile, trying to protect their interests.
The organization most present in DeParle’s schedule is the American Medical Association (AMA). After years of opposing health care reform efforts the AMA backed health reform efforts in 2009 and, in November, stated their support for the House health care reform bill. Representatives from the AMA met with DeParle three times from August to October. The lobbyists present at the meetings were Richard Deem, the senior vice president for advocacy at the AMA, and Richard Tarplin, a lobbyist from Tarplin Strategies.
Both Deem and Tarplin have connections to past health reform efforts. Deem was the AMA’s director of federal affairs during the effort by President Bill Clinton to pass comprehensive health care reform. Tarplin was working in the Clinton White House at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) at the time. Tarplin likely worked with DeParle during the Clinton health care effort as DeParle was in charge of health reform issues at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and later worked at HHS.
Other lobbyists appearing on DeParle’s schedule include Karen Ignagni, the President and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) and another AHIP lobbyist, Gary Bacher. The White House tried for months to bring AHIP to table on health care reform, but ultimately found that they could not reach on agreement to obtain their support for reform. Later reports revealed that AHIP was paying for anti-health care reform advertisements through the US Chamber of Commerce.
DeParle also met with lobbyists from AARP, AFL-CIO, Alliance of Community Health Plans, Business Roundtable, Blue Cross/Blue Shield and the National Federation of Independent Businesses. The full list of meetings can be viewed below:
Health Industry Meetings With Nancy-Ann DeParle Date Lobbyist Name Client May 28, 2009 Jack Ebeler Alliance of Community Health Plans July 23, 2009 Nancy Taylor Business Roundtable July 23, 2009 Stephen Ciccone Eastman Kodak July 23, 2009 John Castellani Business Roundtable July 23, 2009 Maria Ghazal Business Roundtable August 11, 2009 Richard Trachtman American College of Physicians August 11, 2009 Rosemarie Sweeney American Academy of Family Physicians August 11, 2009 Richard Deem American Medical Association September 16, 2009 Donald Danner National Federation of Independent Businesses September 16, 2009 Susan Eckerly National Federation of Independent Businesses October 6, 2009 Richard Tarplin American Medical Association October 6, 2009 Richard Deem American Medical Association October 7, 2009 Karen Ignagni America’s Health Insurance Plans October 7, 2009 Gary Bacher America’s Health Insurance Plans October 9, 2009 John Castellani Business Roundtable October 14, 2009 Scott Serota Blue Cross/Blue Shield October 14, 2009 Alissa Fox Blue Cross/Blue Shield October 19, 2009 Nancy Leamond AARP October 21, 2009 Richard Deem American Medical Association October 21, 2009 Richard Tarplin American Medical Association October 28, 2009 Gerald Shea AFL-CIO 
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Researching and Writing the White House-PhRMA Deal
At the end of last year, the White House dropped a new pile of visitor log records into the public, online record. Upon returning in January from a near month long vacation I decided to take a look at these new records. One story that I wanted some more information on was the oft-reported on deal between the White House and the pharmaceutical companies. I started looking up meetings for pharmaceutical executives, PhRMA lobbyist Billy Tauzin and so on. After a bit of searching and reading some articles from last summer two things dawned on me: 1) There was no singular resource that brought together all of the reporting and all of the data in one place and 2) No one reporting on this deal seemed to know that Sen. Max Baucus posts his schedule online.
The second point is what really crystallized the need to write this piece for me. Last summer, I dug into Baucus’ publicly available schedule (which wouldn’t be available if it weren’t for Sunlight’s efforts) examining his meetings with leaders in the health care industry. When I was looking at the White House Visitor Logs, a lot of the dates looked familiar. That’s because they matched up precisely with dates in Baucus’ schedule with the same actors meeting at the White House and with Baucus. Data that was available online all this time showed how closely the White House and pharmaceutical companies were coordinating with Baucus’ office in crafting a health care reform bill. (Continue reading…)
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White House and Influence Reform Anew
We just received a fact sheet from the White House, which outlines some of the policy goals suggested in President Obama’s State of the Union address.
As Ellen noted, we are particularly excited about new proposals for lobbying disclosure reform and better earmark disclosure.
I’ve embedded a copy below, and copied the text in the extended entry.
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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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Don’t Give Grades Till the End of the Class
Kenneth Vogel over at Politico wrote this morning about a report put together by a coalition of watchdog organizations praising the White House for its openness by giving it an “A” grade.
The watchdog report speaks to the positive efforts undertaken by the administration to make the executive branch more open and transparent, and the highlighting of those efforts is all well and good.
But giving openness grades to the White House right now is like giving a grade for an entire class after the first few weeks. A professor wouldn’t give a grade for the whole semester because a student turned in quality homework in September and laid out a plan for how hard she is going to work over the next few months until the final. Encouragement, guidance, oversight… sure. But not a grade.
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So, you want to know who is visiting the White House?
Last week, the White House released another set of visitor logs online and in a format that can be parsed and analyzed. The 25,000 individual records from September 16 through September 30, 2009 can provide valuable insight into how the White House is developing its policies and ultimately, gives us a rare look into who they are consulting as they develop their agenda.
This is yet another positive step by the Obama administration. By providing this data to the public, they once again show that they share Sunlight Foundation’s view that government information needs to be made public, and that in this day and age, that means it must be released online and in a researchable format.
