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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Apps for America 2 Winners
Over at the Sunlight Labs blog, Clay announced the winners of the Apps for America 2 competition. They are:Congratulations to the winners and thanks to everyone who submitted an entry!
All of the hard work applicants put into their entries isn’t going unnoticed. OMB Director Peter Orszag posted about the winners and other entries on the OMB blog today, writing:
In the contest, we see the principles of transparency and public engagement working to deliver real solutions. The government doesn’t have a monopoly on the best ideas. We look forward to unleashing the creativity of the American people to show us what is possible and help us find the innovative path forward.
Amen to that.
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Who Counts On Cloture?
While the guns of august rage at town halls throughout the country, pundits in Washington and staffers in Congress and the White House are busy counting heads to see if the object of all that fear and loathing, health care reform, has a shot at becoming law. The topic du jour is whether the Senate can overcome the 60 vote threshold of a cloture vote. Despite concerns among Democrats that they won’t be able to reach the 60 vote threshold to avoid a filibuster, very few Democrats have defected on cloture votes (the vote that bypasses a filibuster) so far this year.
This year, only eight Democrats have voted to support a filibuster. The most frequent supporters of filibusters among Democrats have been Sen. Russ Feingold and Sen. Kay Hagan. One of those Democrats, Sen. Arlen Specter, cast his only vote for filibuster when he previously caucused as a Republican. The other Democrats who have supported a filibuster this year include Sens. Harry Reid, Max Baucus, Evan Bayh, Robert Byrd and Claire McCaskill.
Only Sens. Feingold and Hagan have supported a filibuster three times. Sen. Hagan’s filibuster support comes from her attempt to protect a home state interest and the jobs it provides. Each of the three votes she cast in support of a filibuster were aimed at blocking the passage of a tobacco regulation bill. The North Carolina senator’s state is the home of R.J. Reynold’s, who opposed the legislation as an attempt to stifle market competition by their larger rival Altria (Philip Morris). Unlike Hagan, Feingold’s filibuster support has not come as a means to protect parochial interests. In one instance Feingold opposed the restriction on the number of amendments to be voted on and in two other instances the Wisconsin senator’s filibuster support came during consideration of two large spending bills. Feingold has long been an opponent of wasteful spending.
Some may be surprised to see the Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid on the list of filibustering Democrats. Senate procedures state that if the Majority Leader votes in favor of a filibuster he is reserved the right to bring the bill or nomination back up for a future vote. All of Reid’s filibuster support came on cloture votes that resulted in a successful filibuster.
Filibusted.us, the winner of the Sunlight Foundation’s Apps for America contest, provides data on all cloture votes and ranks senators by their likelihood of supporting a filibuster. This year there have been 22 cloture votes, only two of which resulted in filibusters. If Democrats are worried about overcoming a filibuster they may find solace that few of their members, even those who often defect on final votes on legislation, are willing to vote for a filibuster. Concerns about Republican support may be more worrying, particularly when considering the health of two key Democratic senators.
With the continued health issues suffered by Sens. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, Democrats may have to rely on one of the few Republicans who do not regularly support filibusters to reach the 60 vote cloture threshold. The only Republicans who have supported filibusters under 20% of the time are the two Maine senators Olympia Snowe (4.5%) and Susan Collins (13.6%) and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski (14.3%). Democrats seem to have pinned their hopes on Snowe, one of two Republican supporters of the stimulus legislation, to help move the health bill. She is seen as the only Republican senator participating in Sen. Max Baucus’ compromise discussions in the Senate Finance Committee who may ultimately support health care reform legislation.
Only recently has the filibuster become a persistent legislative obstacle to most legislation. Use of the filibuster, through a failure to pass a cloture vote, has been steadily on the rise for decades. The greatest increase has only been seen in between the previous two Congresses. The 110th Congress, the first Democratic-controlled Congress since 1994, saw a near doubling of both attempted filibusters and successful filibusters.
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This Week in Transparency – August 14, 2009
Here are some of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and allies over the past week:
Jonathan D. Salant and Lizzie O’Leary with Bloomberg.com have an article showing how there are six lobbyists attempting to influence the health care reform debate for each of the 535 members of the House and Senate. That figure is three times the number of lobbyists registered to lobby on defense. They used data from the Center for Responsive Politics to illustrate how every one of the 10 biggest lobbying firms by revenue is attempting to influence the debate on behalf of some interest or another, spending $263.4 million on lobbying during the first six months of 2009 alone. They quote Bill Allison, Sunlight’s senior fellow, “Whenever you have a big piece of legislation like this, it’s like ringing the dinner bell for K Street.” Multiple other outlets picked up the article and Bill’s quote, including Kate Barrett at ABC News. And David Schechter, CNN’s senior national editor, wrote a column about the lobbying feeding frenzy surrounding the health care reform debate. He lists Sunlight and OpenSecrets.org as good sources for information on the “lobbying largesse.”
In light of the increasingly heated debate over how to reform health care policy, Lisa Stone at BlogHer wrote about the new partnership between BlogHer and OpenCongress, the joint project between the Participatory Politics Foundation and Sunlight, to provide a forum to move the discourse in a more civil and positive direction. They have asked Nancy Watzman, Sunlight’s director of the Party Time project, to share her investigations on their site multiple times a week. Be sure to check their coverage out, which starts today.
