While there’s much room for improvement, the 110th Congress has made a stab at providing a few rays of Sunlight into the mercenary culture of Washington. For example, in 2008, for the first time, federally registered lobbyists are required to file a new disclosure, called an LD-203, listing the contributions they make to federal candidates, among other things. Those disclosures have been released to the public, but in a form that’s so garbled that contributions are double, triple, quadruple counted or more. My colleague Anupama Narayanswamy painstakingly reviewed 107,000 records, finding the 14,000 individual contributions to federal candidates, and adding up who’s benefited the most from the personal checks of individual lobbyists. The headline above tells you that; read the rest here.

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Not everyone has that kind of appetite apparently. Businesses and lobbying firms are still complaining about the disclosure of contributions - both campaign and honorary - required in the new lobbying disclosure forms (LD-203). “This is insanity. It is grossly overreacting on the part of the Hill,” says one senior vice president of government relations.

The new lobbying reports are available online (you can search them here) and CQ Politics went through and picked out some of the contributions: (more…)

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The Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate are loosening their interpretation of lobbyist disclosure provisions on gifts to lawmakers and staff members and on PAC contributions. The new rules will be put in place after lobbyists and ethics lawyers launched a lobbying campaign to loosen disclosure requirements in the new LD-203 form - a new disclosure document requiring disclosure of campaign contributions and gifts.

The two offices initially ruled that lobbyists must disclose the fee of events where a “covered official” is in attendance. This rule no longer applies:

The new revisions require lobbyists and lobbying organizations to report the fee or contribution for an event if a covered official is honored or receives an award and they are a “sponsor” as defined by the Senate and House gift rules.

The House and Senate’s gift rules take a narrow view of sponsor, requiring that a person or group not only make a financial contribution to an event but have primary responsibility for the event’s organization.

The new ruling also reduce disclosure for lobbyist spending through political action committees (PACs):

The previous guidance stated that lobbyists sitting on a PAC board would have to list all donations of the PAC on their personal LD-203 form. This could require a single lobbyist to list all the donations of several PACs they were involved with.

Under the new guidance, lobbyists are required to list only that they are on the board of the connected PAC, not document the individual contributions made by the PAC.

While certain lobbyists were complaining to force these changes, Sunlight’s John Wonderlich filed his LD-203 and had this to say about it on twitter, “lobbying disclosure was really painless.” Onerous disclosure requirements are in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

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As of July 30 lobbyists will have to report some interesting new information: any campaign contributions, including those from a political action committee controlled by the lobbyist or organization; honorary expenses linked to lawmakers; expenses for meetings involving lawmakers; and donations to presidential libraries. The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 required this new disclosure that lobbyists will file twice a year, with the first deadline being July 30th.  The new forms, LD-203, are here. The Center for Responsive Politics says they plan to capture all these reports. Should be some interesting material in these new reports.

But I was struck by the lack of timeliness of these new reports. Being filed only twice a year raises the question: how much transparency will these forms actually provide?  With all the online tools we have access to today, why not have instantaneous disclosure?  Why wait six months, when the money changing hands is affecting legislation being written today?  It seems to me that this new requirement will give us some more information about the role of the power lobbyist, it does little to deal with the most critical problem - the timeliness of reporting.

Hat tip: Amanda Adams at OMB Watch’s Advocacy Blog.

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