Transparency

The dream of every ethics commission is to have a guaranteed budget. But it is not really a dream for two reasons. One, there are ethics commissions with guaranteed budgets. And two, it is a reasonable policy that can be countered only by a local legislative body's need for control. This blog post will look at the arguments for and against a guaranteed budget, as well as several examples of and approaches to guaranteeing budgets for ethics commissions and similar independent bodies and agencies...

It's nice when something you write about in a blog shows up on the front page of the New York Times the following day. Yesterday, in a post called "Privatization and Transparency," I discussed new types of privatization involving nonprofits, which raise new sorts of problems. One type of nonprofit operates government-funded facilities or programs, such as schools. These nonprofits are...

I've written a little about ethics issues involving quasi-governmental entities and private entities doing government work (oversight, misuse, and personal financial disclosure). But there are...

A report on the relationship between New York's state university system (SUNY) and the SUNY Research Foundation (RF) was published yesterday. What makes it of interest to this blog is the way the report emphasizes the personal nature of the management of the foundation, which distributes nearly a billion dollars a year in research grants almost exclusively to SUNY's many colleges and universities; the way it...

As discussed in an earlier blog post, eighteen months ago the Dallas council, under the prodding of the mayor at the time, passed some ethics reforms. According to a Dallas News editorial last month, only six months later the council backed off...

Last month, the Obama administration drafted an executive order that would require those seeking federal government contracts to disclose their political contributions, and those of their directors, officers, affiliates, and subsidiaries, made in the two years before they bid for a contract. This draft executive order has been the subject of a great and...