There’s almost a Lewis Carroll-like quality to the following passage in the Federal Register, (54 FR 52307-8, for those keeping score at home), in which the Office of Management and Budget published its interim rule for complying with the Byrd amendment, which barred government contractors and grantees from using federal funds to lobby (it became […]

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on the letter Senator McCain wrote to the Secretary of the Air Force: Here’s a copy of it, from the Project on Government Oversight web site. I’m trying to get Air Force’s reply to this as well, which again the Senator’s office refused to release.

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A couple of days ago I followed up with DOD about why they denied our FOIA for correspondence logs earlier. Their denial was based on the fact that the records were too large and they wanted us to narrow our request. On talking to them I figured that DOD officials had interpreted our FOIA to […]

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Via the excellent IEC Journal comes this Government Executive story detailing the indictment of a former Social Security Administration worker who allegedly was paid $20 for each “identity” she pilfered, including Social Security numbers and other information sufficient to get credit cards.
Anu’s story last Friday revealed an inadvertent release of personal information; it’s a little […]

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A few minutes after I posted the story about the USDA publishing Social Security numbers on their Web site, I received a call from Marc Kesselman, USDA’s General Counsel. He “appealed to my senses” and said that by publishing the story, we were compromising confidential and sensitive information that could be misused.
He did not explicitly say […]

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For almost a decade, some divisions of the Department of Agriculture published the Social Security numbers of individuals who receive federal aid in a publicly available online database of government grants. The Farm Service Agency and at least one other agency within Agriculture included the nine digit numbers as part of the tracking number assigned […]

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Today, we received a reply to our correspondence logs FOIA from USAID as an excel spreadsheet. This is only the second time we have gotten a reply in a format that can be uploaded and used to fulfill our goal of making the logs searchable using keywords. Here are the two replies we have received […]

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Here’s an idea that occurred to me after reading John Stanton’s piece today in Roll Call that notes the disclosure requirements for members of Congress who might personally profit from earmarks–part of the reforms adopted by the House and the Senate–don’t apply to congressional aides. There’s a passage in the article about a few members […]

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For the past couple of hours I have been trying to get my hands on a letter that Senator McCain wrote to Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne on April 4 about requesting documents related to the Combat Search and Rescue helicopter program.
According to a Reuters report, Senator McCain has questioned an Air Force decision […]

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Three paragraphs jumped out at me from the final chapter of Robert G. Kaiser’s excellent Washington Post series, Citizen K Street:
Cassidy helped change Washington by shaping the culture of congressional earmarks that became so important in the last dozen years. Earmarks directly transfer the government’s money to particular institutions and interests. He and his original […]

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