Planet oGosh! Open Government Open Source Hacking

The latest TV ad by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the gun control group funded by Mayor Mike Bloomberg, hit the airwaves in Nevada this week, ahead of a close vote Wednesday on a background check bill that passed the state Senate.

The bill would close the loophole that allows private sales to be made without checking the criminal background of the purchaser. It also bans people deemed mentally ill and likely to harm someone from possessing a gun. The bill can be followed on Scout, Sunlight's tool for tracking the progress of state and federal legislation.

The bill passed the Democrat-controlled state Senate by one vote, along party lines. It still requires approval by the Democratic-controlled Assembly and Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval, who said he has not decided whether he will back the bill or not.

The ads ran Tuesday and Wednesday on at least two channels -- the Las Vegas FOX and CBS affiliates. The group paid a total of $2,600 to run four 30-second ads during the evening news on the channels, according to Political Ad Sleuth, Sunlight's tool for tracking political ad purchases. The new ad appeared on Ad Hawk, Sunlight's tool for tracking TV ads.

Legislation that would require virtually all agency reports to Congress be available online in one central location advanced out of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee yesterday on a voice vote. The Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act, originally sponsored by Rep. Mike Quigley and enjoying the bipartisan support of Committee Chairman Darrell Issa and ranking member Elijah Cummings, will need the sign-off of the Committee on House Administration before it can get a vote on the House floor. In March, 26 organizations wrote to the Oversight Committee to express their support for ACMRA.

The legislation, which garnered the approval of both committees last Congress but did not receive a vote last Congress before time ran out last session, would make agency reports to Congress more transparent. It directs agencies to give the Government Printing Office the reports they file with Congress (with appropriate redactions), and for GPO to make those reports available online in open formats for bulk download after a short time. GPO has expressed support for taking on this role. The legislation was tweaked slightly so that the repository will not include mention of reports whose very existence is classified.

Companion legislation was introduced last Congress by Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Joseph Lieberman and ranking member Susan Collins as well as committee member Tom Coburn. It is hoped that current HSGAC Chairman Tom Carper and ranking member Tom Coburn, along with other senators, will re-introduce legislation in the Senate. Earlier this year, Senator Coburn attempted to attach a version of ACMRA as an amendment to the budget resolution.

The common-sense measure will make it easier for members of Congress, their staff, federal agencies, and the public to gain access to these reports that help reveal how the government functions.

The amended legislation is available here.

House bill 1211 amends the Freedom of Information Act with the intended purpose being to provide for greater public access to information. The bill would require federal agencies to make public information disclosed under FOIA available in an electronic, publicly accessible format and require the OMB to ensure the existence and operation of a single, free website for submitting requests for records and receiving automated information about the status of a FOIA request.

• H. R. 1211 To amend section 552 of title 5, United States Code (commonly known as the Freedom of Information Act), to provide for greater public access to information, and for other purposes., [pdf] Mr. ISSA (for himself and Mr. CUMMINGS), 113TH Congress 1st session, March 15, 2013.

Eight groups, including the Sunlight Foundation, sent letters to the House and Senate, urging Members of Congress to adopt legislation closing down the loophole that allows so-called social welfare organizations to engage in political activities. The murky law was at the root of the controversies surrounding the IRS’s improper targeting of certain groups’ applications for 501(c)(4) status.

At congressional hearings this week, many members of the Senate Finance Committee and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee raised the issue of fixing the broken IRS rules that allow social welfare organizations to engage in substantial electioneering activities. Many noted that engaging in campaign activities is explicitly contrary to the law that says such organizations must engage “exclusively” in social welfare activities. Campaign activities are not “social welfare” activities.

If it results in a clarification of the law, the IRS debacle will have a silver lining. But there is still a great deal of resistance to efforts that would ensure that groups that engage in political activities disclose their donors. Chairman Issa of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee rejected the idea that it was appropriate for his committee to address the question of any possible fixes—begging the question: what happened to the “reform” part of his committee? And in the Washington Post today, Senator Mitch McConnell uses the IRS case as a twisted justification to endorse dark money in our elections. His sanctimonious criticism of transparency measures ignores Supreme Court precedent as well as decades of support (including his own) for disclosure as a narrowly tailored method to address political corruption.

(It’s also remarkably hypocritical that McConnell would use the 1958 Supreme Court decision in Alabama v. NAACP to justify his position. That case prohibited government mandated disclosure of membership lists--not campaign finance records--when, on balance, threats to the group’s first amendment rights were thought to outweigh the public’s interest in disclosure. McConnell was less than concerned about the NAACP precedent when, under his direction, he repeatedly blocked an electronic filing bill in the Senate by insisting on an amendment that would require membership organizations disclose their members’ names any time a group filed an ethics complaint against a sitting senator. Apparently McConnell has his own balancing test, heavily weighted towards his own interest as opposed to the public interest.)

Narrow changes to tax law would ensure that groups intending to impact our elections disclose their donors, while fully protecting the anonymous speech of organizations that are legitimately engaged in social welfare activities. Clarifying the laws would also decrease the likelihood of future instances of improper targeting by the IRS.

The influential Committee on House Administration released a letter yesterday that endorsed the principle that "the documents of our democracy should be available to all Americans electronically, in perpetuity, and for free." The letter, signed by every member of the committee, rejected a recommendation made in a flawed report issued by the National Academy of Public Administration, which had called for the Government Printing Office to consider charging "end uses" for online access to government documents made available through the online portal FDsys.

The Committee on House Administration oversees GPO, and the letter is a clear signal as to how GPO should proceed. The letter is also another example of the Committee's deepening emphasis on making the government transparent and accessible.

