Bill Allison's tip sheets, slides and other things

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Index for tracking paybacks posts

General Resources

Tracking Big Donors part one 

Tracking Big Donors part two

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More on tracking paybacks: Big Donors, Part Two

So I'm going to assume that you've you've identified a big donor you want to look at. How do you proceed? In this post, I'm going to walk you through some Sunlight Foundation tools which are great for our purposes (I previewed a few in the previous post). But first, for sake of argument, let's pick a big donor. How about Vinod Khosla, who was profiled in a 60 Minutes report on the failures of Greentech (worth noting that Khosla pushed back on the report here). 

Khosla runs a venture capital firm imaginatively called Khosla Ventures -- the companies it's invested in are listed here. Let's look at one of those firms--KiOR, which produces biofuels. 

Here's their profile in Influence Explorer. Note that they lobby, turn up in regulatory dockets and have an employee who sits on a federal committee--basically outside experts who help the government formulate policy. 

You can also look KiOR up in Scout, which allows you to search through the Congressional Record, congressional bills, the Federal Register, state legislation and other information from a single search box. 

Scroll down to see the results...

They turn up in EPA regs as a government-approved provider of fuel additives for meeting federal requirements for using renewables in various types of fossil fuels. One could run the name of every single company Khosla has invested in to see if they get Dept. of Energy loans (KiOR does), to see if they lobby, to see if their executives sit on federal advisory committees, to see if they're mentioned in legislation or on the floor of Congress.

One other little trick I use when backgrounding big donors:

It's a very simple Google search. site:gov vinod kholsa. You can his testimony before a Senate committee, an SEC filing, evan an announcement that he'll be addressing folks at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 

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More on tracking paybacks: Big Individual Donors, Part One

In the heat of the 2012 campaign, NPR’s Mara Liasson interviewed Paul Begala for a story whose somewhat counterintuitive premise was that Democrats were having trouble attracting big money. Begala told her the reason why:

“…there’s no self-interest here…Jeffrey Katzenberg is our largest donor. He gave us $2 million. He’s not going to sell any more tickets to Kung Fu Panda 2 if Obama gets a second term. He’s just doing it because he believes in his country.”

Rule number one: there’s always self-interest. In Katzenberg’s case, it was an old WTO dispute with China over access that U.S. films had to the Chinese market. At a time when the United States had multiple trade issues with China—active International Trade Commission complaints from U.S. firms about unfair trading practices, a congressional investigation that found counterfeit (and flawed) Chinese parts were making their way into U.S. weapons systems, complaints of intellectual property theft by U.S. software developers and a congressional effort to penalize China for manipulating the value of its currency to increase its exports—resolving the film issue jumped to the top of America’s trade agenda. Vice President Joe Biden negotiated a resolution to the dispute; during the breaks, he checked with Katzenberg to make sure the terms he was seeking were acceptable. Katzenberg might not be able to sell more tickets to Kung Fu Panda 2 in the United States, but he will be able to sell more to Kung Fu Panda 3 in China.

The interests of the biggest individual donors can be more difficult to discern than those of corporate entities and labor unions. The late Bob J. Perry, for example, was a prolific donor at the state and federal level. In his home state of Texas, he supported efforts to limit damages in civil suits, but his company, Perry Homes, did not lobby the federal government. His company had a few federal entanglements--a couple of OSHA violations in the last five years totaling $2,500 (one, for $1,500, was reduced to $750) and a comment on a federal regulation--but nothing that quite comes close, on a cost benefit analysis, to justifying the tens of millions he put into politics.

That doesn't mean Perry does not have federal issues--he might prefer a lower tax rate or the preservation of a particular tax loophole, as a homebuilder he might prefer robust support of institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Recall that federal policies, including, as Gretchen Morgenson put it, "when Washington decides, in its infinite wisdom, that every living, breathing citizen should own a home," played an outsized role in the collapse. And though people often regard such speeches as so much rhetoric, remember President George W. Bush's acceptance speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention: 

Another priority for a new term is to build an ownership society, because ownership brings security and dignity and independence.

Thanks to our policies, home ownership in America is at an all- time high. 

Those policies helped home builders as much as they did the pols who made millions while running Fannie Mae into the ground and the Wall Street firms that repackaged all that toxic mortgage debt. 

