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  • Capitol Words

    Explore and compare what Congress says.

    Capitol Words explores the most popular words and phrases used by legislators in the U.S. Congress. Search the data from 1996 to today by state, date or politician.

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  • Clearspending

    Review how federal spending is misreported by agencies.

    Clearspending is a scorecard that analyzes how well U.S. government agencies are reporting their spending data on USASpending.gov. Clearspending is the most thorough analysis of this federal grant and loan data ever conducted.

  • Email Congress

    Contacting Congress is now as easy as email.

    Email Congress is a web service allowing U.S. residents to email their Congressional representatives.

  • Follow the Unlimited Money

    Track the political spending of organizations.

    Follow the Unlimited Money, a product of the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group, is a searchable database tracking organizations that are paying for ads and other forms of political communication. This project is now integrated into Influence Explorer.

  • Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker

    Follow foreign influence on U.S. policy.

    Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker digitizes information that representatives of foreign governments, political parties and government-controlled entities must disclose to the U.S. Justice Department when they seek to influence U.S. policy.

  • Hall of Justice

    An inventory of criminal justice data.

    Over the course of 2014 and 2015 as we compiled around 10,000 data sets and research documents. Hall of Justice is a resource for exploring the criminal justice data and information we’ve identified.

  • House Expenditure Database

    Dig into office spending by House members.

    House Expenditure Database On November 30, 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives released the quarterly Statement of Disbursements online for the first time. Since the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer posted these in PDF format, Sunlight created a searchable database of each House member's expenditures. This database contains information that is a subset of the information provided in the PDFs.

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  • House Staff Directory

    Look up House staffers.

    The House Staff Directory empowers the public to better communicate with their elected representatives by making available staff names and (public) phone numbers and addresses. In addition to legislative offices, the directory also includes staffers from offices that support House activities. It is no secret that congressional staff are the lifeblood of Congress, but identifying the best staffer to speak with about a particular issue is a daunting challenge.

  • Influence Explorer

    Uncover political activity.

    Influence Explorer connects the dots of political contributions on the federal and state level allowing you to track influence by lawmaker, company or prominent individual.

  • Lobbyist Registration Tracker

    Follow the trends of the latest lobbying.

    Lobbyist Registration Tracker is a database which allows users to see lobbying registrations as they're submitted and the trends in issues and registrations over time.

  • Open States

    Discover and follow all state legislatures.

    Open States allows anyone to discover more about lawmaking in their state. With Open States, you can track state bills, get campaign and contact information for legislators and follow all the action across 50 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico.

  • OpeningParliament.org

    A global initiative to make legislatures transparent.

    OpeningParliament is a global initiative bringing together more than 80 international organizations to develop best practices on how the world's legislatures should be transparent and accountable. Led in part by the Sunlight Foundation, the National Democratic Institute and the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency, OpeningParliament is also the home of the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness, a set of shared principles developed by the emerging parliamentary monitoring community.

  • Party Time

    Tracking the political fundraising circuit.

    Party Time documents the political fundraising circuit. From the early morning hours until late at night, there are opportunities for members of Congress, presidential and congressional candidates to meet with supporters behind closed doors, press them for money and party. Breakfasts, luncheons, barbecues, golfing outings, receptions, concerts, basketball, baseball, football—the social whirl is endless.

  • Political Ad Sleuth

    See the details of political ad purchases.

    Political Ad Sleuth is an opportunity for local volunteers to help us make a national, online database of TV stations’ public ad files. This paperwork, which every broadcaster keeps but doesn’t post online, contains important information about who is buying airtime for political ads.

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  • Politwoops

    Archive of deleted tweets from U.S. politicians.

    Politwoops is the only comprehensive collection of deleted tweets by U.S. politicians. From minor messaging changes to major gaffes, Politwoops offers a window into what they hoped you didn't see.

  • PublicMarkup

    Add your thoughts to pending bills in Congress.

    PublicMarkup lets you review and comment on proposed bills before they're introduced—or while they're pending—in Congress.

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  • Scout

    Get real-time alerts about Congress and the states.

    Scout is a rapid notification service allows anyone to create customized email or text alerts on actions Congress takes on an issue or a specific bill. It also makes it easy to search federal regulations and track bills in all 50 states (a first). The website tracks a variety of sources including the Congressional Record, THOMAS, the Federal Register and Sunlight’s Open States to create legislative news searches about issues a person, company or nonprofit cares about.

  • State of the Union Machine

    Generate random State of the Unions based on previous speeches.

    The State of the Union Machine generated a random State of the Union based on language modeling of the speeches from previous presidents.

  • Sunlight Academy

    Free tutorials and webinars.

    Sunlight Academy is an interactive training portal that aims to provide instructional and education resources to make government more transparency and accountable. The different training modules cover a range of topics from basic research skills to comprehensive issue specific tools and resources.