The NAPA report was requested by Congress as part of a long-range operational review of GPO. Unfortunately, despite dozens of interviews and a ten-month study, NAPA failed to contact key "end-users" who are responsible for republishing and widely disseminating public information, such as GovTrack.us, WashingtonWatch.com, the Sunlight Foundation, the Center for Effective Government, the Internet Archive, Public.Resource.Org, and the Legal Information Institute. These organizations are leaders in disseminating government-held information online to the public at no cost, and NAPA would have done well to learn from their expertise and see whether it could be applied to GPO.

Instead, NAPA's report misstated and omitted parts of the history regarding imposing fees on public access to electronic information. It omitted a discussion of how third parties, like the non-profits identified above, further GPO's mission to "produce, protect, preserve, and distribute documents of our democracy." It failed to examine how charging end users for electronic access would destroy the ability of non-profit organizations to obtain and re-transmit the information, thereby placing greater burdens on GPO to fill the gap and weakening public access to crucial information.

We applaud the Committee on House Administration's continued support for public access to governmental information. While it is unknown whether the letter has broader applicability to data being sold by GPO outside of FDsys, such as that listed here, it is important that information on FDsys remain available to the public at no cost, a position affirmed by the Committee.

Zoning impacts the most physical elements of communities and impacts people's daily lives. When it comes to being transparent about the zoning process and its outcomes, many local governments are posting information -- one way or another -- on their websites. It's a varied landscape, but it is worth assessing to see where there might be room for improvement.

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ZONING

It's not surprising, in a way, that so many local governments choose to proactively release various kinds of information related to zoning. Zoning regulations can impact everything from what can be built and where it can be built to how it can be built and more. How a lot is zoned doesn't just determine whether that land can be used for commercial or residential purposes (or something else entirely) -- it can also determine the very structure of buildings down to details like height and square footage. Zoning and planning ordinances can even impact how close certain kinds of buildings may be to one another -- schools and liquor stores are one example of a spatial relationship that is sometimes regulated. Zoning has an impact on many of the most concrete aspects of a municipality, and this makes it an issue that's of interest to residents, business owners, developers, and many other groups. This means zoning can also be a prime target for people who want to game the system to obtain influence over this important aspect of cities.

The zoning process generally consists of elected or appointed officials making decisions about how land can be used and the specifications of structures. It has a direct impact on the shape communities take. The zoning process, and what it controls, however, varies from place to place. That means it's important for each municipality to be clear about what its process is so policymakers, residents, and businesses alike can all understand this powerful issue. For this look into the landscape of zoning data, we're including information most directly related to the process and its outcomes. We're not including other data that might be tied to land parcels, like data about tax breaks or special tax zones.

Not all zoning data is created equal, of course. Some cities simply release a list of the ordinances related to zoning, others release PDF maps of how land parcels are zoned, and some have interactive maps with layers of information. To have open zoning data, a municipality should have structured data available online that makes it easy for people to analyze and reuse -- in addition to information that enables people to understand the zoning process.

The phrase "open data" is often used without an explanation of how something qualifies as fitting that definition. For zoning data to be open, it should be more than "open" in the sense that it gives people the license and permission to reuse it. It should also be structured in such a way that it is machine-readable, enabling easy reuse of the data by those who want to add context or put it into an application. Formats that would qualify as open and structured include JSON, CSV, and XML for databases, as well as formats that can carry zoning data in particular across various kinds of geographic information system (GIS) software, like shapefiles.

This isn't to discount static files like PDFs entirely as something that can be helpful to post online. PDFs are primarily designed to preserve document structure across platforms and to be readable by humans. They might be useful, for example, for printing out maps of current zoning for a neighborhood and comparing it to maps of proposed zoning changes -- something that could be handed out at a neighborhood meeting or zoning commission meeting. However, if you want zoning information to be consumable by mobile, web or desktop applications, using PDFs is less than desirable.

COVERING THE BASICS  

While maps might be the first kind of zoning data that comes to mind, maps aren't the only kind of information that matter when it comes to being open about zoning. Maps may provide an end-user experience, but they don't shine a light on how things got to be the way they are. Zoning maps don't usually provide answers to questions like: What is the zoning process for a specific municipality, since it can vary from city to city? What are the stipulations for how something is zoned in that city, and how can it be changed? What privileges or restrictions are handed out through the zoning process? Who oversees the zoning process? Where can people go to express support for, or concerns about, zoning changes?

Some cities proactively share information online that answers many of these process questions about their zoning. Arvada, CO, has a portal for its planning and zoning information that includes information about who oversees these processes, the current codes regulating the processes, and details about fees and applications, all in addition to an array of maps about zoning, planning, and land use. Madison, WI, has detailed guides about its zoning processes available from one page, too. Fort Worth, TX, has a single page dedicated to explicitly answering specific questions about zoning basics and linking to further resources.

Not all cities provide this basic layer of insight into how zoning happens, however. Some cities just post ordinances and some information about zoning commission meetings but don't add much more context, leaving questions about important details like permit processes. In other cities, all of the process questions are answered online, but they're not all grouped together in a way that's easy to find or navigate.

THE NEXT STEPS   

Answering the procedural questions related to zoning and planning provides an important layer of transparency. More layers of transparency come into the picture when cities also release maps that visualize how zoning works. Zoning maps range from the simple and static to the complex and interactive.

The most simple and static zoning maps often come in the form of PDF files or other image files, like JPG. Bethlehem, PA, and Chandler, AZ, for example, make their current zoning maps available as downloadable PDFs.

