Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group

1. Congressional-DoD correspondence visualization

   By Bill Allison Jul 27, 2007 6:12 p.m.

   Why should the Sunlight Labs guys get all the fun? I loaded the subject lines of the correspondence logs referenced immediately below into Many Eyes, which our co-conspirator Josh Ruihley used to create our Earmarks Visualizations. So what words turn up most frequently in the subject lines of letters members write most frequently about to the Office of the Secretary of Defense? Al Qaeda? Military contracts? National Guard? Body Armor? See for yourself.

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2. DoD correspondence log converted from pix to spreadsheets

   By Bill Allison Jul 27, 2007 4:18 p.m.

   I'm posting, in an Excel spread sheet, the congressional correspondence logs covering the first three months of 2007 that we got a while back in a less than user friendly format from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Here's a sample of what we got in response to our FOIA -- a .tif or tagged image file format -- I picked one at random, but we have a CD-Rom with 189 files just like it.

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3. Coburn goes after lobbying by contractors, requests lobbying disclosures from Pentagon

   By Bill Allison Jul 19, 2007 7:13 p.m.

   Citing 31 U.S.C. 1352, the federal statute that bars contractors and grantees to use federal funds to lobby the government, and requires them to disclose any lobbying they've done in connection with winning a contract or grant (that's the elusive SF-LLL we've been tracking), Sen. Tom Coburn has written to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates requesting, among other things, SF-LLLs (good luck, Senator!). The full letter is attached; here's an excerpt...

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4. Random notes while tracking SF-LLLs

   By Bill Allison Jul 13, 2007 3:48 a.m.

   So I've been going through FedBizOpps, looking for solicitation notices that specifically mention the elusive lobbying disclosure SF-LLL, and coming across some interesting bits of federal business. This solicitation from the State Department, for example, suggests why Anu has yet to receive any correspondence logs from the agency:

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5. SF-LLL Update: Not for public inspection?

   By Bill Allison Jul 9, 2007 10:45 p.m.

   My conversation with Department of Trasnsportation contracting officer Bob Robel (see the Moblity Technologies, Inc. post immediately below) also yielded some interesting information on standard form LLL, which contractors are supposed to file "for each payment or agreement to make payment to any lobbying entity for influencing or attempting to influence an officer or employee of any agency, a Member of Congress, an officer or employee of Congress, or an employee of a Member of Congress in connection with a covered federal action." (Covered federal action here refers to a federal contract or grant.)

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6. FHWA discouraging FOIA requests from potential contractors?

   By Bill Allison Jul 9, 2007 9:02 p.m.

   Here's a little information on something we started looking into last February:

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7. Smart reforms to deter congressional conflicts

   By Bill Allison Jun 21, 2007 10:15 p.m.

   I wish I'd notice this earlier: Taxpayers for Common Sense and the National Law and Policy Center sent a joint letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Minority Leader John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell calling for better personal financial disclosure.

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8. OGE working toward electronic filing of financial disclosure forms

   By Bill Allison Jun 16, 2007 3:14 p.m.

   Members of Congress aren't the only ones to file publicly available personal financial disclosure forms; so do presidents, cabinet secretaries, high ranking officials, and others throughout the upper echelons of our government. Just as with the legislative branch, the public must be afforded the opportunity to determine whether administration officials have potential conflicts of interest.

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9. Congressional financial disclosure forms now online

   By Bill Allison Jun 14, 2007 8:44 p.m.

   Today is the day that members of Congress must make their personal financial disclosure forms public. The Center for Responsive Politics has them up here. PoliticalMoneyLine, a division of Congressional Quarterly, has them online, in big, state-by-state PDFs. The House is here, the Senate here.

10. Tracking another mystery PAC

    By Bill Allison Jun 11, 2007 2:22 a.m.

    I kind of like digging into these -- some people do crossword puzzles, I like figuring out which member goes with which leadership PAC. BillPAC, on page three of its March 13, 2006 amended Statement of Organization, provides the following address for its treasurer, Jeff Reeder: 10970 McFarland Rd., Mercersburg, PA 17236. I ran the address through the U.S. Postal Service's 9-digit zip generator -- 17236-9642 -- and plugged that into Project Vote Smart's 9 digit zip search. The address is in Rep. Bill Shuster's district.

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11. Free PACER docket search from Justia

    By Bill Allison Jun 6, 2007 4:19 p.m.

    I stumbled across this site by accident, but I'm glad I did -- a free search that allows you to look up federal court cases without logging into the Pacer system. It seems to be a little more user friendly than the U.S. Party Case Index. To get the actual court documents, however, you'll still need a PACER account and will still have to pay eight cents a page to view filings...

12. OMB will track phonemarks, but last-minute-marks present more of a problem

    By Bill Allison Jun 4, 2007 10:39 p.m.

    Christin T. Baker, the associate director for communications in the Office of Management and Budget, voicemails and emails that OMB already tracks "nontraditional sorts of ways of getting projects funded" in its database, something they'll continue to do in 2008. Here's one example from 2005, gotten by downloading the CSV data from the site into an excel spreadsheet, sorting on the field called "Citation_Source" and looking for the ones that aren't bills or conference reports.

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13. Rep. Russ Carnahan tied to Arch Leadership PAC

    By Bill Allison Jun 4, 2007 2:38 p.m.

    Following up on this post, I spoke to Vince Currao, a political consultant for both Rep. Russ Carnahan and the Arch Leadership PAC. Currao said that Carnahan is the honorary chair of Arch Leadership PAC and that the Missouri lawmaker "raises money for" it.

14. Looking into Arch Leadership PAC

    By Bill Allison Jun 3, 2007 3:17 p.m.

    Just for fun, I thought I'd take ten minutes and see if I can track down another mystery PAC for our friends at the Center for Responsive Politics--this time the Arch Leadership PAC. FEC filings list the PAC's address as 906 Olive St., Suite 1212, St. Louis, MO 63101. Googling it, I got a lot of links--the one that caught my eye was this campaign finance report from the Missouri Ethics Commission showing that Tom Carnahan, treasurer of a state-registered campaign committee for Robin Carnahan, lists that address. Googling Tom and Robin Carnahan, one comes across this bio of former Sen. Jean Carhahan:

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Investigations by Sunlight Foundation reporter Bill Allison