The Federal Election Commission (FEC) released their 2009 legislative priorities which includes four recommendations. Of these four, the FEC considers electronic filing of Senate campaign finance reports to be a priority. OMB Watch has supported this for years, and most recently with the introduction of S. 482. You can help by calling your senators and asking them to cosponsor the bill.

Last Friday President Obama authorized the release of over 250,000 pages of previously sealed presidential records.  The bulk of the documents are from the Reagan administration, and include presidential briefing papers, speechwriting research materials, and declassified foreign policy memoranda.  In a similar vein, eight-hundred pages of records regarding Sauid Arabia that were produced by the George H. W. Bush administration will also be released.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities published a fantastic, in-depth report this month examining the state of disclosure of state level tax expenditures. The report reviews the best (OR, MN, and CT) and worst (AR, MD, and RI) state reports and outlines the best practices for the ideal tax expenditure disclosure. CBPP makes a strong case that increased disclosure of tax expenditure data by states would improve policies and accountability:

If properly designed and implemented, a tax expenditure report makes tax expenditures more transparent by telling policymakers and the public how the state is spending its money and what it is accomplishing through those expenditures. A tax expenditure report also encourages accountability by enabling policymakers and voters to evaluate individual tax expenditures and decide whether to continue them. In addition, a tax expenditure report saves money by enabling policymakers to monitor the costs of tax expenditures and rein in their cost if necessary.

On April 9 I introduced the need for improving the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) and suggested three broad paths for achieving this. Here I discuss one path – expanding information. We always want more information. And for a while TRI was a program regularly searching for new data to report with new industries being added, new chemicals, lowering the threshold for some chemicals, and adding federal facilities. But recently we have gone backwards with an effort by the agency to raise the reporting thresholds and have fewer detailed reports filed.