Despite millions in potential cost savings to taxpayers, the U.S. Senate has still yet to pass a requirement that it file campaign finance reports electronically.

By Friday, presidential candidates, House candidates, political action committees and super PACs must file their fourth-quarter financial reports with the Federal Election Commission electronically.

Senate campaigns, however, must submit their reports on paper to the secretary of the Senate, where they are scanned and sent to the FEC. The agency then prints the documents, collates them and delivers them to a private contractor to type into an electronic database.

The process costs taxpayers roughly $500,000 a year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. And as a result, it can take weeks or even months for the public to know who is bankrolling senators’ campaigns.

A requirement that senators e-file their campaign finance reports was included in the Senate version of a financial services bill that was folded into the larger budget bill passed earlier this month. However, the e-filing measure didn’t appear in the final budget.

The disappearance disappointed advocates for the practice, such as Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., who has championed e-filing legislation. His stand-alone bill requiring Senate e-filing has yet to receive a vote.

Nothing, however, prohibits senators from e-filing voluntarily with the FEC — in addition to filing on paper with the Senate — and an increasing number are doing so. Yet as many as 80 senators are not, including about 20 who backed a bill requiring the practice.

Tester’s bill has 36 co-sponsors — 28 Democrats, six Republicans and two independents. Of those 36 co-sponsors, 22 have not filed past campaign finance reports electronically. And 19 are expected to file the reports due this Friday only in hard copy.

Among them: Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa; Mike Enzi, R-Wyo.; and Mark Udall, D-Colo.

“Sen. Grassley is not comfortable filing two reports because the software program is constantly being updated with new data and filing two reports two different ways at two different times could lead to discrepancies,” said Grassley spokeswoman Jill Gerber.

“An electronic filing doesn't help promote transparency if it's not legally accepted and the same info is still taken from the paper copy,” added Dan Head, a spokesman for Enzi.

Udall spokesman Mike Saccone said the senator wants to change the law so that all Senate campaigns must file electronically, but that “until then, his campaign will follow the requirements of existing law.”

Gerber, Head and Saccone nevertheless maintained that their bosses were strong supporters of Tester’s bill.

“There should be one form, one filing,” Gerber said. “Sen. Grassley looks forward to electronic filing.”

Meanwhile, at least three of Tester’s co-sponsors plan to take the e-filing leap this week.

The offices of Democratic Sens. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, Tim Johnson of South Dakota and Ron Wyden of Oregon told the Center for Public Integrity that the campaign finance reports due by Friday would be e-filed.

“In this day and age, it makes sense to file electronically,” said Perry Plumart, a spokesman for Johnson. “There’s no reason not to.”

Whitney Potter, a spokeswoman for Heinrich, said the senator “is an enthusiastic cosponsor” of Tester’s bill.

Officials for the other 16 co-sponsors who don’t e-file did not respond to requests for comment.

In October, 17 senators voluntarily e-filed their previous campaign finance reports, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of FEC records.

Those lawmakers were Tester and Sens. Max Baucus, D-Mont.; Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.; Thad Cochran, R-Miss.; John Cornyn, R-Texas; Joe Donnelly, D-Ind.; Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.; Al Franken, D-Minn.; Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; Angus King, I-Maine; Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.; Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.; Jack Reed, D-R.I.; Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.; Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I.

In a statement, Tester told the Center for Public Integrity that “it’s long past time for the Senate to bring its campaign finance reporting into the 21st century.”

Lisa Rosenberg, a government affairs consultant for the Sunlight Foundation, which endorses e-filing, said the opposition doesn’t make sense, especially since most Senate campaigns store their campaign finance data electronically. Submitting the data online would be faster for them, too.

“It’s crazy that it just keeps getting blocked,” Rosenberg said. “Voters deserve to know who’s funding campaigns.”

President Obama will take a gentle swing tonight at for-profit education companies that sometimes leave students with crippling debt and scant job prospects.

During his State of the Union address, Obama is expected to identify an audience member who carries a massive debt burden after attending a school owned by DeVry Education Group, one of the biggest for-profit education companies, according to a government official briefed on the speech. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the speech publicly.

