Archives for April 2023

House Publishes More Earmarks Request Data, Which We Enhance

At the end of last week, the House Appropriations Committee published all earmark requests for FY 2024 on the committee’s website, including publishing them as a spreadsheet. This is great and welcome news. For the first time, the appropriations spreadsheet separated member names into different columns and included state, district, party, and recipient address. This makes the information significantly more usable. Thank you.

In fact, it’s so usable, we spent a little time over the weekend making it even more robust. We enhanced their spreadsheet by adding bioguide IDs for each member, appropriations subcommittee codes, a standardized recipient address (with help from ChatGPT), and extracted the recipient state and zip code. We have been playing around with using the AI to categorize whether the recipient entity is a non-profit or a governmental entity. We can imagine a lot of use cases for this cleaned-up data.

The spreadsheet is available online here. We are continuing to tinker with it.

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Congressional Data Task Force Meeting Set For June 22, 2023

The next Congressional Data Task Force Meeting is set for June 22, 2023 from 2:00 – 4:00 pm EST.

The meeting will take place in hybrid format. You must register online here, at which point you’ll be prompted to indicate whether you want to attend virtually or in person. If you attend in-person, the meeting will take place in the House Longworth Building, room B-248/B-249.

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Notes from the Congressional Hackathon on April 6, 2022

(Everyone is welcome to add edits/ comments. Document created by Daniel Schuman at Demand Progress daniel@demandprogress.org)

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