Center for Responsive Politics
The Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) is a nonpartisan research group based in Washington, D.C. that tracks money in politics and the effect of money and lobbying activity on elections and public policy and maintains a public online database of its information.[1]
The freely available OpenSecrets.org databases allow web users to track federal campaign contributions and lobbying activity in a variety of ways, such as by industry and interest group. Other popular resources include the personal financial disclosures of every member of the US Congress, the president and top members of the administration. Users can also search their own ZIP codes to learn how their neighbors are allocating their political contributions.
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[edit] History
Founded in 1983, the nonprofit center aims to create a more educated voter, an involved citizenry and a more responsive government. OpenSecrets.org, first launched in 1996, is the online incarnation of the Open Secrets money-in-politics project the center launched in the 1980s, which was contained in large, printed books. CRP’s website OpenSecrets.org has won four Webby Awards (2001, 2002, 2006, 2007) for being the best politics site online. In 2010, OpenSecrets.org was named a Webby Official Honoree.
[edit] Recent projects
During the middle of the 2000s, CRP created a Revolving Door database that tracks former federal government officials that become lobbyists, and vice versa. Also established: a comprehensive database on federal lawmakers' personal finances, a database of political action committee money and campaign finance profiles of more than 120 business industries. In 2009, the center co-released several comprehensive studies. They including a project database linking federal earmarks to lobbying expenditures and a database detailing both the state and federal campaign donation activities of thousands of corporations and special interest groups.
[edit] Journalism
OpenSecrets Blog is the Center's home for original journalism, as written by a small staff of reporters. It broke several national news stories in 2009, such as an investigation into the political donation patterns of NFL football teams and analysis of how local and state governments use taxpayer money to lobby the federal government. The information within two weeks-long reporting projects -- one focusing on federal health care reform and another on financial reform -- have been cited in the press dozens of times throughout 2009 and 2010. In 2009, Project Censored honored the OpenSecrets Blog for covering what it considers three of the 25 most underreported news stories that year.[2]
[edit] Funding
Support for CRP comes from a combination of foundation grants, individual contributions and payments from custom research requests. Major donors to CRP include the Sunlight Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Joyce Foundation and the Ford Foundation. CRP accepts no contributions from businesses, trade associations or labor unions. According to the organization's 990 form, in 2007, it had just over $1 million in revenue and net assets of $1.6 million.[3]
[edit] Staff
Sheila Krumholz has been the center's executive director since December 2006, having served for eight years as CRP’s research director. She first joined the CRP staff in 1989 and was assistant editor of the first edition of the printed volume of Open Secrets.
Information Technology Director Susan Alger and current Research Director Jihan Andoni have both worked for the Center since 1999. Communications Director Dave Levinthal, who serves as the Center's spokesman and edits the OpenSecrets Blog, joined in 2009 after working for seven years as a political reporter at The Dallas Morning News. [4]
Krumholz and Levinthal regularly appear as commentators and analysts on national news networks and programs, including CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, National Public Radio and the BBC. Hundreds of newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and USA Today, have also cited CRP data and quoted its directors. On October 30, 2007, the Center's former communications director, Massie Ritsch, was featured on the Colbert Report.
[edit] References
- ^ Mission | OpenSecrets
- ^ OpenSecrets.org Featured in Book About Under-the-Radar News Stories, September 21, 2009
- ^ http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2007/521/275/2007-521275227-04779f45-9.pdf
- ^ http://www.opensecrets.org/about/staff.php
[edit] External links
- OpenSecrets.org database
- OpenSecrets Blog
- OpenSecrets.org Facebook fan page
- OpenSecrets.org Twitter feed
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