Robert Shea is a Republican insider with a head for business and a yen for federal program performance standards. Gary Bass is a government watchdog with a mean bite who wants openness and knows how to get it.
Official antagonists, political opposites, brought together by a wild, crazy idea: federal budget transparency. Online and searchable. Free for the asking.
Today, the White House budget office officially launches USASpending.gov, a Web site that shows taxpayers where their dollars go and which legislators, contractors and regions get the most.
The site was created by Shea, associate director of the Office of Management and Budget. It was modeled on a site pioneered by Bass, director of OMB Watch, one of the budget office’s harshest nonprofit critics.

We are really excited to be releasing our latest widget today. Our new “Congress, I’m Watching” widget lets you announce which bills in Congress you support or oppose, while also sharing links to clear, up-to-date information that encourages others to get involved the legislation themselves.
Any blog, membership group, or other organization can customize the “Congress, I’m Watching” widget to tell their readers — and Congress — which bills they want to see passed and which bills they don’t. As with all our widgets, it’s free, customizable to fit the look of your site, easy to integrate (just copy/paste a small chunk of html into your site), and can be set up in a manner of minutes.

Public Citizen today unveiled a Web site that provides an up-to-date listing of the 2008 presidential hopefuls’ “bundlers,” the super-fundraisers who are powering the billion-dollar race for the White House. The revitalized site, an expansion of Public Citizen’s similar effort during the 2004 campaign and the only such clearinghouse for the 2008 campaign, is at www.WhiteHouseForSale.org.
The site identifies nearly 1,900 individuals who are funneling money from other donors to the candidates. Of these, more than 230 were bundlers for President George W. Bush in at least one of his presidential campaigns, or for either Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) or former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean in 2004.

The Capitolist is an anonymous, uncensored message board for congressional staff members. Contributors are welcome to express their views and opinions on congressional affairs, politics or any other subject of interest. We encourage contributors to discuss their first-hand experiences with lawmakers and to report on the events of the day.

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 recipients of 2005 earmarks were all defense contractors.
The analysis was based on the database of earmarks from 2005 produced, and posted online, by the federal government’s Office of Management and Budget. OMB collected the data from the agencies responsible for dispensing the money. The database does not include the names of members of Congress who asked for specific earmarks to be inserted onto the books, since members were not required to disclose this information.
The Sunlight Foundation standardized the data, linking subsidiaries to parents.

With the 2008 presidential race already on the fast track, the Federal Election Commission has developed an online mapping application that will make it easier for the public to track where — literally — presidential candidates are getting their money.
The application, scheduled to debut June 12 on the FEC Web site, will enable users to view donations by geographic area. The interface will let users narrow down their geographical search to three digits of a ZIP code and will feature a database with the names of the companies contributors work for and the dates of their donations.

Those enterprising members of the Tracy City Council have come up with a strategy to hide from public view all their written communications about government business. With a bit of legal legerdemain, they claim to be able to evade state open-government laws, transforming their communications from public records into private correspondence.
How can they do that? Simple, according to their legal pleadings in a lawsuit in San Joaquin County Superior Court: When sending or receiving email, as long as the council members use their own computer (rather than a city-owned computer), and as long as they use their own email account (rather than an account set up by the city), their messages are not subject to the Public Records Act, no matter what the emails say or to whom they’re sent.
The Public Records Act defines a public record as “any writing containing information relating to the conduct of the public’s business prepared, owned, used, or retained by any state or local agency . . .” (emphasis added.) Email that is not composed on a Tracy computer or transmitted via a Tracy email account or server is not “prepared, owned, used or retained” by the city of Tracy, argue the council members.

The first step to solving a problem is recognizing that you have one.
That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway, to avoid becoming depressed by Maplight.org.
It’s a new Web site with a very simple mission: to correlate lawmakers’ voting records with the money they’ve accepted from special-interest groups.
All of this is public information. All of it has been available for decades. Other sites, including OpenSecrets.org, expose who’s giving how much to whom. But nobody has ever revealed the relationship between money given and votes cast to quite such a startling effect.

To my knowledge, this is the first and largest collective effort by volunteers to assimilate open source data and convert it into a public, referenced, research tool. . .
. . . This database includes all of the 2086 unique emails included in the HJC [House Judiciary Committee]-released documents from the DOJ. It is fully searchable and referenced, so you can easily see the email “with your own eyes”. Also included is referenced biographical information for many of the involved personnel. Finally, as a second functionality, we also include a “Text Search” tool that enables search of all of the text of all of the PDF documents.

Also online is a usable, electronic version of the immigration reform bill from theTruth Laid Bear.

Late Friday night, an electronic version of the “immigration reform” bill was finally published, and quickly found its way into the hands of KLo at the Corner. From there, it has spread all over the net, of course.
But the published version is a big, clunky PDF file (which, if you like, you can download here.) Good if you plan on printing out all 326 pages of it, not so good if you are a blogger who wants to comment on a particular section and show your readers exactly what you’re talking about.
So I’ve taken the copy published by NRO and parsed it into a format that allows for easy browsing online. . .
. . . If those who forged this “compromise” have their way, this bill will be voted on as early as Tuesday. That’s a crazily short amount of time for Senators — let alone the American public — to review, understand, and have a voice on the substance of such a complex bill.
My hope, however, is that by presenting the bill in this form, I will help make the bill more accessible to all, and provide a central spot where commentary, criticism, and suggested improvements can be assembled. Who knows — maybe our erstwhile leaders on Capitol Hill will take notice, and take some of our comments to heart.

The League of Women Voters (LWV) is pleased to announce the release of Observing Your Government In Action: Protecting your Right to Know. This comprehensive resource guide, part of the League’s Citizen Transparency Initiative, provides useful best practices and tips for observing government activities and promoting transparency.