FARA RECORDS MAY GO ONLINE‚Ķ at least that‚Äôs what FARA employees told me today. I was at the FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act) offices at the Department of Justice this afternoon browsing around to find more about a couple of organizations I came across in the earmarks database. Unfortunately, FARA’s searchable database was not functioning [...]

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CONTINUING WITH SOME OTHER EARMARKS in the OMB database, the Department of Justice gave $740,000 to Mistral Security Inc, for continuing a drug identification program. This grant was to expand an aerosol drug detection technology that is already being tested in schools as a pilot run. The aerosol sprays can be used to detect the [...]

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After fooling around with it for the last half-day or so, I feel confident I can pronounce the new OMB earmark database a great tool and a success for OMB, and I can’t wait for the updates going forward.
One thing I wanted to try was to see if one can match companies that get earmarks [...]

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I’M TOO EASILY DISTRACTED by eamarks. Since the Office of Management and Budget posted its earmark database, I’ve found it hard to concentrate on the 1990 portion of the SF-LLL timeline (which is mostly written but still needs a lot of links). Instead, I keep looking up things like this:
Virginia Equine Center Foundation / Virginia [...]

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The timeline for form SF-LLL that I foolishly promised the other day has grown to an alarming length. I’m posting the pre-SF-LLL history now–the events that led Congress to pass and the President to sign a bill requiring those seeking federal contracts or grants to file a disclosure form whenever they pay a lobbyist ito [...]

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Today, I’m pulling together a timeline — a sort of biography of form SF-LLL that also suggests a number of questions. In the meantime, through the magic of Nexis, thought I’d pass along this bit from a Sept. 18, 1989, Washington Post editorial on the passage of the Byrd Amendment, the rule that required the [...]

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