While it's better to have PDFs than nothing at all, taking the next step and releasing more interactive zoning data interfaces enables analysis in a way that's often not possible with static image files. Some cities, like Alexandria, VA, provide both static maps in PDF formats and maps with layered information. Alexandria's GIS maps provide information in four layers: buildings, streets, metro tracks, and metro stops. Denver, CO, provides an interactive map on their website that allows users to see the zoning of specific parcels across the city, including details about zone districts, codes, and relevant ordinance numbers.

Map portals come with their own set of challenges for users trying to understand just what zoning regulations really mean in practice. Sometimes trying to make the maps able to show all the complex layers of zoning (or trying to make them too simplified) can cloud people's ability to understand what it all means.

OPEN, STRUCTURED DATA FOR DOWNLOADS

Having a map portal doesn't mean a city makes its zoning data available for download, either. Open, structured zoning data is actually available for download in a relatively small number of cities -- and mostly in big cities. Cities that do allow for bulk download of their geospatial data include Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, D.C. We had a hard time finding small cities that allow for bulk downloads of their geospatial data.

Small or rural cities aren't exempt from having complex zoning processes and outcomes that should be made more transparent and could benefit from having bulk download. While bigger or more urban cities might typically have more area to zone or more kinds of zoning types related to residential and commercial purposes, small or rural cities sometimes have other kinds of zones (like agricultural) or their own special complexities. Releasing zoning information is something that's needed across the different sizes and types of municipalities.

Bulk downloads of zoning data are important because they can can make it easier for users to see the two levels of zoning data that should be available: parcel-level data containing property boundaries and zoning statuses as well as zone-level data that groups together parcels with the same zones. Data that is available for download should also include clear metadata that can help reveal trends in the data and assist with organizational, archival, and data quality efforts.

Most cities are far from this level of transparency, however. So what's to be done about zoning data? How can municipalities be open about the zoning process and what current zoning means?

***

Even those groups who work closely with zoning issues are aware of the complexities of this kind of data. The idea of trying to standardize this kind of data has sparked long conversations in the urban planning community about the benefits and challenges of such a move. It's hard to define what would work well across so many different sizes of cities with such different needs and people to serve. How a local government approaches zoning can also be impacted by complex legal and regulatory relationships between states and localities, which is explored as part of this National Association of Counties report.

There are many resources from locally-focused groups exploring how zoning, and the processes that create it, might be made more accessible to the public. We've compiled some in our research.

Defining open zoning data is a complex task. It's worth thinking about because it is a dataset that literally shapes the environment in which people live, work, and play. While there is complexity in zoning data, having better data would empower transparency and accountability in several ways: it would allow policymakers to better understand the impact of their decisions related to zoning, allow people to understand what they are (or are not) allowed to do, and provide accountability on the process itself, to name a few. We'll explore these impacts of opening up zoning data further in an upcoming post.

Thanks to Kaitlin Devine, Steve Spiker, Andrew Salzberg, Lou Huang, Andrew Hill, Juan Pablo-Velez, and many others for contributing information to this post.

Photo of Madison, WI, by Flickr user Ann Althouse. 

Screenshot from City of Denver GIS map. 

 NEWS:

• Conservative members of the House are continuing their ill advised crusade against the Census Bureau, and Stephen Colbert had some things to say about recently introduced legislation that would effect business' ability to plan for the short and long term. (Government Executive)
• Following revelations that the Justice Department obtained a wide range of records about several journalists a bipartisan group of House members is pushing for legislation that would require federal entities to meet certain conditions before taking personal information from a journalist. (POLITICO)
• The Australian government admitted last week that they unintentionally censored more than 1,200 websites while trying to take one allegedly fraudulent site offline. Australia requires ISPs to block sites suspected of illegal activity if asked by the government. (Tech President)
• Remember Buck McKeon (R-CA), the Armed Services Committee chairman whose wife's run for California state assembly was bankrolled by defense contractors? His family is back and trying to use his power for their financial gain. Golden Oak Consulting, run by three of McKeon's relatives, is lobbying for a couple of companies with armed services interests. (Roll Call)
• As immigration reform legislation gains steam in Congress lobbyists are picking up their pace. The Chamber of Commerce, labor groups, and Silicon Valley are making major headlines and a host of other groups are staying under the radar but lobbying hard nonetheless. (The Hill)
• Prosecutors are planning to seek a retrial against five former officials in Bell, California who are accused of rampant corruption. A judge declared a mistrial in March after jurors failed to come to consensus on several counts. (AP/Yahoo)
• The DATA Act was reintroduced in the House and Senate last week. The legislation, which has been slightly simplified from the version that failed to pass through the 112th Congress, was passed out of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform yesterday. (Federal Computer Week, POGO)

BILLS:

• S.994. A bill to expand the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 to increase accountability and transparency in Federal spending, and for other purposes. (DATA Act)
• H.R. 2061. The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2013. (DATA Act)

Do you want to track transparency news? You can add our feed to your Google Reader, or view it on our Netvibes page. You can  follow the progress of relevant bills on our Scout page.  You can also get 2Day in #OpenGov sent directly to your reader!

It's deja vu all over again as the Senate debates the farm bill this week--just as it did nearly a year ago without any legislation ultimately passing--and one of the hot button issues remains the crop insurance program whose cost has been steadily rising to more than $14 billion in 2012. The Senate bill reforms but also expands the Depression-era program; President Barack Obama has called for additional cuts and several senators are offering amendments to reform it.

