Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group

1. Few members at the summit own healthcare stock

   By Anupama Narayanswamy Feb 25, 2010 4:31 p.m.

   A quick analysis of personal financial disclosures of Members of Congress shows that very few of them present at the healthcare summit own stock in the healthcare industry.

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2. White House visitor logs are short on descriptions

   By Anupama Narayanswamy Feb 3, 2010 3:25 p.m.

   The White House released their most recent visitor logs yesterday but except for public events or group tours, it sheds little light on why the President or White House officials met with particular individuals. Though the logs include a column for descriptions of the meetings, for most entries it was left blank.

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3. OGD: Labor releases open government page

   By Anupama Narayanswamy Jan 22, 2010 3:34 p.m.

   The Department of Labor is one of the few agencies that has its "/open" page up and running as part of the Open Government Directive. One of the datasets they have featured as a high value dataset is the "weekly reports of fatalities, catastrophes and other events." The data, compiled by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, briefly describes workplace accidents, identifies the company at which and the date when the accident occurred; the data can be downloaded as a csv file. Although this dataset is available on Labor's Web site, it doesnt seem to be uploaded on the data.gov Web site yet.

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4. Database used to track contractor fraud poorly managed, filled with inaccuracies

   By Anupama Narayanswamy Jan 14, 2010 1:03 p.m.

   Congressional watchdogs have often criticized the online tool maintained by the General Services Administration to prevent the award of federal funds to banned individuals and companies. A Sunlight Reporting Group review of the sites data finds that it continues to be badly maintained, with rampant problems including omissions, inaccuracies and other data quality issues.

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5. Stimulus grantees cited for poor oversight of federal funds

   By Anupama Narayanswamy Nov 24, 2009 4:32 p.m.

   The Carson City Airport Authority, which has benefited in the last four years from more than $13 million in federal funds, is now slated to receive another $9.6 million in stimulus money, even though an independent auditor cited problems earlier this year with how it manages its federal grants.

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6. Support for Baucus Healthcare Plan Brings in Donations

   By Anupama Narayanswamy Nov 6, 2009 3:55 p.m.

   Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., the key architect of one of several competing health care reform bills under consideration in Congress, isn't up for re-election until 2014, yet his campaign committee has enjoyed an influx of contributions. In the third quarter of 2009, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee added more than $136,000 of campaign cash to his coffers, bringing his total for the year to more than $448,000. Overall, Baucus has more than $2.2 million in his campaign account, the majority of which is left over from his 2008 re-election bid.

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7. Recovery.gov recipient schema

   By Anupama Narayanswamy Oct 20, 2009 8:39 p.m.

   We've received a few calls from reporters asking where they can find a record layout for recipient data recently posted on recovery.gov. It doesn't seem to be available on the site, but is available on federalreporting.gov and here's a link to it.

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8. Digging into recovery.gov data

   By Anupama Narayanswamy Oct 5, 2009 10:12 p.m.

   We're playing with the new stimulus data released last week on the Recovery.gov Web site - analyzing the data, trying to find out which states are receiving the most money and what kinds of projects are receiving the most money. Data on contracts can be downloaded from FPDS site and the grants and loans from the USAspending Web site.

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9. Corruption charges prompt Congo to lobby Congress

   By Anupama Narayanswamy Sep 25, 2009 3:40 p.m.

   In the past few years a handful of private equity or hedge funds have garnered a reputation as "vulture funds," a term coined to describe companies that profit from the debt of extremely poor countries. The hedge funds buy defaulted debt for pennies on the dollar, then sue them later for the full amount owed in U.S. and European courts.

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10. Opening the Window on Foreign Lobbying

    By Anupama Narayanswamy Aug 18, 2009 7:51 p.m.

    In 2008, Bermuda's influential reinsurance industry needed some help. Successive seasons of monster hurricanes in the United States, where much of its client base is, had cost these insurers of insurance companies $22 billion in losses. Eager to avoid a repeat and unable to change the weather the companies and Bermuda's government turned to something they could influence: The U.S. Congress.

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11. Adding it up: The Top Players in Foreign Agent Lobbying

    By Anupama Narayanswamy and Luke Rosiak, Sunlight Foundation and Jennifer LaFleur, ProPublica Aug 18, 2009 1 p.m.

    It isnt just U.S. companies or groups that push for their causes on Capitol Hill. Thousands of times each year, lobbyists for foreign governments and other overseas organizations reach out to members of Congress and other U.S. leaders to make their case on issues important to them.

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12. The FOIA Process: Still as Archaic as Snail Mail

    By Anupama Narayanswamy Jun 25, 2009 3 p.m.

    There are very few occasions in the Sunlight offices for us to use the fax machine, so we were somewhat out of practice when we learned that we had to use it to send Freedom of Information Act requests to the Department of Treasury. At least the fax is instantaneous: we received most of our responses from them via snail mail.

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13. Is FOIA any better under Obama? An anecdote today, data later

    By Anupama Narayanswamy Jun 23, 2009 9:01 p.m.

    Newsweek's Michael Isikoff report on the Obama administration's mixed record on transparency got me to thinking about our own experience with FOIA requests. Isikoff notes,

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14. The unbearable opacity of TARP: Government agencies can't tell us who's in charge

    By Anupama Narayanswamy Apr 28, 2009 4:32 p.m.

    The new report to Congress from SIGTARP -- the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program -- begins by noting that TARP has evolved into "12 separate, but often interrelated, programs involving government and private funds of up to almost $3 trillion" of an "unprecedented scope, scale, and complexity." The report highlighted the possibilities of fraud and conflicts on interest in the bailout process and calls for better disclosure. We continue to find that even some of the most elementary details about the program -- like who is actually managing distribution of the bailout money to financial institutions -- is still shrouded in secrecy.

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Investigations by Sunlight Foundation reporter Anupama Narayanswamy