Perry was also a big supporter of increasing the numbers of legal immigrants--his company employed a lot of foreign born workers. 

Because his firm didn't lobby at the federal level, and because Perry rarely granted interviews, we don't have a lot to go on. The fact that he gave overwhelmingly to Republicans when Democrats were just as enthusiastic about inflating the housing bubble as the GOP and even more eager to increase legal immigration suggests an ideological component, although his tilt to the GOP could be explained by Democrats' well-funded tilt toward trial lawyers (in 2010, a Texas court issued a $58 million damage award against Perry Homes and another defendant; to avoid an appellate proceeding, the plaintiffs agreed to mediation and reached a settlement--terms were not disclosed--with Perry Homes in 2011. 

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Tracking Paybacks

Sunlight resources: docketwrench.sunlightfoundation.com: Great for tracking federal regulations and who is trying to influence them. You can search by company (Northrop Grumman) or subject (hydraulic fracturing) or agency (EPA). Scout: Search across legislation, federal register notices, congressional floor speeches, state legislation and other sources. Sign up for alerts. Great tool. Political Party Time: Sunlight's one of a kind database on political fundraisers. Real Time FEC: Sunlight's up to the minute FEC filing service. Sort, parse or filter raw FEC data as it comes in. Tools, tips and resources for tracking federal spending What the Sunlight Foundation offers: If you don't know InfluenceExplorer or its data warehouse, Data.InfluenceExplorer.com, you really owe it to yourself to swing by and take a look. There's campaign finance data, lobbying, contracts, grants, contractor misconduct, federal advisory committee data--a whole host of info that you can search multiple ways, slice and dice and download. A huge time saver if you're looking for data. ClearSpending is Sunlight's audit of USASpending.gov -- see below for my boulder sized caveat. Be sure to check out ClearSpending to understand why numbers in USASpending might not be reliable. We have lots of other resources for reporters--please check out our tools and projects page to see more. Sources of data: The Federal Government publishes a wealth of information on how it spends money, everything from broad overviews like the pie chart in the instruction book that comes with every 1040 the IRS sends out to very detailed, granular information in budget justifications and collected on USASpending.gov. There are also a number of nonprofits that republish that information in user-friendlier formats. Caution: The old saw “They couldn’t print it if it weren’t true” can apply just as much to numbers put out by the government as it does to Bat Boy stories in the Weekly World News. Assume most government projections will be inaccurate (the future is very hard to predict), and double check numbers you get from contracts, grants, etc. Overviews/big picture: The President’s budget (online here) details spending by departments and agencies, even functions. One thing that’s very helpful: Check out the chapter in the budget called Cuts, Consolidations and Savings, which is loaded with programs the executive branch wants to shut down. Generally, you’ll find a member of Congress or two that champion those programs. Also very useful are the historical tables in those budgets. Two of my favorites are Outlays by Function and Subfunction and Budget Authority by Agency. Don't ignore Congress--look at the tracked by the Library of Congress. Read the House and Senate reports as well. Some outside groups that review budgetary documents that can be helpful: Bigger picture analyses can be found at the Center for a Responsible Budget and the National Priorities Project. For more detailed analyses, Taxpayers for Commonsense is one of my favorites. They do incredibly interesting research on their own, plus track what a lot of the other groups around town are doing. The Project on Government Oversight also does great work tracking spending issues, and both collaborate with journalists. They're hugely helpful. The Center for Effective Government is another good group. Devil is in the details: To get even more granular, look at the Budget Justifications that the agencies publish as part of the budget process. Defense publishes them, and includes links for the service branches, here. Health and Human Services is here. Generally, I search for the agency name and the word budget--usually the budget justifications come up on the second or third link. To get even more granular, you can look at the individual contracts and grants awarded to meet the objectives of those programs. USASpending.gov and its nonprofit sector big brother, FedSpending.org, provide a lot of that data. (FedSpending.org debuted months before USASpending.gov, the original version of which used a lot of the templates and layouts of FedSpending). For grants, be sure to check the Federal Audit Clearinghouse. For contracts, take a look at the Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System, a site my colleague Tom Lee once called "The Worst Website Ever." Don't forget about the influence side of the equation. Use Influence Explorer to track lobbying and campaign contributions. Open Secrets is also great for tracking money.