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White House launches ethics site that Obama promised in 2008
The White House launched a centralized ethics website Thursday, fulfilling a 2008 campaign pledge made by President Obama.
Ethics.gov brings together several government databases dealing with lobbying and ethics, including Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) filings, Federal Election Commission (FEC) records and travel reports prepared by the Office of Government Ethics (OGE).
Users can type in a person’s name to find out if he has visited the White House, whether he has lobbied and how much he has contributed to candidates running for federal office.
On the website for Obama’s transition team, he pledged to “create a centralized Internet database of lobbying reports, ethics records and campaign finance filings in a searchable, sortable and downloadable format.”
John Wonderlich, policy director for the Sunlight Foundation, praised Obama for standing by his pledge.
Watchdog groups including Sunlight had been working with the administration to help get the project off the ground.
The site offers a one-stop shop for searching White House Visitor Records, OGE travel reports, LDA data, the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Act data, FEC individual contribution reports, FEC candidate reports and FEC committee reports.
Wonderlich and others at Sunlight are reviewing the website. They plan to point out to the administration any discrepancies they find in the data and also push for other kinds of data to be posted, such as federal government contracts and officials' personal financial disclosure statements.
“The White House is playing a new role, which they haven't done before, which is provide a unified search and provide greater accountability for government officials,” Wonderlich said. “Hopefully, this turns the White House into a better ally in improving transparency as we work to improve these public disclosures.”
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