On the other side are the agricultural trade associations representing the crop insurers and the farmers that make use of the program. "We write to express our support for strong, meaningful, and affordable crop insurance protection for this nation’s farmers and ranchers, and our opposition to any changes to crop insurance that would discourage producer participation or undermine private sector delivery," wrote a long list of organizations representing crop insurers and the farmers that make use of the program in a March letter to the Senate Agricultural Committee Chairman Debbie Stabenow, D., Mich., and ranking member Thad Cochran, R., Miss.

All together the signatories of the letter reported spending more than $52 million on federal lobbying during the 2012 election cycle, according to a search on Influence Explorer. (See chart below.) These groups range from the American Association of Crop Insurers to the U.S. Sugar Beet Association to the American Bankers Association. While a number of these groups lobby on a long list of issues before Congress, not just crop insurance, the figure nevertheless helps demonstrate the collective clout these groups carry in the nation's capital.

Stabenow, who is seen as a champion of the crop insurance program, herself has collected nearly $90,000 in campaign contributions over the course of her Senate career from PACs and employees associated with the organizations that signed the letter, according to a search on Influence Explorer. "It's a public private-insurance system that is frankly working very well," Stabenow said on the Senate floor this week. She frequently discusses the program, according to Capitol Words.

IRS employees who sent overly detailed questionaires to some groups applying for tax-exempt status in recent years used words like "tea party" and "patriot" to try to filter out those that planned to be heavily involved in politics (a big no-no).

As it turns out, not only was that improper; it's not even very effective. For instance, two liberal groups that have faded in and out of the political scene mysteriously and repeatedly over several years bear names that few would associate, at first glance, with progressive causes: Citizens for Strength and Security, and Patriot Majority.

As we've laid out in our Shadow Money Trail stories over more than a year, tax-exempt 501(c)(4)s are hard to track: They don't have to disclose their donors, they don't have to file tax forms until nearly a year after the close of their fiscal years, and those tax forms require very little detailed information. 

It's far worse when the paper trail is full of dead ends -- by design.

• 2009: A liberal 501(c)(4) group, Americans for Stable Quality Health Care (ASQHC), is established, raising and spending nearly $47 million that year. Included in that is a grant to another 501(c)(4), the Foundation for Patients Rights, which had no other source of income.

• 2010: Foundation for Patients Rights is terminated. It gives what's left of its funds to an arm of ASQHC that is not a 501(c)(4), but a 527 group. And it's not called ASQHC, but Citizens for Strength and Security Action Fund. It's housed at a different address from the first organization, but is run by the same consultants.
  

• 2011: Citizens for Strength and Security, the 501(c)(4), shuts down, having spent more than $50 million on "media buys" in 2009 and 2010.

• Also 2011: The consultants who ran the 527 create a new 501(c)(4): Citizens for Strength and Security Fund (no "Action"). CSSF then starts a super PAC simply called Citizens for Strength and Security.  

To elaborate: In its first year, Citizens for Strength and Security (then ASQHC) raised $47 million with a staff of only two people. The pair -- who appear to have been employees of the consulting firm Hilltop Public Solutions -- worked an average of two hours a week. They drew no salary from the group, but two firms that share an address with Hilltop -- SA Productions and Data  and S&B Public Solutions LLC -- were paid more than $3.4 million for "issue advocacy" and "coalition management" in 2009 and 2010.  

In 2009, the vast majority of ASQHC's spending went toward media production and airtime -- with at least $40 million being paid to the shadowy consulting firm Waterfront Strategies, a unit of the big media firm GMMB, which did work for President Obama's campaign, among others. Waterfront was one of twelve contractors, other than SA Productions, to receive at least $100,000 from ASQHC. Since tax-exempt groups are required to list only their top five contractors, we don't know who else is on the list.  

One of the only non-advocacy expenditures made by ASQHC came in the form of a $1.24 million grant to another "social welfare" organization called Foundation for Patients Rights -- not to be confused with Center to Protect Patient Rights. That grant made up the entirety of FPR?s 2009 revenues, and most of that money ($1.1 million) subsequently went right out the door as spending on ?media.? (FPR never filed any reports with the FEC, but it's possible the organization ran "issue ads" that it didn't have to report to the election agency.)

The Foundation for Patients Rights terminated the following year, after only 15 months in existence -- entirely funded by ASQHC's grants. But before shutting down, it spent more than $800,000 on ?ads and production." It also gave $180,000 to ASQHC's union- and industry-backed 527, not its 501(c)(4) -- the latter being where all the money had come from to begin with. The "Health Care" component of the groups' name was gone by this time, though. The 527 receiving the money was called Citizens for Strength and Security. Grantor and grantee shared the same address -- a UPS store in Washington, D.C.

Thus, money that had begun in a social welfare group's account wound its way through another 501(c)(4) and ended up with an arm of the originating group that had fewer restrictions on its political spending. And in fact, the CSS 527 raised and spent close to $10 million, most of it in 2010. One of its top contributors was the Democratic Governors Association, which gave it $3.3 million that year.

That same year, 2010, Americans for Stable Quality Care changed its name to Citizens for Strength and Security Action Fund and filed its first spending reports with the FEC -- using the M St. address of another group, Patriot Majority USA (about which we'll have more later). It reported $1.4 million in spending to the FEC, but the group told the IRS it spent $9.3 million on ?media buys and production expenses? -- most of it going once again to Waterfront Strategies. (As before, some of it may have been used for issue ads not reported to election authorities, but the IRS doesn't require detailed spending reports.)