Writing at Forbes, Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, wrote about what he calls the promise of innovation provided by Government 2.0. And he asked, “How does government itself become an open platform that allows people inside and outside government to innovate?” O’Reilly points to the Apps for America contests as an example of the “virtuous circle of citizen innovation” using the information made available through the White House’s Data.gov. PC World published a piece by Grant Gross with IDB News Service on how the contest is asking developer to use the raw data released on Data.gov and elsewhere to demonstrate the power of data-publishing and number-crunching services. Gross discussed with Clay Johnson, Sunlight Labs’ director, about how the Labs works to assist traditional and citizen journalists with investigative reporting. “As the Obama administration begins to release more data, there aren’t enough fingers on keyboards here in Sunlight Labs to handle all this,” Clay said. “Has the Obama administration succeeded in making more government data available? You’re talking to the guy with the most unquenchable thirst for that, who will never say that they’re successful.” (Continue reading…)
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This Week in Transparency – July 17, 2009
Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and allies from the week:
Jeff Jacoby, columnist for The Boston Globe, mentioned ReadTheBill.org in a piece he wrote calling on congressional lawmakers read legislation before they vote on it. Glenn Reynolds, at his Instapundit blog, linked to Jacoby’s column. Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish, followed by linking to Reynolds.
In Washington Monthly’s July/August edition, Charles Homans wrote about the Obama administration’s “experiments with data-driven democracy.” The article centers on the work of Vivek Kundra, the White House’s chief information officer, and mentions both the District of Columbia’s Apps for Democracy contest and Sunlight’s Apps for America contest. Homans quotes Clay Johnson, Sunlight Labs’ director, saying Kundra has his work cut out for him. “I have nothing but respect for what he’s trying to do. But it’s a hard job, and it’s going to take some time for this to actually happen right. I mean years.” While discussing Kundra’s launch of Data.gov, Homans again quotes Clay, “The top data source is on the world’s copper smelters, which isn’t going to tell us very much about what’s going on inside of our government.”
As Ellen Miller, Sunlight’s director, wrote earlier this week, “When it comes to following the money that’s flowing to power on Capitol Hill, no one does it better than the Center for Responsive Politics.” For instance, MAPLight.org used CRP data to show how money watered down the energy bill, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (HR 2454). With Congress debating health care reform, Forbes used CRP data to show how America’s Health Insurance Plans, the political advocacy and trade group for the health insurance industry, has spent nearly $10 million on lobbying Congress in the past two years. Robert J. S. Ross, writing at The Huffington Post, quotes CRP about how the insurance industry has contributed $568 million to political campaigns since 1998. CNN’s Jonathan Mann used CRP data in noting how doctors have spent roughly two-thirds of a billion dollars lobbying lawmakers in the last 10 years.
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Weekly Media Roundup – May 8, 2009
Today, May 8th, marks the 125th birthday of Harry S Truman, our 33rd president. He once said, “Secrecy and a free, democratic government don’t mix.” Amen, Mr. President.
Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and grantees from this week:
Monday morning, Tom Lee, a technology director at Sunlight, appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” taking questions about Recovery.gov, the Web site set up to track spending under the federal government’s economic stimulus program. Tom is working on SubsidyScope, a project of The Pew Charitable Trusts, that looks at the role of federal subsidies in the economy. Below is the video of the segment:
Speaking of Recovery.gov, Matt Kelley with USA Today reported that the Web site won’t have details on contracts and grants until October and may not be complete until next spring — halfway through the program. Kelley quotes Greg Elin, Sunlight’s chief evangelist, saying people accustomed to getting easily searchable information quickly could be frustrated. “If we have to wait until October to get the information or to the end of the year to get a powerful recovery.gov site, the Obama administration will have missed an important opportunity.”
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Weekly Media Roundup – May 1, 2009
Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and grantees from this week:David Herbert with the National Journal (subscription required) wrote about the grades new media experts from across the political spectrum gave the Obama administration’s Web presence. The experts gave WhiteHouse.gov an average grade of C+. Although they mostly see it as an improvement from the previous administration’s site, many noted that it remained a one-way forum and suggested it be opened to allow comments and other interactive features. Herbert quotes Ellen Miller, Sunlight’s executive director, “This occasional use of interactive tools” is impressive, but “90 percent of the time the site is pretty straightforward, as it was under [George W.] Bush.” Recovery.gov, the administration’s site where citizens can monitor the expenditure and use of recovery funds, fared even worse in the Journal’s poll, averaging a C. The most common gripe about the site, Herbert writes, is that it’s “the view from 30,000 feet,” as Micah Sifry, senior technology advisor for Sunlight and Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) co-founder, told him. Without providing on-the-the ground details, Recovery.gov offers taxpayers few tools for staying on top of where their money is going, reviewers said. Recovery.gov has competition in the form of privately-operated Recovery.org, which has “more granular data and a real search tool, which one assumes we’ll eventually see on Recovery.gov,” Micah explains. “I don’t think it’s fair to compare this site to other Web sites yet, as it’s just weeks old,” Micah added. “Let’s take another look in three to six months, OK?”
