Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group

1. Open Notebook: Flaws in Lobbying Disclosure 3

   By Bill Allison Nov 20, 2009 4:30 p.m.

   In the half hour since we posted on Service Employee International Union's 2008 political activity and lobbying expenditure numbers, the U.S. Postal Service delivered the copy of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's form 990 that we requested yesterday.

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2. Open Notebook: Flaws in Lobbying Disclosure 2

   By Bill Allison Nov 20, 2009 4:15 p.m.

   In 2008, according to a federal disclosure form that's available online from the Labor Department, the national headquarters of the Service Employees International Union spent $67 million on political activities and lobbying. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce files an annual report with the Internal Revenue Service that requires it to disclose spending on lobbying activities; the IRS does not post those disclosures online. We requested a copy from the Chamber, which they are sending to us in the mail.

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3. Duty suspended, contributions tendered

   By Bill Allison Nov 18, 2009 3:39 p.m.

   Dave Maass reports on the latest round of tariff suspensions in San Diego City Beat, doing a nice job of following the money between beneficiaries of these measures that reduce taxes for a small number of beneficiaries (usually one) and the members of Congress who propose them.

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4. Open Notebook: Flaws in Lobbying Disclosure

   By Bill Allison Nov 17, 2009 4:10 p.m.

   Yesterday, Hot Air's Ed Morrissey wrote that two conservative groups are charging that Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, should have registered (or re-registered) as a lobbyist. They're citing White House visitor logs (Stern was the most frequent visitor in the fist batch of records released) and his own tweets as evidence. The same day, Washington Post reported that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is trying to raise $50,000 to commission an economist to find fault with current health care reform proposals working their way through the Senate.

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5. How many stimulus jobs does it take to change a light bulb?

   By Bill Allison Nov 7, 2009 4 p.m.

   Pointing out flaws in Recovery.gov data is getting to be like shooting fish in a barrel (see here, here, here, here, here and here for examples). While reporters had to dig out those examples, a handful of records do the work for you.

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6. How data-dependent is health care reform?

   By Bill Allison Oct 26, 2009 2:33 p.m.

   If the visualization of America's Healthy Future Act (also known as the Baucus Bill) -- immediately below is any indication, data is pretty important to health care reform plans. The word occurs 275 times in the text -- there are new data banks, data collected, data submitted and data shared.

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7. CAR Training - visualizations

   By Bill Allison Oct 23, 2009 7:02 p.m.

   Sign up for a many eyes account by clicking here: Many Eyes Registration.

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8. Correction: Fees for Livingston Group corrected in FLIT

   By Bill Allison Oct 23, 2009 3:26 p.m.

   Due to a data entry error, the Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker contained duplicate entries for fees paid to the Livingston Group by some its clients. We have eliminated the duplicate records. Some of the totals we reported in the two main stories that accompanied the release of the database have changed:

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9. Fighting net neutrality, telecom companies, outside lobbyists, cluster contributions to members of Congress

   By Bill Allison Oct 22, 2009 10:45 p.m.

   While the Federal Communications Commission considers the first steps toward ensuring net neutrality--making certain that broadband providers do not discriminate against high traffic sites--the telecom firms that would be affected by the rules and their trade groups have been swamping Congress with a one-two punch of campaign contributions from the companies and their registered lobbyists. Some 244 members of Congress were the beneficiaries of these contribution clusters--totaling more than $9.4 million--from January 2007 to June 2009, an investigative collaboration of the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Responsive Politics has found. Telecom interests and their lobbyists engaged in more clustered giving than any industry save pharmaceuticals.

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10. Why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce reported spending so much on lobbying

    By Bill Allison Oct 21, 2009 10:57 p.m.

    The latest filing from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports that the trade association, which represents 300,000 members--mostly businesses--spent a whopping $34,690,000 on lobbying in the third quarter of 2009. So what does this number actually mean? What are they spending their money on?

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11. Baucus Bill now available

    By Bill Allison Oct 19, 2009 11:04 p.m.

    Read all 1,502 pages of it here (the members of the Senate Finance Committee who voted for it didn't bother to, but don't let that stop you).

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12. Murtha challenger trounces incumbent in fundraising; outraises Boehner and Pelosi too

    By Bill Allison Oct 16, 2009 5:32 p.m.

    While the ethics scandals that have multiplied around top fundraisers and earmark recipients of Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., have yet to involve him directly, he now faces a challenge from a different direction: A well-financed opponent.

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13. Recovery.gov recipient data just in

    By Bill Allison Oct 15, 2009 4:50 p.m.

    Recovery.gov posted information today showing that 30,383 jobs have been created or saved by the federal contracts that have been awarded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. So far, $16 billion has been disbursed by 9,100 contracts. The federal government is spending more than $525,000 spent on every job they saved or created.

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14. Follow the (Airport) Money

    By Bill Allison Oct 7, 2009 6:30 p.m.

    Over the past five years, the Federal Aviation Administration has handed out nearly $18 billion in grants for almost 19,000 airport projects. In theory, these projects -- funded through the FAA's Airport Improvement Program -- are supposed to enhance safety or protect the environment. In fact, according to a Subsidyscope analysis of FAA data (neatly assembled into a searchable database by Sunlight's Kaitlin Lee), a fair amount of money has gone toward the building of parking lots and other questionable things.

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Investigations by Sunlight Foundation reporter Bill Allison