As I wrote about yesterday in this post, last Friday the House Oversight Committee held a great hearing focusing on spending transparency. We submitted written testimony for the hearing, which you can read here. In it, we talk about the six changes Congress and the Obama administration should make to USAspending.gov, the government's spending website which is based off of one of our websites, FedSpending.org.

An interesting exchange occurred last week between a top government official and a group of corporate leaders attending the first meeting of President Obama's Management Advisory Board. According to Robert Brodsky of Government Executive, Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) John Berry appealed to the board to help set the record straight about "overpaid" public employees.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that corporations are not subject to the personal privacy exemption of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The 8-0 ruling in Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T overturned a lower court ruling in AT&T's favor, which transparency advocates had worried could have imposed significant new barriers to public access to information.

The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) new program tracking the amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution spewing from big facilities is among the victims of a long list of environmental programs attacked in the House this week. The House voted to slash funding for the EPA's new greenhouse gas registry, which requires the biggest GHG emitters to disclose how much planet-warming gas they spew every year, starting with 2010. The registry places no regulations on emissions, but it does collect vital information needed to take any meaningful steps toward reducing GHG pollution. The House clearly wants all of us to remain in the dark about where the pollution is coming from.