Chris Lefkow with Agence France-Presse gained a different take by interviewing academics, technology analysts and nonpartisan groups on the administration’s technology efforts. Lefkow writes that they all said the first “tech president” is off to a good start. Lefkow quotes John Wonderlich, Sunlight’s policy director, “their first pronouncements are very encouraging,” and added that the challenge, however, is going to be the implementation. Andrew Resiej, Sunlight’s other senior technology advisor and PDF co-founder, said the administration been doing as much as it can to fulfill its promises in regards to transparency and technological innovation. “However they’ve been constrained by decades of industrial-age rules and regulations and procurement protocols that are handicapping the speed at which they can implement that vision,” he said.
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Weekly Media Roundup – April 24, 2009
Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and grantees from this week:
Sunday evening, BlogTalkRadio posted an episode of “Talking Gov2.0,” where Clay Johnson, Sunlight Lab’s director, discussed Sunlight, Sunlight Labs and the Apps for America contest. Speaking of Apps for America, Clay announced the winners on Monday. And Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb wrote about the contest, and included a screencast of the winners.
Victoria McGrane with the Politico wrote about the lack of online disclosure of campaign finance data by candidates for the U.S. Senate, and the efforts to rectify this through S. 482, the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act. She mention’s Sunlight’s Pass S. 482, and extensively quotes Lisa Ronsenberg, Sunlight’s government affairs consultant, about the need for the Senate to join the 21st Century.
The National Journal reported on data from the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) that shows last year’s top 20 Political Action Committee contributors to federal candidates poured a combined $22 million into lobbying efforts from January through March — an increase of nearly 20 percent over the same period in 2008.
Anne C. Mulkern with Greenwire (subscription required) used Capitol Words to look at the use of energy- and environment-related words by congressional lawmakers. The New York Times re-posted Mulkern’s piece.
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Weekly Media Roundup – April 17, 2009
Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and grantees from this week:Various media outlets and bloggers, including the likes of CNET.com, the Associated Press, the National Journal, Lawrence Lessig and Craig Newmark, have covered and congratulated the Center for Responsive Politics’ (CRP) for making its data records from OpenSecrets.org free for anyone to download. The Journal’s “Tech Daily Dose” column reported that more than 120 people had downloaded bulk data within the first 24 hours of CRP opening up its archives.
The Washington Post’s “The Reliable Source” column highlighted Capitol Words, which “slices and dices the entirety of the Congressional Record for your searching pleasure,” they write. McClatchy’s David Lightman reported that, in light of the financial crisis, words you would expect to be used by congressional lawmakers often, such as recession, bailout, stimulus and deficit do not crack the top 30 most frequently uttered terms so far this year. And Daphne Ritter with the New York Post looks at the top words used by several lawmakers from the Empire State’s congressional delegation.
Alice Lipowicz with Federal Computer Week used OpenCongress data in writing about how only 10 congressional lawmakers (four senators and six reps) post their daily schedules on their official Web sites. New York Newsday editorialized about how Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) is blazing a trail in her congressional career by posting her schedule and personal financial disclosure reports online. “While (congressional lawmakers are) at it, they should make sure that information is easy to locate, archived and searchable, so that watchful voters can track, over time, the lobbyists and interest groups bending an official’s ear,” the editors wrote.
Last week, Ryan Singel at Wired’s “Epicenter” blog wrote about Sunlight Labs‘ contest Apps for America, and asked his readers to vote for their favorites. This week, he reported back on the response he received, and issued what he terms the “Epicenter Reader’s Choice award.”
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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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Announcing Apps for America
Sunlight Labs is pleased to announce our new mashup contest for 2009: Apps for America. Inspired by our own mashup contest in 2007, along with the DC Office of the CTO’s Apps for Democracy contest. We’re doing things a bit differently than our first contest in that we’ve broadened the number of APIs that make your app eligible, we’ve increased the prize money, and we’re requiring that all the applications submitted be released under an open source license.
The contest details are here
Basically, you need to use one of the APIs or data dumps listed on this page to make a compelling application. You can develop on any platform you want as long as the judges can judge it. For instance— we wouldn’t recommend making an TI-85 application because none of our judges saved their calculators from high school, but we would recommend web applications, client applications, Adobe AIR applications and the like. If you’re looking for some ideas, check out our Project Ideas page for some inspiration.
Our judges are pretty awesome: Adrian Holovaty from the Django Project. Aaron Swartz, Founder of Reddit.com. Xeni Jardin from BoingBoing.net. Peter Corbett, one of the inventors of Apps for Democracy and founder of iStrategy Labs. We’re keeping one slot open for one other judge. I’ll be a judge, too.
This marks a shift here in the Labs too, from being an experimentation laboratory to a full-scale open source development organization. After all, we can’t call on Government to be transparent if we’re not transparent ourselves.
So let the games begin! We’ll be blogging about the contest as it goes on through March over on the Sunlight Labs Blog so make sure to stay tuned for updates!
