I’m going through the version of the bill N.Z. posted, and came across this language on page 68:
(2) that the information in clause (1) has been available on a publicly accessible congressional website in a searchable format at least 48 hours before such vote.
Clause 1 requires all congressionally directed spending in bills — earmarks, tax […]

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Why should the Sunlight Labs guys get all the fun? I loaded the subject lines of the correspondence logs referenced immediately below into Many Eyes, which our co-conspirator Josh Ruihley used to create our Earmarks Visualizations. So what words turn up most frequently in the subject lines of letters members write most frequently about […]

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I’m posting, in an Excel spread sheet, the congressional correspondence logs covering the first three months of 2007 that we got a while back in a less than user friendly format from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Here’s a sample of what we got in response to our FOIA — a .tif or […]

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An Alaskan nonprofit foundation that raises money to make “the records and mementos of Sen. [Ted] Stevens’ career in public service” has failed to file registration documents or pay fees since 2004, according to the Alaska Department of Law. In response to a FOIA request to the department for all documents filed by the Ted […]

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Browsing through the 2008 Senate Interior and Environment Appropriations Bill on the Taxpayers for Common Sense site, I noticed that one of the largest amounts ($11 million) was earmarked to the National Rural Water Association – a non-profit organization that provides training and technical assistance and gives out sub-grants to water providers in rural areas. […]

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Citing 31 U.S.C. 1352, the federal statute that bars contractors and grantees to use federal funds to lobby the government, and requires them to disclose any lobbying they’ve done in connection with winning a contract or grant (that’s the elusive SF-LLL we’ve been tracking), Sen. Tom Coburn has written to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates […]

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So I’ve been going through FedBizOpps, looking for solicitation notices that specifically mention the elusive lobbying disclosure SF-LLL, and coming across some interesting bits of federal business. This solicitation from the State Department, for example, suggests why Anu has yet to receive any correspondence logs from the agency:
The Freedom of Information Document Management System (FREEDOMS) […]

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The Center for Investigative Reporting and the Los Angeles Times used some of our correspondence logs to track down letters members of Congress were writing to federal agencies requesting funding for certain projects. Here’s a link to the LA Times story.
CIR’s Will Evans mentions Real Time and posts some of the letters CIR received here.

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My conversation with Department of Trasnsportation contracting officer Bob Robel (see the Moblity Technologies, Inc. post immediately below) also yielded some interesting information on standard form LLL, which contractors are supposed to file “for each payment or agreement to make payment to any lobbying entity for influencing or attempting to influence an officer or employee […]

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Here’s a little information on something we started

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