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| CREW Cuts | December 2007/ Issue #8 | |
Judge Issues Temporary Restraining Order Against the White House in CREW Lawsuit  On November 12th, U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy granted CREW's request for a temporary restraining order to prevent the White House from destroying back-up copies of millions of deleted emails while CREW's lawsuit against the administration is pending. CREW brought a lawsuit against the White House in September challenging its failure to restore and preserve millions of emails deleted from White House servers and to institute an effective electronic record-keeping system. When the White House refused to give adequate assurances that it would preserve back-up copies of the deleted emails -- the only source of these important historical records -- CREW sought a temporary restraining order. Read more Read The Washington Post story CREW Complaint Compels Dept. of Ed. Inspector General to Investigate Bush Brother's Company Earlier this fall, CREW requested that the Department of Education's Inspector General (IG) investigate why federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) funds are being spent on educational products sold by Ignite! Learning, a company founded and headed by Neil Bush, President Bush's younger brother. On October 31st, CREW received a response from the IG stating that he would review the matter and "take appropriate action." CREW had asked the IG to look into Ignite! Learning after a three-month CREW investigation revealed that school districts are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, including NCLB funds, on Ignite!'s Curriculum on Wheels (COW), a cart-mounted video projector and hard drive loaded with a year's supply of Ignite!'s social studies, science, or math curricula. At a standard price of $3,800-$4,200 per unit, the COW is a very expensive device with limited use. Congress has set rigorous standards for the types of educational approaches and products on which NCLB funds can be spent, but CREW's research shows that Ignite! products do not meet those criteria. In fact, there is no scientific data, as defined by NCLB, supporting the effectiveness of Ignite!'s products. Read more Read The New York Times story |
CREW Launches Collaborative Online Government Document Database On November 8th, CREW, in conjunction with a coalition of government watchdog groups, launched a new online government document database, governmentdocs.org. The online database will house Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) responses, and other government documents, from a number of organizations, that can be browsed, searched and reviewed. It is the only one of its kind. Joining CREW in this project are the Project on Government Oversight, Public Citizen, Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation. Traditionally, government watchdog groups have either posted FOIA documents on their websites as unsearchable PDFs, or statically highlighted several pages within a document to bolster their findings. Governmentdocs.org changes that by providing a database of searchable documents and a unique URL for every page of every document. As it is a coalition effort, users will be able to search documents from all the organizations on the site at the same time. Start viewing documents now at governmentdocs.org. Read more Read the Austin American-Statesman story
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| (c) 2007 Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, all rights reserved. | |||
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