Tag: Data

How Agencies Can Improve Proactive Disclosure

Agencies should set up a process to proactively disclose information that is of interest to the public on an ongoing basis. To help prioritize, agencies should look at requests made through the Freedom of Information Act, via other request-based systems (i.e., specialized forms for a particular dataset or document), and information regularly disclosed by public affairs and congressional relations offices.

Categories of information to consider for proactive release include: commercial (business-related), current events (relevant to journalists), ethics (relevant to government watchdogs, such as lobbying, ethics waivers, etc.), agency operations, and datasets (paper versions are disclosed to the public but the underlying dataset must be FOIA’d).

On a regular basis, each agency should review its efforts to evaluate the effect of proactive disclosure and whether additional documents/datasets should be proactively disclosed.

A Few Ideas on Getting Started

1. — Review how the agency already discloses information to the public.

Agency information is made available to the public in many ways. Some examples include:

  • As responses to FOIA requests
  • As responses to specialized request forms
  • Responses to media inquiries (by email, telephonically, and press advisories and releases)
  • As letters or reports to Congress or OMB
  • Information the agency is trying to place with media
  • Information disclosed in reports (already online) that are not in machine-readable formats

There may be others ways as well. Get a sense of how the public is accessing information.

2. — Get an understanding of how each of these information request processes work and obtain a representative sample of the kinds of requests being answered.

FOIA. Obtain the FOIA logs and randomly choose a significant number of requests (say 500 or 1000). Categorize each request based on the likely purpose for which it will be used: commercial, current events, ethics, agency operations, and datasets. Within each category, figure out whether the requests overlap a common dataset or series of documents.

Responses to specialized request forms. Create a list of the specialized information request forms that an agency uses to receive requests from the public. Determine the volume of requests received, on average, each year. For each form, figure out whether the information is pulled from a particular dataset or set of documents.

Responses to media inquiries. Reach out to press office staff to see whether they keep a media log, which tracks who has called and what they’ve called about. If it is exists, review a representative sample (pick a few random days) to see whether there is any commonality to the requests. Identify and list the most frequent requests. If not, look at releases and advisories pushed out by fax or email.

Reports to Congress or OMB. Make a list of all reports to Congress or OMB. Are they already available online, but not in one central place? Are multiple years grouped together? Are they available through FOIA or published through some other means?

Information to be placed with the media. Speak with press offices to get a sense of the kind of information commonly pushed to the public. Is it available online in one central place? How is the information presented?

Information disclosed but not in machine-friendly formats. Create a list of reports available on the website. Identify whether they are only available as PDF, or are they available in other formats as well, such as csv or doc?

3. — Prioritize

Looking at the information identified above, are there kinds of information that is requested again and again? If so, is it possible to disclose the underlying dataset or series of documents that underpin these common requests? Decide based upon the number of requests and the likelihood of use by the public.

Some clues to look for:

FOIA. Is information drawn from a certain source requested again and again? If so, is it possible to make the source information available to the public? If not, is it possible to create an expedited way of requesting that information? Or to pre-process that information as if it were already the subject of a FOIA request?

Responses to specialized forms. While being sure to include items from each category of information to consider for proactive disclosure, look at the most utilized special forms and determine whether it is possible to release the underlying information all at once.

Responses to media inquiries. Are there kinds of information requested again and again from press staff? Or types of requests that can be anticipated in the news cycle? If so, work with press staff to get ahead of the curve and disclose the information that is frequently requested.

Reports to Congress or OMB. If these reports routinely become available, publish them all online in a central place on the agency website as soon as they are issued. If there are concerns about redactions under FOIA, process through FOIA immediately prior to receiving a request, so they can be released at the same time or as close as possible to when the report is issued.

Information trying to be placed with the media. Publish the information as soon as possible.

Information disclosed but not in machine-readable formats. Work with offices and technology staff to make sure information published as a PDF is also published in other (open) formats as well, such as csv and doc.

4. — Two more things

(i) Talk to external and internal stakeholders. They know where the pain points are and can advise as to what would be most useful.

(ii) Look to see if an entity is broadly republishing the information the agency has provided. For example, some non-profit organizations will request an entire dataset and make it available all at once. In turn, many thousands of people will use that information. Instead of making the organization request that data, publish it online so it is available at once to everyone.

Examples of categories of information:

{ Liked this? You may also like A FOIA No-Brainer and A Checklist for Drafters of Transparency Legislation }

— Written by Daniel Schuman

Keeping Congress Competent: The Senate’s Brain Drain

One of the foundations of democracy is a legislature that functions well. The ability to assess whether a legislature is functioning properly depends on the public’s ability to see what it is doing. Observing what the U.S. Senate is doing, unfortunately, is a difficult task, and one that is unnecessarily hard. Have special interests become increasingly powerful in the Senate because the upper chamber has diminished its capacity to legislate? To evaluate this question, we gathered data about congressional staff numbers, pay, and retention from a number of difficult-to-access (and often non-public) sources.

While the U.S. Senate is often seen as the wiser and more seasoned counterpart to the House, we believe it is suffering from the same affliction that has robbed the lower chamber of some of its ability to engage in reasoned decision making, placing it at the mercy of special interests. Over the past thirty years, the Senate weakened its institutional knowledge base and diminished its capacity to understand current events through a dramatic reduction of one of its most valuable resources: experienced staff.

