Sunlight Foundation

Congress makes the role of US chief technology officer permanent

On Jan 6, 2017, President Barack Obama quietly signed a bill that codified the role of the chief technology officer (CTO) of the United States into law. Congress made the US CTO permanent in the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act, which passed the Senate on December 10 and the House on December 16. In doing so, our legislators recognized a reality that’s clear around the globe: technology is now part of every facet of society, including government itself.

In the 21st century, it’s critical that the President of the United States have a technologist advising him or her on policy decisions. Congress codifying the role of the CTO in US government is an important, unheralded action that institutionalizes one of the promises that President Obama made before entering office. Notably, the US CTO is now a Senate-confirmed position, however, which will place appropriate scrutiny on the background and qualifications of the person nominated to serve. Unfortunately, the legislation that President Obama signed into law does not put the US CTO at the cabinet table. In Section 604 of the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act, Congress designates the US CTO as an associate director in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), reporting to the Director. To put it another way, the US CTO is now officially the “T” in OSTP.

Sunlight will endure

Dec 16, we announce that Sunlight will continue its role as a nonpartisan advocate for open government under the leadership of Executive Director John Wonderlich. Alex Howard will be the new Deputy Director, helping to lead Sunlight into the next stage of its evolution.

Over the past two months, we have heard from people around the United States, indeed around the world, of their regard for the role the Sunlight Foundation has played in the global transparency movement. Developments over the past two months have made it clear how important Sunlight’s continued work in the public interest is and can be, as an independent institution. Unfortunately, several staff will be departing as part of this transition. Sunlight will continue to confront key challenges facing democracy, including conflicts of interest and other forms of corruption, and other threats to open government, press freedom, undisclosed influencers and regressive legislation and regulation.

New FCC online political ad disclosure rule exposes dark money TV buys

Americans get a new tool for approximating the size of what you might call the nation's "Gross Political Product." Beginning soon, every broadcast television station in the country will have to post online copies of contracts and other information about the political advertisements they are airing. For the first time, voters will have easy access to documents detailing who is buying campaign commercials and how much money they are spending.

The ability to take a close and more accurate read of spending on (mostly negative) political TV ads -- already north of $40 million in April when the Wesleyan Media project released a study on the 2014 Senate contests -- represents a rare victory for transparency in a political system increasingly inundated with dark money.

It's also a huge expansion of a pilot project launched in 2012, when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ordered affiliates of the top broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC) in the nation's 50 largest TV markets to begin online posting of their political ad files. That's why the Sunlight Foundation and other organizations, including Free Press and ProPublica, began an effort to systematically track TV ad buys during the 2012 campaign.

An example is Americans for Prosperity (AFP), which has not reported a single TV ad buy during the 2014 cycle to the FEC, even though Sunlight's ad tracking tools show that the group has been extremely active in swing states, especially North Carolina and Michigan. Plenty of Democratic-allied groups, such as Patriot Majority and the League of Conservation Voters, engage in the same kind of under-the-FEC-radar advertising.

How the FCC is expanding transparency

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission just made the cost of a Senate seat a lot easier to calculate. The FCC quietly signaled that -- opposition from the National Association of Broadcasters notwithstanding -- all broadcast TV stations must begin posting political ad buys online as of July 1.

That's a big deal. It means the FCC faced down a well-funded and influential constituency. And it means voters in six states with heated Senate races, but no top-tier TV market, now will be able to find out just who is paying for all the political ads clogging their airwaves and just how much they are spending. Until the FCC's 2012 order, the only way the public could access broadcast filings was by riding circuit to local TV stations and rooting through paper files.

Why is this important? Some of the biggest money in politics today is being spent completely off the Federal Election Commission's radar screen. Television advertisements that mention or depict a candidate and clearly express a point of view about that candidate don't have to be reported to the nation's campaign finance watchdog unless the ads run within 30 days of a primary election or 60 days of a general election. That means a lot elected officials are piling up a lot of IOUs to deep-pocketed donors without the public being able to see -- which is why we're using TV ad files to make them visible.

No Justice Roberts, the Internet can't do government's job

[Commentary] Writing for the majority in the Supreme Court’s latest effort to dismantle the nation’s campaign finance system, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that government doesn’t need to restrain big money in politics because the Internet will.

"With modern technology, disclosure now offers a particularly effective means of arming the voting public with information," Justice Roberts wrote in the 5-4 decision. "Reports and databases are available on the Federal Elections Commission’s Web site almost immediately after they are filed, supplemented by private entities such as OpenSecrets.org and FollowTheMoney.org. Because massive quantities of information can be accessed at the click of a mouse, disclosure is effective to a degree not possible at the time Buckley or even McConnell was decided."

As one of the “private entities” that endeavor to make campaign finance data available in real time on the Web, we beg to differ. There are several problems with Roberts’ argument that the Internet will take care of big money in politics:

  • The Senate hasn't made it to the 21st century
  • Disclosure is far from timely
  • Disclosure? What disclosure?? The FEC fails to require adequate reporting by candidates and political committees, inviting entrepreneurial political operatives to set up the kind of elaborate laundromats that Justice Stephen Breyer outlined in his trenchant dissent from the decision.
  • Can you say Citizens United? Is campaign finance disclosure really so bad that we need private entities to clean up their data? The answer is, unfortunately, yes.

Hidden elections spending is playing an increasingly important role in the 2014 elections and serves as yet another example of the limitations of the Internet's ability to produce transparency.