Jeffrey Birnbaum, writing in the Washington Post, reports lobbyists wrote key portions of the mortgage bailout bill:
Credit Suisse, a large investment bank heavily invested in mortgage-backed securities, proposed allowing hundreds of thousands of homeowners to refinance their mortgages with lower-cost government-insured loans, relieving financial institutions of the troubled debt.
After the bank proposed this to Congress […]

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Last week, some members of Congress called for an immediate suspension of a drug testing program administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs after ABC News and the Washington Times reported that one of the side effects a specific drug that helps kick the smoking habit could possibly be suicide.
The drug Chantix, manufactured by […]

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The Senate Office of Public Records database shows that one of the outside lobbying firms employed by Countrywide is Eris Group, formerly known as Bartlett, Bendall & Kadesh, LLC. Among the firm’s lobbyists, (and they’re currently lobbying on subprime mortgage bailout legislation) is Jennifer Bendall. The firm’s Web site tells us that…
Bendall’s Washington career […]

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Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s days raising money for his political campaigns might come in handy when he sits down with the clients of his new employer, law and lobbying firm Dickstein Shapiro LLP.
The firm has a long list of clients in the health care sector — an industry that provided generous support for […]

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Okay, I’m a total geek — looking up lobbying records at 15 minutes to midnight on New Year’s Eve. (The nine-year-old made it to about 11:15 this year, then conked out…) But I hope I’m the first to report that the Senate Office of Public Records has introduced a greatly enhanced search interface for lobbying […]

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DLA Piper, the most generous backer of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, lobbies for defense giant Lockheed Martin on environmental issues (perchlorate, and this bill in particular), for First Kuwaiti
General Trading & Contracting Co. (which has been accused of paying kickbacks to a Kellogg Brown & Root manager), and a private citizen who, DLA Piper […]

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Actually, nothing to report. I called DIA, and they’re looking into the anomaly.
Meanwhile, one of the other agencies mentioned in that Secrecy News reported will withhold its contracts apparently hasn’t been reporting any; it does appear that there’s a $6.9 million anomaly for the Department of Defense Counterintelligence Field Activity…

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Our friends at CREW are providing a fantastic resource for reporters, bloggers, citizens and government document junkies–GovernmentDocs.org: An online compendium of scanned images of documents acquired from government agencies through the Freedom of Information Act by (right now) a handful of nonprofit groups (including the correspondence logs collected through Real Time’s FOIA project). Documents that […]

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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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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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