Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group

1. Credit in the Gilded Age

   By Bill Allison Mar 5, 2009 8:15 p.m.

   I've been reading The Gilded Age, by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. It's amazing how little the Washington they depict--the lobbyists, the appropriators, the schemes--has changed. This passage, however, put me in mind of our current credit and banking crisis:

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2. Making the bailout more transparent

   By Bill Allison Mar 5, 2009 8:10 p.m.

   It's old news -- several trillion dollars ago -- but back in 2008 the Federal Reserve, Treasury and the FDIC started working in tandem on a series of measures to stabilize the financial system. The Federal Reserve's aid is doled our or loaned out in secrecy, despite the dogged attempts of Bloomberg News to pry loose the data; the FDIC has released some, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by our colleagues at SubsidyScope.com.

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3. Senate approves earmarks for PMA Group clients

   By Bill Allison Mar 5, 2009 5:05 a.m.

   Sen. Tom Coburn would like to do away with all earmarks; this evening the Senate voted on an amendment he proposed that would eliminate, from the Omnibus Appropriations bill, earmarks for 14 clients of the soon-to-be-defunct lobbying shop, the PMA Group. The purpose of the amendment read as follows:

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4. More earmarks mapped!

   By Bill Allison Feb 27, 2009 4:56 p.m.

   Yesterday, it was the earmarks in the Commerce, Science & Justice bill. Today, it's Energy and Water:

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5. Cities seeking a Piece of the Action?

   By Bill Allison Feb 26, 2009 1:43 p.m.

   From the A Piece of the Action? database, here's a list of cities that have hired lobbyists who have reported that the bailout or the stimulus is a specific lobbying issue, complete with links (if any) to project requests on the excellent StimulusWatch.org page for those cities:

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6. Our friends at labs...

   By Bill Allison Feb 24, 2009 10:42 p.m.

   ...are discovering the inadequacies of federal data. It tells you something, but never everything you need to know. Data is useful, but it's the digging into data--unlocking the details of the data--that justifies the expense of presenting it. By itself, data is really no more interesting than passages of the tax code or lists of earmarks. There was nothing inherently interesting about Dennis Hastert listing a 1/4 share of 69 acres (Plano, IL) on his financial disclosure form -- it was seeing where that land was -- an w

7. New registrants seeking a piece of the action

   By Bill Allison Feb 24, 2009 9:49 p.m.

   So far in 2009, 90 entities--local governments, oil companies, ad hoc coalitions of various interests, unions, airports, tech firms and others--have either hung out their own shingle or hired at least one of 65 lobbying firms to keep an eye on the 2008's federal bank bailout, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, or 2009's economic stimulus, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a review of registrations filed with the Senate Office of Public Records through Feb. 23, 2009, show. These filings represent new hirings, and do not account for the hundreds of other interests whose regular Washington lobbyists have added the bailout and stimulus to their specific lobbying interests. Also, because of the vagaries of the searching the Senate Office of Public Records database and the requirements of lobbying disclosure forms, other interests might have hired new firms who added one or both bills to their lobbying issues, but won't disclose such activity publicly until the end of the first quarter of 2009.

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8. Appropriations Omnibus released

   By Bill Allison Feb 23, 2009 9:56 p.m.

   The House Committee on Rules has released the latest legislative tome -- this time, the rest of the FY2009 appropriations. The Labor-HHS-Education portion of the report -- available here -- is packed with earmarks. If you can download the pdf (I had trouble getting it to go), check pages 81 to 84 -- lots of earmarks in small type -- but no sponsor names (unless I'm missing something).

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9. Hidden earmarks?

   By Bill Allison Feb 23, 2009 8:37 p.m.

   This passage is from page 85 of the Labor, HHS, Education portion of the committee report for the big appropriations bill:

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10. Who's seeking A Piece of the Action?

    By Bill Allison Feb 23, 2009 5:48 p.m.

    The bailout (the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP, etc.) and the stimulus (the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act) are massive pieces of legislation with lots of moving parts. Thus, the more eyeballs on them and what's around them, the better.

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11. Lobbying for a Piece of the Bailout and Stimulus Action?

    By Bill Allison Feb 23, 2009 4:46 p.m.

    First a word of caution: when the title of a database ends with a question mark (in this case, A Piece of the Action?, approach it with some caution.

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12. PMA Investigation: Looking for More than Straw Men?

    By Bill Allison Feb 19, 2009 8:07 p.m.

    Congressional Quarterly looks in breadth and depth at the influence of the PMA Group, whose offices were raided by the FBI. (The story is co-written by my old colleague Alex Knott, who started delving into PMA back in 2004.) As good a story as it is ... here's an excerpt clipped from InstaPundit ...

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13. Treasury Taking a Bath on TARP

    By Bill Allison Feb 17, 2009 5:55 p.m.

    Via twitter, via Right Org, comes this very cool way of tracking the Treasury Department's Troubled Asset Relief Program investments from Ethisphere -- almost like an S&P index of stocks of publicly traded firms that have received money from TARP:

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14. Rangel-ing the Campaign Cash

    By Bill Allison Feb 12, 2009 10:26 p.m.

    My colleague Nancy Watzman flags a fundraising flier from Rep. Charles Rangel, who held a Valentine's Day fundraiser this morning hosted by tax and accounting specialists Ernst & Young (nothing says Valentine's quite like a firm involved in the U.S. tax shelter industry).

Investigations by Sunlight Foundation reporter Bill Allison