Despite the explosion of new issues senators must master and an ever-increasing population they must serve, the Senate has roughly the same total number of staff in 2005 as it had in 1979 — around 5,100. While much substantive work is performed in committee, committee staff has been cut by one-third. Similarly, the number of personal office staff in a policymaking role has declined by 14 percent. And staff pay has mostly stagnated between 1991 and 2005. It’s no wonder that a recent Congressional Management Foundation report found staff feeling as if they don’t have enough time to do everything they need to do, and they said resource constraints cause the quality of their work to suffer.

1_gP7CNUE7lHnQUqEMe5I82w Continue reading “Keeping Congress Competent: The Senate’s Brain Drain” →

39% of Office of Legal Counsel Opinions Kept from the Public

The Department of Justice is withholding from online publication 39% (or 201) of its 509 Office of Legal Counsel opinions promulgated between 1998 and 2012, according to a Sunlight Foundation analysis. This apparently conflicts with agency guidance on releasing opinions to the public as well as best practices recommended by former Justice Department officials.

OLC Opinion Graph Continue reading “39% of Office of Legal Counsel Opinions Kept from the Public” →

Keeping Congress Competent: Staff Pay, Turnover, And What It Means for Democracy

Incoming Speaker Boehner recently vowed to tighten the House of Representative’s collective belt through a 5 percent budget reduction. Congressional staff are the most likely target. An in-depth look at Congressional staff employment trends raises questions about whether Congress has the support necessary to do its job. After reviewing a quarter century of staff salary and retention data, we found:

  • A pay gap between Washington-based House personal office staff earnings and people doing equivalent work in the DC metropolitan area.
  • A decrease in the total number of hill staff over the last two decades.
  • Fewer staff engaged in policy-making roles.
  • Average salaries for most Washington-based House personal staff have not increased in two decades, and may have decreased for many.

Who is picking up the slack? One clue could lie in the nearly 12,500 federally registered lobbyists, and countless others, who provide information and exert influence in the halls of Congress; by contrast there’s around 7–8,000 House personal office, leadership, and committee staff. Put a different way, $2.6 billion was spent on lobbying in Washington in 2010, versus $1.37 billion for the House of Representatives in FY 2010. Have we privatized Congress? Continue reading “Keeping Congress Competent: Staff Pay, Turnover, And What It Means for Democracy” →

The Decline of Private Laws

This article was written by Melanie Buck and published by the Sunlight Foundation on December 1, 2010.

Because of a quirk in the law, Adela Bailor was ineligible for compensation for the brutal attack she suffered at the hands of a felon in federal custody. A court concluded that it had no power to hold the government responsible for her attack, even while noting her case “raise[d] serious questions about the moral responsibility of the government to protect its citizens.” In its opinion, the court suggested that she had one last resort: Congress.

Congress has the power to enact “private laws,” a type of legislation narrowly targeted to provide benefits to specifically identified individuals (including corporate bodies) when “no other remedy is available.” Claims of ill treatment and unfair circumstances have prompted many of the 107 proposed private laws currently pending in Congress.

In Ms. Bailor’s case, Rep. Julia Carson introduced legislationin 1997 to give her compensation. Private laws have been used to protect private property, grant waivers for certain federal or legal requirements, provide personal compensation for transgressions by the government, and address refugee or transportation concerns. The majority of bills concern immigration cases. In theory, each private bill represents a petitioner who has exhausted all other options for redress.

Although once very common, private laws are now rarely enacted into law. House of Representatives Historian Anthony Wallis suggests that their decline stems from the increased ability of administrative bodies to solve these issues. Wallis also says that private provisions are sometimes included in public legislation, thus reducing the need for private laws. That seems rather rare; our review of nearly 2/3s of the 1535 private bills introduced from the 101st to 111th Congress found only 23 instances where private measures were included in public bills. Congress may be phasing out private legislation because of an increasing workload, a concerns about conflicts of interest, and a lack of awareness of how to use this type of legislation.

Despite this decreasing frequency of enactment, Members still introduce a significant number of private laws each Congress. Many bills are reintroduced over many Congresses, although few are ultimately acted upon. For example, the legislation regarding Ms. Bailor was introduced in every Congress from the 105th through the 110th. A private bill for the relief of Kadiatou Diallo — the mother of Amadou Diallo — and her family has been introduced in each Congress since the 107th. A private bill for Ibrahim Parlak, a Kurdish immigrant serving jail time in America, has been introduced in each Congress since the 109th. Of the 107 private bills introduced in the 111th Congress, 63 were introduced in previous Congresses.

For the 111th Congress, we examined every private law that was introduced as of October 2010 to see whether we could categorize their subject matter by Googling for the name of the person who is the subject of the bill. Of the repeat private bills that we could classify, almost all concern citizenship issues. 23 pertained to deportation issues involving illegal immigrants, 9 regarded political asylum cases, and the 6 “DREAM Act” cases involved teenagers who had been living in the United States for years without knowing that they were living in the country illegally. The remaining 6 bills compensated individuals wronged by the United States or bestowed military honors.

Historically, private laws could stay deportation so long as they were pending in Congress, but it is unclear whether reforms implemented between 1947 and 1971 have ended this practice.

Most private laws are introduced by a small number of Senators and Representatives. Senator Feinstein has the biggest share, with 13 of the 63 repeat bills currently pending.

For Ms. Bailor, the legislative journey appears to have ended when the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Carson, died in 2007.

Sooner or later, all the private bills introduced this term will likely share the same fate.