Like other (c)(4)s, CSS Action Fund can keep its donors' identities secret. But one surprising benefactor has come to light: the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association.  Its $2.5 million grant -- first reported by the Center for Public Integrity -- made up about 19 percent of CSS Action Funds's total revenues in 2010. 

In 2011, CSS Action Fund shut its doors. But the same year, a 501(c)(4) called Citizens for Strength and Security Fund (minus the "Action") set up shop at the old Foundation for Patients Rights address -- which a recent Frontline documentary revealed to be a UPS store. And its board members are the same as those of the old CSS 527, Lora Haggard and Jeremy Van Ess. The latter is connected with Hilltop. The new (c)(4) went on to fund its own super PAC, called simply Citizens for Strength and Security.

The new (c)(4) group had a new address and a new employer identification number (the IRS assigns a unique EIN to every distinct organization that has employees) but it was still linked to figures close to the old organization. Its mission, too, was the same, except for the deletion of "health care" from the description -- the Affordable Care Act having already been signed into law.  

Neither of the two 501(c)(4) groups in the Citizens for Strength and Security family appear to have sought exempt status from the IRS -- or if they did, they don't appear to have received it, something that would have been highly unusual. Still, more than $60 million flowed through these organizations, much of it going into the political arena.

Patriot Majority

Citizens for Strength and Security is not alone in the process of surreptitious rebirth. Another liberal group, Patriot Majority USA -- some of whose activities OpenSecrets Blog first reported last year -- has been engaged in a similar evolution, employing some of the same tactics that seem designed to mask the doings of the complicated constellation of organizations known as Patriot Majority.

The network includes multiple 527s, a super PAC, and a 501(c)(4). Its 501(c)(4) arm has been killed off twice, each time rising anew.

The first iteration of the group, Patriot Majority for a Stronger America, began as the 501(c)(4) ?Midwest Alliance for Better Government? in 2006. It shut its doors in 2009. Meanwhile, though, another (c)(4), American Alliance for Economic Development, had been formed in 2008 with the same employees -- none of whom drew a salary -- at the same address. (It was also the same address that Citizens for Strength and Security Action Fund, the group discussed above, would use in later FEC filings.)

In 2010, American Alliance changed its name to Patriot Majority USA. Then, as OpenSecrets Blog reported last year, Patriot Majority USA gave large sums of money to two politically active, liberal 501(c)(4)s -- America Votes and VoteVets. Both of these groups then gave large grants to Patriot Majority's own political 527 account. In essence, money appears to have gone from Patriot Majority USA's nondisclosing social welfare account through two other social welfare groups, ultimately making its way into Patriot Majority's 527 account.

In 2011, Patriot Majority USA began using a P.O. box as its mailing address, then filed a termination report. The same year, another 501(c)(4) called Patriot Majority USA -- housed at that very same P.O. box, boasting the same board, and even listing the terminated Patriot Majority USA as an affiliate -- filed its initial tax return. It would be Patriot Majority USA version 3.0 that would end up being the first to report to the FEC making direct, political expenditures -- rather than passing the money first through a super PAC or 527.  

The latest iteration of Patriot Majority USA was very active in the 2012 campaign season, telling the FEC it spent $7 million on ads. Yet despite the fact that it is not supposed to be primarily a political organization, it doesn't appear to have done much since the elections. Its YouTube page has not been updated in the six months since early November, and its homepage -- which, structurally, has been virtually unchanged through the last two versions of the organization -- has been stripped down to bare-bones auto-updating content such as a sidebar of "this day in history" facts. 

IRS Oversight 

No one affiliated with Patriot Majority or Citizens for Strength and Security responded to our repeated requests to explain why they engage in this complicated process of reincarnation and money shuffling. We tried all of the phone numbers listed on the Citizens for Strength & Security documents, and we contacted Hilltop Public Solutions. Nobody would comment. Craig Varoga, who has overseen the Patriot Majority groups, also did not respond to calls or emails. (Varoga is not anxious to be found; year after year, he lists "no@email" in the email address field on IRS forms for his organization.)

Nonprofit experts contacted by OpenSecrets Blog could not think of a practical motivation for their actions. "It?s hard to tell what is going on here," said Marcus Owens, former head of the Internal Revenue Service's Exempt Organizations division, "but starting and terminating organizations makes it more difficult for the IRS to identify who did what when."  

Ellen Aprill, professor of tax law at Loyola University in Los Angeles, speculated that the groups might have feared they'd violated a tax rule and decided it was better to dissolve "either to be good going forward or, if we were to take a cynical, Machiavellian view, to continue to ignore rules by operating briefly and then dissolving to do the same thing again."

What we do know is that the IRS is not an agency built for political oversight or transparency, and these groups could very well be using the agency's weaknesses as an added layer of cover for their activities.  

The IRS's primary legal responsibility is to protect information, rather than disclose it, and that is reflected in almost every aspect of the nonprofit infrastructure.  Groups are not required to get the agency's blessing to claim 501(c)(4) status, and if they don't they aren't included in the IRS summary data listing all the tax-exempt organizations it oversees. Annual tax filings are submitted long after they are relevant; even after they're filed, the IRS doesn't provide them  -- nor any of the relevant data -- online or in machine-readable format.  

On the rare occasion that an organization's exempt status is revoked or denied, little to nothing about it is public. As we described in part five of our recent Shadow Money Magic report, the IRS doesn't tell the FEC or the public that the group might be required to disclose its donors. Rather, most groups could simply pay their federal income taxes and fade away, except in cases of prominent organizations like Crossroads GPS -- which applied for exempt status nearly three years ago and has yet to receive it. (This week a Crossroads spokesman told the Los Angeles Times that his group may have been a victim of the IRS' heightened scrutiny of conservative groups.) Denial letters are made public only after they are scrubbed of all identifying information. Furthermore, formal denials are often unnecessary because, according to Lois Lerner, IRS Director of Exempt Organizations, "many organizations withdraw their application for exemption when they learn that a denial is forthcoming."