That is where we come in. The minds over at Sunlight Labs under the direction of Clay Johnson, have taken the White House visitor logs and created a new mashup that will allow you to mine this data for information on the individual visitors. The new page links to data from the Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute on Money in State Politics in order to show whether visitors have given campaign contributions. It links to Wikipedia pages and Google searches so that you can look deeper into the biographical information on visitors and get a fuller picture of the visitor’s perspectives on their specific issue area. And it links to their profile on LittleSis.org so you can see their relationships with politicians and other influentials.
The White House has promised that they will release this data on a monthly basis, with October’s data to be released sometime this month. One point of concern: The White House announced that they are withholding some records for reasons of national security, political sensitivity, privacy or other concerns. While we understand these concerns, it is unclear how many visitors fall into those categories, which could be used by either this administration or future administrations to scrub the data of meetings that they would like to hide.
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White House Takes Huge Step Toward Transparency
Early this morning, the White House took a huge step toward a more transparent government by announcing a historic new policy to voluntarily disclose White House visitor access records. Each month, records of visitors from the previous 90-120 days will be made available online.
From the President’s statement:
For the first time in history, records of White House visitors will be made available to the public on an ongoing basis. We will achieve our goal of making this administration the most open and transparent administration in history not only by opening the doors of the White House to more Americans, but by shining a light on the business conducted inside it. Americans have a right to know whose voices are being heard in the policymaking process.
Aside from a small group of appointments that cannot be disclosed because of national security imperatives or their necessarily confidential nature (such as a visit by a possible Supreme Court nominee), the record of every visitor who comes to the White House for an appointment, a tour, or to conduct business will be released. Read the full policy here.
The Administration has also agreed with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) to settle four pending cases requesting specific White House visitor access records, including those dating from the Bush administration (read the transmittal letter here). We have provided CREW with the records relating to their requests….
You can read all the details of this new policy at Norm Eisen’s blog.
There are a couple of important things to note. First, I understand that the president was personally involved in pushing this new policy forward and that generally around the White House there was not a lot of sympathy for this dramatic change. This is very significant and illustrates a fundamental commitment by this president to the campaign pledges he made toward openness of government.
Second, the White House has given itself wiggle room in that they will exercise discretion in deleting the names of certain visitors — personal friends, national security related meetings, and for some other reasons. We are going to trust them to make the right decisions. (We don’t need to know, don’t want to know the name of Sascha and Malia’s friends as one example.) One misstep and the good will we are offering them right now goes out the window.
Third, there is a substantial delay in making this information available to the public, 90-120 days. This latter point does give me some considerable pause. I understand that it will take at least 60 days for the Secret Service records to make their way to the White House and then some time to clean the data of personal information like social security numbers and phone numbers, but I would also bet it would be pretty darn easy to design a system that could provide that information on a daily basis. (Why shouldn’t the White House have access to the back end database that the Secret Service uses on a daily basis?) Hopefully, the White House will look into technological fixes for what they now assume will be a manual review and cleansing of the records. Real time, online is the standard to which we should hold all government information. That’s what “public” information means in the 21st century.
That critique aside, this is indeed a historic step. This kind of disclosure pioneered by the White House can keep government strong, keep citizens informed, provide an opportunity for all of us to monitor at close hand the work of the White House, providing an insurance policy for our citizens against those who want to keep them in the dark.
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White House Releases List of Health Care Lobbyists, Execs
The White House made public a list of health care lobbyists and executives who have visited the White House one day after it was reported that requests had been denied for the visitor logs. Those listed as attending include PhRMA lobbyist Billy Tauzin, America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) CEO Karen Ignani and American Hospital Association (AHA) CEO Richard Umbdenstock. This is pretty good turnaround after the hit the White House took yesterday on their initial refusal to release the visitor logs.
For the full list of health care visitors, see here.
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White House Publishes Staff Salaries
As ProPublica just pointed out on Twitter, the White House today released staff salaries, as they do each year.
Since 1995, the White House has been required to deliver a report to Congress listing the title and salary of every White House Office employee.
What’s unique about this year’s report is the data that accompanies it, helpfully presented in a sortable chart, which is itself downloadable.
Using Google Spreadsheets, I made the following chart, to see whether my first impression was correct: that many White House staffers were concentrated at either $30 – 40,000 per year, or around $160,000. Turns out my first impression was wrong, and that there’s a fairly even distribution.
This is a step in the right direction, where a simple explanation, accessible chart, and exposed data all combine to give a useful look at something that’s required to be made public.
(Note — please interpret this chart as a stab at making sense by an amateur, and should not represent Sunlight’s visualization work, which far, far exceeds my own.)
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Lunchtime Link Round-Up
Some open government/transparency posts from around the web:
The Food and Drug Administration, in conjunction with their Transparency Task Force, launched a transparency blog to discuss ways to make their operations more open to the public.
The White House is asking for more help on the Open Government Directive. They are looking for people to tell them the “three most important pieces of information you think every agency should be required to disclose about its operations.” Also, they are seeking input on how the private sector could help the government mash up data.
Utah launched a new state government web site that looks very cool. Let us know in the comments what you think about this as a state government portal.
And in today’s least surprising news, contracting in Iraq is plagued by a lack of oversight and corruption.
