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.
The whole letter is worth reading — […]

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Here’s the correspondence logs we received from the Department of Defense recently. We received about 100 pages of documents in PDF format that we converted to text.

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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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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.

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By Larry Makinson and Anupama Narayanswamy
The nation’s top defense contractors were also the biggest beneficiaries of congressional earmarks in 2005, an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation has found. Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics led the pack. Those four corporations collected a combined $1.09 billion in earmark awards. Overall, the top 20 corporate […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Two letters members of Congress wrote to the Defense Contract Audit Agency reveal two cases of employees of government contractors who alleged wrongdoing by their companies.
We learned about the letters from our Freedom of Information request to the agency for congressional correspondence logs. We have received DCAA’s responses to both members of Congress, but not […]

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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.

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