For its part, Citizens for Strength and Security doesn't appear to ever have sought exempt status for either of its 501(c)(4) incarnations. Patriot Majority USA, on the other hand, applied for, and received, exempt status at least twice, according to its most recent letter granting exempt status, obtained by OpenSecrets Blog. In that letter and the accompanying documents, Patriot Majority USA acknowledged that it had "substantially similar activities and goals" as the old Patriot Majority USA, which it refers to in the filing by its previous name, Alliance for Economic Development.

In the document, it also explains that it had no intentions of hiring employees, opting instead to depend on "a large base of volunteers who will be responsible for contributing to, developing, and disseminating the organization's message."  At the time it filed its first annual filing, the organization boasted about $2.9 million in revenues, but no volunteers.  

In the course of their evaluation of Patriot Majority USA's request for exempt status, IRS staffers don't appear ever to have inquired about Patriot Majority USA's previous two iterations, and the third incarnation was granted exempt status once again, after a wait of only three months. That was in 2011, a time when many other organizations waited far longer to receive approval as IRS staffers screened (often inappropriately) applicants for hidden political agendas. Ironically, this group's application sailed through though its name contained the word "patriot," one of the terms the IRS supposedly looked for, according to the Treasury Department's Inspector General for Tax Administration.

However, in a final twist, it now appears that the IRS might have revoked the tax exempt status of the last two versions of Patriot Majority USA. The IRS data that includes listings of all exempt organizations no longer contains records for the group. Washington, D.C.'s Corporations Division still lists Patriot Majority as "active," and there are few other explanations for its absence from the list. "It could mean that their status was revoked after an audit and for cause," tax attorney Owens says.

But that's between Patriot Majority USA and the IRS. The public won't be told anything, and the FEC won't be notified. The donors behind the millions spent by Patriot Majority in the 2012 election will remain safely on the dark side of Section 6103 of the US Code.   

Reporting intern Janie Boschma contributed to this post.

Image: Ball of tangled wire via BigStockPhoto.com.

As the immigration reform bill has been negotiated in the Senate, the number of new lobbying registrations filed this year disclosing an interest in the issue has surpassed the number from all of 2011. Some organizations are hiring lobbyists for the first time while others have bolstered their Washington presence to influence the bill.

And the largest driving force behind the flood of lobbyists appears to be companies--especially in the tech sector--pushing for more temporary visas for high-skilled workers, a crucial part of the bill that passed the Senate Judiciary Committee by a 13-5 vote Tuesday. The bill, which also provides a road map to citizenship for the nation's roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants, can now be considered by the full Senate after the Memorial Day recess.

There have already been 55 lobbyists hired whose clients want to influence immigration, according to Sunlight's Lobbying Registration Tracker. That surpasses the 54 registrations from all of 2011 and 42 new reports from 2012 that reported immigration as an issue.

April and May have been the most active months for new registrations, which lobbyists must file within 30 days after they begin lobbying for a client. In the less than two months since April began, 37 registrations have poured in.

Even though this surge only reflects newly hired lobbyists, there has also been an increase in the number of clients that are actively lobbying on immigration-- from 317 in 2011 to 354 in 2013, the Center for Responsive Politics reported. It is not possible to determine how much money is being spent lobbying on immigration legislation because firms are not required to disclose how much of their fees are generated by any single issue.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog.

Jason Hibbets is the project manager at Red Hat and lead administrator for opensource.com. He has been applying opensource principles in neighborhood organizations in Raleigh, NC  for several years, highlighting the importance of transparency, collaboration, and community building. Follow the rest of his thoughts at @jhibbets.

Have a great idea to improve your city? Want to flex your creative and/or techie muscles? Want to spend two days networking, collaborating and maybe win some cash?

CityCamp NC, an event to promote citizen participation and innovation, will be held on May 30-31 at the James B. Hunt Jr. Library on the NC State University Campus in Raleigh. CityCamp NC will be followed by a Nation Day of Civic Hacking event hosted by Raleigh’s Code for America Brigade on June 1. Alisha Green and Rebecca Williams from Sunlight’s Policy team will also be in attendance.

This year, CityCamp NC will award a top prize of $3000 plus a consulting session with Jason Caplain at Bull City Venture Partners to the winning team. A second and third team will be awarded prizes of $1000 and $500, respectively.

Photo credit: City of Raleigh, NC

The event is $5 for students and government employees (appropriate ID must be shown at the door) and $10 for all others.

Time is running out! For more information and to register, visit http://citycampnc.org.

Disclaimer: Sunlight Foundation is one of the sponsors for CityCamp NC 2013.

Interested in writing a guest blog for Sunlight? Email us at guestblog@sunlightfoundation.com

Unfortunately, there was a technological glitch and I didn't get to finish my presentation on digital preservation at the 2013 House Legislative Data and Transparency conference. I've attached my presentation notes (PDF) in case anyone is interested. I'd be interested to hear comments.

In a letter to the Acting Public Printer of the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) the House Committee on Administration has rejected a recent recommendation by the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) to charge the public for access to GPO’s congressional documents. The response is to the NAPA report Rebooting the Government Printing Office: Keeping America Informed, which recommended that GPO consider charging for access to its Federal Digital System (FDsys).

