Glen Charles, who had been a miner in West Virginia for 42 years, was diagnosed as having black lung, for which he received benefits under the Black Lung Act up to the time of his death in August 2005. Under federal law, surviving spouses of miners who die from the disease are eligible to continue […]

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Rep. Henry Waxman’s oversight committee sent out letters today to the Department of Defense, the Department of State and to Blackwater CEO Erik Prince asking for various sets of documents regarding contracts going back to 2003.
Among other issues, the seven-page letter to Erik Prince raises questions about all the no-bid contracts Blackwater has […]

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Nine months before Blackwater USA employees took part in a shootout in which eight Iraqi civilians were killed, a few members of Congress raised concerns about the performance of the private military company that provides security services for the Departments of State and Defense in Iraq. In 2007, five members of Congress sent at least […]

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This article in the Washington Post yesterday on the earmarking process cites letters sent to the Department of Energy written by members of Congress including Rep. Rahm Emanuel in support of projects at the Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago and the Illinois Institute of technology.
We recently received the correspondence logs from […]

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According to this AP article, the Justice Department is maintaining that the White House Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
The argument for this seems to be that the OA is not an “agency” as defined by FOIA. But in the past year, the Office of Administration has processed 65 […]

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We just received few of the letters we had requested from the Department of Defense from the January batch of correspondences. We received only a partial response to the FOIA where we had selected specific letters from the correspondence logs.
The other letters will come in if we manage to convince DoD that we are […]

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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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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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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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