Let the light shine through

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - At the quiet, rather ordinary third-floor offices of the Sunlight Foundation, none of the doors are closed.

The khaki-clad staffers at the foundation wouldn’t have it any other way.

Launched last month, the foundation — funded by businessman/lawyer Michael Klein — hopes to help push the activities of the federal government into full view. The group, as its name implies, wants the American people to know what their elected representatives are up to, who they’re doing it with and for how much.

Already, the group has handed hundreds of thousands in grants to good-government groups, to make government spending information available to everyone via the Internet.

On a warm Tuesday morning, the foundation’s co-founder and executive director, Ellen S. Miller — one of the doyennes of D.C.’s transparency movement — sat down with The Examiner to discuss her group’s mission and the struggle to break down Washington’s culture of secrecy.

Q: Why do we need another nonprofit group for government reform?

A: Well, while we have a reform agenda, Sunlight’s agenda really is transparency. It is to try to create more usable information in more usable ways for journalists, bloggers and citizens — to make the story easier to tell about what happens in Washington. And that’s a unique goal. There’s no other institution that does that.

We do that by funding new databases for information that are not now digitized, by pressuring members of Congress to be more transparent themselves. In the age of the Internet, that’s certainly easy — if there was a will to do it.

Sunlight really is trying to go beyond the age of the Internet with this notion of one-click disclosure. With one click of a button, you should be able to find out anything you wanted to know about one industry, a member of Congress, a labor union.

Q: Is there a culture of secrecy in Washington? Where does the problem start?

A: Most of the problem is that the information is hidden in broad daylight. There is a lot of information out there. But a lot of it is not available on the Internet in a searchable format. That’s ridiculous in the 21st century.

The way that information is delivered is deliberately last-century. The Senate, for example, requires that campaign donations be reported on paper to the secretary of the Senate, who then turns it over to the Federal Election Commission, which spends half of a million dollars digitizing them — typing them in — and then makes them available some many weeks later to the public. I mean, that is absurd. And it is absolutely deliberate.

The fact that personal financial disclosure statements are filed as infrequently as they are filed is absolutely deliberate. We’ve made a grant to digitize those files and as soon as that is done, reporters like yourselves will be able to draw correlations on how members vote based on their stock holdings.

Q: What about on the other side of this? Even if people knew what was going on, what’s the guarantee that they would care?

A: There’s no guarantee that people will care. However, the explosion of personal involvement by millions of citizens on the Internet gives us hope and an expectation that the more information that is out there, that the better informed people will be about their member of Congress and the institution of Congress as a whole and will demand more accountability.

I mean, transparency for someone who purports to represent the people should be a no-brainer. It’s certainly a no-brainer for the public. A political consultant in the know said to me many years ago that if people knew how bad it was in Washington, they’d come to the Capitol and burn it down.

Sunlight Foundation

» www.sunlightfoundation.com

» Founded in January

» Officially opened in April

» Initially funded with $3.5 million grant from businessman/lawyer Michael Klein

» Draws name from famous quote by former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”

bmyers@dcexaminer.com

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