• House Administration Rejects NAPA Recommendation to Charge Public for Access to Legislative Documents, Committee on House Administration (May 22, 2013).

The 2nd annual House Legislative Data and Transparency conference is now streaming live. Here's the agenda and speaker bios for the conference. Note that I'll be on a panel on digital preservation at 2pm eastern/11am pacific with Lisa LaPlant from GPO and Marc Levitt, Byrd Center for Legislative Studies. Should be fun :-)

NEWS:

• A new paper on the UK's open government data policies looks into ways that open data can be monetized and recommends an National Data Strategy. Groups have weighed in questioning the paper's focus on economic growth at the expense of transparency.  (Tech President)
• The NRA PAC kept up a strong fundraising pace during the first quarter, pulling n more than $1.2 million. They have nearly $7 million cash on hand. (Roll Call)
• A day after asserting that his office is exempt from state public records laws Virginia Attorney General, and candidate for governor, Ken Cuccinelli is backing off the controversial statement. Staff attorneys had been claiming the exemption when they responded to public records requests and Cuccinelli has asked them to stop the practice. (Washington Post)
• K street isn't letting the string of scandals stinging the Obama administration, and sucking up lots of oxygen in Congress, get in the way of their priorities. Lobbyists are still working on issues like the farm bill, immigration, and the internet sales tax. (The Hill)
• A new database put together by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune tracks travel by Members of Congress during 2012. While Afghanistan was the most popular destination, members also spent a lot of time in Spain and France, tending to take a few extra days in those more scenic locales. (Washington Post)
• Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington is suing the IRS over the agencies internal rules on reviewing 501(c)(4)'s for nonprofit status. The suit would force the IRS to bring its rules in line with federal law that says 501(c)(4)'s need to be exclusively "social welfare" organizations. (POLITICO)

TODAY:

• The IRS: Targeting Americans for their political beliefs. House Oversight and Government Reform. 9:30 am. 2154 Rayburn House Office Building.
• Markup of the DATA Act of 2013, H.R.1380, the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act, and more. House Oversight and Government Reform. 1:00 pm. 2154 Rayburn House Office Building.
• 2013 Legislative Data and Transparency Conference. 9:00 am - 5:00 pm. Capitol Visitor Center Auditorium.

Do you want to track transparency news? You can add our feed to your Google Reader, or view it on our Netvibes page. You can  follow the progress of relevant bills on our Scout page.  You can also get 2Day in #OpenGov sent directly to your reader!

The American Public Health Administration has begun airing a new TV ad supporting Gina McCarthy, President Barack Obama's nominee for administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. It's the first time the nonprofit group has aired an ad backing a specific nominee, according to a spokeswoman.

McCarthy was okayed by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in a party line 10-8 vote last Thursday, but will still need a floor vote to become the country's top environmental regulator. Republicans had previously threatened to boycott a vote on her nomination, and all eight Republicans on the committee voted against her.

McCarthy is currently the EPA’s assistant administrator in charge of air and radiation, and has worked in state government in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Republican opposition centered on general complaints about EPA's practices rather than specific grievances about McCarthy.

Health association spokeswoman Audrey Pernik said the ad backing McCarthy wasn't political. It features images of asthmatic children, and lauds McCarthy's work on clean air issues. A press release from the association calls McCarthy "instrumental" in developing rules to limit mercury emissions from power plants that are expected to prevent 11,000 premature deaths each year.

Throughout the 2012 election cycle, Sunlight followed the unlimited money. From super PACs and corporations to unions and “dark money” we collected, in real time, the political spending reported by these outside groups.

With the 501(c)(4) social welfare nonprofits back in the news again (and the IRS’s enforcement of them), we wanted to take a closer look at how these organizations spent money to influence the 2012 election. We often use the term “dark money” to describe these groups since they can spend an unlimited amount on independent expenditures and electioneering communications yet they do not have to disclose their donors. For more information on how to track all types of federal campaign finance disclosures, check out this handy infographic.

Overall, dark money groups reported $300 million in independent expenditures in 2012. Of the 50 groups who spent the most, 15 are 501(c)(4) nonprofits. Using our Follow The Unlimited Money tracker, Political Ad Sleuth, Ad Hawk and return on investment calculations, here is how they made an impact in the race for the White House and Congress.

Please note that Americans for Prosperity spent $33.5 million overall in 2012 focusing on opposing just a single candidate: Barack Obama. It is separated from the list below since the others spent money in more than one race. Figures below are also reflective of just general election spending.

Crossroads GPS

This conservative group spent more than $70.5 million and had a return of investment of 14.42 percent. More than $15 million was spent to oppose Barack Obama and more than $10 million was spent to oppose now Virginia Senator Tim Kaine. Watch ads and review ad files.

American Future Fund

This conservative group spent nearly $24 million and had a return of investment of 5.57 percent. More than $11 million was spent to support Mitt Romney. Watch ads and review ad files.

Americans for Tax Reform

This conservative group spent more than $15.7 million and had a return of investment of 57.35 percent. The group only spent in congressional races. Review ad files.

American Action Network Inc.

This conservative group spent more than $11.7 million and had a return of investment of 60.33 percent. The group only spent in congressional races. Watch ads.

League of Conservation Voters Inc.

This liberal group spent $10.3 million and had a return of investment of 83 percent. It spent $2 million to oppose Virginia GOP Senate candidate George Allen and $957,000 to oppose Mitt Romney. Watch ads.

Review the remaining 10 top spending 501(c)(4) nonprofits in this spreadsheet or below.

