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Project updates on Recovery.gov lack clarity
By Claritza Jiménez Aug 9, 2010 5:06 p.m.A Texas company that received $14,675 in economic stimulus money submitted a mandatory progress report to the federal government using just two words: “door mats.” A California solar energy company went to the other extreme, using technical language that gave little insight of what it did with a half-million dollars in taxpayer money.
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U.S. Energy, Mining Companies Must Disclose Government Payments
By Julie Vorman Jul 2, 2010 12:03 p.m.U.S. energy companies will soon have to reveal how much they pay foreign governments for rights to produce crude oil, natural gas and minerals around the world.
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One year later, Data.gov bigger but needs to get better
By Gabriel Debenedetti Jun 30, 2010 6:33 p.m.One year ago, the U.S. government launched Data.gov, a central plank in its Open Government initiative to make it easier for the public to find and use official datasets. The site has grown from an initial 47 databases to more than 272,000, and attracted nearly 100 million hits. It inspired eight American cities – including San Francisco and New York City – eight states, and six other nations to launch similar sites of their own. By most metrics, the project has been a success.
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Free repository offers copies of PACER federal court records
By Traver Riggins Jun 30, 2010 6:21 p.m.Want to see the federal indictment of a mortgage fraudster? You got it. Need the docket for a U.S. appeals court case? It’s yours. All with the click of a mouse — and your 16-digit credit card number.
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Farm credit regulator won't disclose enforcement actions against banks
By Joe Eaton Jun 16, 2010 12:39 p.m.As Congress negotiates a final version of financial reform, one group of lenders has already won a blanket carve out from increased bank regulation — the more than 90 banks and associations of the Farm Credit System, a government-sponsored enterprise that dates back to 1916. The system, which has $30.8 billion in capital, includes about 90 agricultural credit associations that are cooperatively owned, plus five wholesale lending banks.
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Quest for EPA documents reveal deliberate misclassification by agency staff
By Naseem Miller Jun 16, 2010 11:21 a.m.For the past four years, as executive director of Citizen Action New Mexico, Dave McCoy has been hounding the local and federal government for documents.
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Coast guard database makes oil spill penalties nearly impossible to track
By Ariel Wittenberg Jun 7, 2010 1:39 p.m.The U.S. government has investigated potentially thousands of BP leaks, spills and other incidents but the information is stored in a Coast Guard database that keeps key details such as investigative findings and penalties out of the public’s reach.
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Critics say federal student privacy law misused by colleges
By Claritza Jiménez Jun 1, 2010 4:13 p.m.Reports of NCAA football violations, lists of who gets free tickets to big games, and disciplinary records of students found responsible for sexual assault are among the records that U.S. colleges and universities have refused to release, citing a federal student privacy law. Last month, a Wyoming community college even went to court to stop a local newspaper from publishing a leaked internal report about a trip the college president took to Costa Rica.
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CPI's Jim Morris talks about BP's OSHA violations
By Bill Allison May 28, 2010 4:42 p.m.Our colleague Jim Morris, who runs Data Mine, our joint project with the Center for Public Integrity, talked about his story on BP's pattern of OSHA violations at its refineries on ABC yesterday. Jim appears at 10:10 in the clip; if the player below doesn't work it's available here.
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BP blamed in 8,000 spill reports, federal data shows
By Bill Allison May 27, 2010 1:49 p.m.British Petroleum and its subsidiaries have been the subject of roughly 8,000 reported incidents of spills, emissions and leaks of oil, chemicals and gases into the environment, according to a government database. (download them here).
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USDA pulls plug on some farm subsidy data
By Claritza Jiménez May 24, 2010 3:20 p.m.Identifying some individuals who receive generous federal crop subsidies without going anywhere near a farm has gotten trickier. The Department of Agriculture, which paid $15.4 billion in 2009 subsidies, is no longer centralizing the data that made it easier to pinpoint individuals who receive farm payments through their affiliation in farming corporations, co-ops and other types of business partnerships.
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Lobbying data is public but not reliably searchable
By Josh Israel May 14, 2010 11:45 a.m.The 1995 Lobbying Disclosure Act, requires all lobbyists to file reports with the Clerk of the House of Representatives and Secretary of the Senate and that those two offices “maximize public access” to the documents through “computerized systems.” But the searchable database of every filing by registered federal lobbyists, made available through the Senate’s Office of Public Records, has a major problem: its search engine doesn’t work correctly.
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More transparency sought from White House’s OMB in regulation reviews
By Jim Morris May 6, 2010 11:12 a.m.Under President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, the White House Office of Management and Budget became known as the place where promising new regulations died behind closed doors. So opaque was the OMB review process that a research and advocacy group called OMB Watch materialized in 1983 to “lift the veil of secrecy.”
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Grab a shovel and help Data Mine dig
By Bill Allison Apr 30, 2010 2:16 p.m.From my colleagues at the Center for Public Integrity:
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