Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group

Sunlight puts House office disbursements in database form

Six months after promising to do so, the House on Monday, Nov. 30, published online its quarterly log of expenditures by members' offices. Until now, reporters and citizens who wondered how a congressman spent the taxpayer money allocated for operationslargely mundane expenditures on payroll and office supplies, but occasional spending on items such as luxury carshad to peruse tattered binders in a dingy basement or order a copy from the Government Printing Office.

Washington Watch Releases Earmark Request Entry Form

For the first time in 2009, members of Congress had to release their earmark requests to the public. As we've documented before, this information is scattered over 535 Web sites in all kinds of different formats. Jim Harper and Washington Watch have now released a tool that allows volunteers to capture that earmark information for posterity, centralize it in a single location, and allow for all kinds of additional analysis and investigation. And, if you participate, you can win a Kindle!

An Army of pharma trips?

The Center for Public Integrity has analyzed 22,000 Pentagon travel disclosures -- filed when an outside party pays for a trip taken by Department of Defense personnel. The finding that jumped out at both Anu and me:

Whither stimulus contracts?

The Washington Post's Kimberly Kindy reports that the Dept. of Energy is awarding stimulus funds to companies specializing in nuclear clean-ups that have a mixed track record:

Where to find stimulus contracts

A company that offers outsourcing services to federal and state governments got a a contract award for $2.8 million in funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act -- the stimulus -- to set up call centers for the FCC's digital transition effort; they advertised for jobs paying $16.38 an hour in Buffalo, N.Y. The Dept. of Health and Human Services spent $326,000 in stimulus funds to purchase and install 98 workstations (and an option to store them until needed at a cost of $35 per pallet); a Midland, MI-based company, Space, Inc., got the sale. And the General Services Administration used stimulus funds to hire a pair of Northern Virginia contractors to help oversee the hiring of contractors bidding for both stimulus and non-stimulus work.

Cram down look ups, cont. cont....

For more detail on what this is, see here. While this is still partially that, it's also turning into something else. As I noted, this is raw research, not a finished product--results to come. One thing I'm finding is that looking closely at slices of data from Party Time leads in all kinds of directions...

Cram down look ups, cont.

More research (see here for details on what this research is. I'm trying to see if there was a flurry of fundraising around the vote on the Durbin amendment to the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act of 2009.

Tracking swine flu...

...with Google maps.

Bailout Watch debuts from Open the Government

File this one under useful tools -- our friends at Open the Government have launched Bailout Watch, a compendium of resources on TARP, Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and other places. I like the Expert Exchange page.

Pro Publica tracks the bailout

Maybe it has something to do with today being tax day -- Pro Publica launches a very cool Eye on the Bailout

Better links to earmark requests...

...available here.

$4.5 billion-dollar tariff break back

Pro Publica posts executive branch financial disclosures

Available here, thanks to our friends at Pro Publica. A very handy tool. The Office of Government Ethics should really post these online, but until they do, Pro Publica is your best source.

Download TCS's earmark request spreadsheet

Our friends at Taxpayers for Common Sense announce that they have a downloadable spreadsheet with what looks to me to be the definitive list of links to earmark request disclosures from House members. The Hill gives some good examples of how hard it is to find the disclosures.