Visit the Sunlight Reporting Group for a review of the role political nonprofits have played in recent elections.

TransparencyCamp has come and gone, but the ideas that sprouted at TCamp are just beginning to come to life.

Steve Spiker from OpenOakland shared his insight about the transparency movement in the TCamp wrap up video below, “We’re saying things need to be different in our country and that’s only going to happen if you care enough to persist on it.”

The transparency community understands that progress starts at TCamp but it doesn’t end when you go home.

For example, Waldo Jaquith, whom you may remember as an OpenGov Champion, created a dataset of all the public comments on proposed legislation in Virginia. You can see the new data already available at OpenVirginia.org!

Becky Sweger of National Priorities Project gave back to the community by being a part of Citizen Advocacy day and lobbying her Senators and Representatives.  She recently blogged about her experience, “After writing about the DATA ACT for the past year, it was gratifying to go to Capitol Hill and campaign face-to-face for better federal spending data.”

In another great project, TCamp attendees used Consumer Financial Protection Bureau data to create an open source tool that visualizes bank complaints. Kathryn Peters (of TurboVote) who worked on that project, recently announced on Twitter that the tool is launched!

And we can’t forget that Fabrizio Scrollini Mendez is “Talking this party down South,” with a TransparencyCamp in Uruguay, ABRE LATAM, June 24-25. The Sunlight Foundation is proudly one of the sponsors.

Please tell us about your post TCamp experiences-- there are far more successes than we could include in a post. If you couldn’t make it to TCamp or would like to relive the amazing presenters we’ve posted more videos here.

TCamp lasts for a weekend but, it is the accomplishments after TCamp that truly count. Thanks for making those happen! 

More TCamp inspired events:

• Hack for Change event  in DC June 1

• Hack Montgomery June 1

• DC API meet up

• Global data literacy boot camps in June databootcamp.org

• Puerto Rico Tech Summit Hackathon June 6

• Civic Hacker meetings in Chicago to connect data sciences

More TCamp inspired projects:

• Legislative project in Uganda

• Improve etherpad

• City of Chicago code project

• Become a Tech Ambassador in Ohio

• Create tutorials on scraping

• Twitter meetups, for activist toolbox

• New public data platform form the CFPB

• Campaign on twitter to get jargon explained

More TCamp inspired self-improvement:

• Submit more pull requests

• Review notes for missed sessions

• Do a tutorial

A few weeks ago, we integrated the full text of federal bills and regulations into our alert system, Scout. Now, if you visit CISPA or a fascinating cotton rule, you'll see the original document - nicely formatted, but also well-integrated into Scout's layout. There are a lot of good reasons to integrate the text this way: we want you to see why we alerted you to a document without having to jump off-site, and without clunky iframes.

As importantly, we wanted to do this in a way that would be easily reusable by other projects and people. So we built a tool called us-documents that makes it possible for anyone to do this with federal bills and regulations. It's available as a Ruby gem, and comes with a command line tool so that you can use it with Python, Node, or any other language. It lives inside the unitedstates project at unitedstates/documents, and is entirely public domain.

What it Does

The chief problem that us-documents solves is taking the original documents and converting them into context-less HTML that can be dropped directly into any website. Once dropped in, all of the styling can be done with CSS.

For example: Congress publishes XML for every bill in the House and Senate, and it's rich XML (just look at that DTD). It's built to handle a lot of different use cases, including compatibility with sophisticated drafting tools. Most of that just gets in the way of displaying the bill to users, so we can rip most data out and turn it into div's and span's.

In this before-and-after example, we're turning a piece of CISPA's official XML into HTML we can drop into place:

Doing it this way also lets us make our own decisions on what to display - Congress may feel the need to display the table of contents of the bill, but we don't, so it can be hidden with CSS.

We do something similar with rules and notices from FederalRegister.gov. Even though FR.gov already provides HTML snippets ripe for integration, there are simple things we can do to make them even more universally usable, like ditching "id" attributes.

This lets us take the HTML used here on FederalRegister.gov and embed it plainly in Scout, without any conflict with our own HTML.

Doing Right By Citations

One of the other reasons to integrate these documents into Scout was to link legal citations to searches, to take advantage of Scout's special citation searching.

Both Congress and the Federal Register already attempt to detect and link the legal citations in their documents. To make these links easily overrideable, us-documents extracts the basic pieces from each caught citation and puts them into data attributes on the link, e.g. data-title="5" data-section="552".

This way, we can easily process that HTML client-side in JavaScript, and replace the original links with new ones built from those data attributes.

The Federal Register does a terrific job of detecting citations, but strangely, Congress's detection seems a lot spottier. If you take a look at last year's DISCLOSE Act, it's difficult to tell why only one citation gets linked, and so many others are not. It's possible we may end up using our own citation detector in the end.

Does This Need a Standard?

us-documents is doing a pretty naive transform on these documents, and the resulting HTML needs entirely different CSS for bills and for regulations. It works, but there are few questions that come to mind:

• Is it worth identifying the common denominator of tags and features necessary for both kinds of documents, and transforming them both into a standard end product?
• If so, should that standard be the resulting HTML, or is it worth creating an intermediate format of some kind?
• And should this standard have some sort of compatibility or at least good vibes with existing standards for legal documents, such as Akoma Ntoso or legal-markdown?

The answers may become more obvious over time if others begin using the tool, and if it gets expanded to process more kinds of documents than just federal bills and regulations. Grant Vergottini also just wrote a post asking smart questions about the use of HTML, XML, and JSON with documents like these.

In the mean time, us-documents has already been useful to us, and we hope it will be to others.