Obama will use the woman, a single mother, to illustrate the challenge faced by millions of Americans who are unable to pay down their education loans, the official said. The president is not expected to name DeVry, or the for-profit education industry generally.

Critics charge that students at for-profit schools like DeVry often have trouble repaying their loans, mainly because they have weaker job prospects than people who attend traditional, not-for-profit colleges. More than 23 percent of 2010 DeVry students defaulted in their first two years of repayment, according to Education Department data. That’s well above the national average of 14.7 percent.

For the for-profit education industry, the default rate is 22.7 percent, compared with 11 percent for public universities and 7.5 percent for private, not-for-profit, schools.

Several other for-profit education companies are being investigated by state attorneys general, the Justice Department, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for misleading prospective students about the likelihood that they will find a job in their chosen fields. The schools’ lending programs also are being examined, according to people briefed on the probes. DeVry is not one of the schools being investigated.

U.S. student debt last year topped $1.2 trillion, making it the biggest single source of consumer debt aside from mortgages, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. More than $1 trillion of those loans are held or guaranteed by the government, the agency says. The debt burden is dragging on the economic recovery, making it more difficult for young people to afford mortgages and strike out on their own, agency officials have said.

Tonight will mark Obama’s most direct reference in a State of the Union address to how he believes student debt hurts Americans’ finances and the economic recovery, the official said. Obama has talked in the past about ensuring that all Americans have access to higher education and called on colleges to slow tuition hikes.

A super PAC created to aid Liz Cheney, the daughter for former Vice President Dick Cheney, in her quest to become Wyoming’s next U.S. senator raised $38,500 last year, new documents show, and none of it came from donors in the Cowboy State.

Instead the cash came predominately from well-connected Cheney family allies in the Washington, D.C., area, including erstwhile lobbyists and a former secretary of defense.

Critics labeled Cheney a carpetbagger during her now-defunct campaign against incumbent Republican Sen. Mike Enzi. She countered by touting her status as a fourth-generation Wyomingite — despite the fact that she had been living in northern Virginia for years and only purchased a home in Wyoming in 2012.

Cowboy PAC — which was formed in mid-October and may accept unlimited contributions from corporations and individuals so long as it does not coordinate its spending with Cheney — reported collecting $10,000 donations from three men:

• Red Cavaney, the former president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute;
• Lewis Eisenberg, an executive at the investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts; and
• Terrence O’Donnell, a partner at the law firm Williams & Connolly LLP.

Additionally, Frank Carlucci, who served as Defense Secretary under President Ronald Reagan, contributed $5,000. Wayne Valis, the founder and president of the D.C.-based lobbying and consulting firm Valis Associates, gave $2,500. And J. Robinson West, the founder and former chairman of the oil and gas industry consulting firm PFC Energy, donated $1,000.

Cavaney, Eisenberg and O’Donnell also directly contributed to Cheney’s Senate campaign, according to the most recently filed campaign finance records, which cover donations received through September.

Campaign contributions cannot exceed $2,600 per election, with primary and general election races counting as separate contests.

O’Donnell told the Center for Public Integrity that he was “very supportive” of Liz Cheney’s Senate bid, having known the Cheney family since the 1970s.

“I thought she would be an outstanding United States senator,” he said.

“The loss is Wyoming’s and the country’s,” he added, about her recent decision to withdraw from the race.

Meanwhile, Cavaney hosted a fundraiser last month for Cowboy PAC at an upscale Italian restaurant in the D.C. neighborhood of Georgetown, according to the New York Times. He did not immediately respond to requests for comment, nor did the other four super PAC donors or a representative of Cowboy PAC.

Kristin Walker, a spokesman for Enzi’s campaign, declined to comment.

Last July, Cheney announced her desire to challenge Enzi, who is seeking re-election to a fourth Senate term. In early January, Cheney ended her Senate campaign, citing “serious health issues” in her family.

About 25 percent of the $1.03 million Cheney’s campaign raised through the end of September came from residents of Wyoming, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of Federal Election Commission data.

At the end of September, Enzi reported $1.2 million in the bank. In September, his supporters also launched a super PAC.

In 2013, it raised $59,000 from seven individuals, all of whom listed addresses in Wyoming or Colorado. The largest donors were Susan Samuelson, who is identified as a rancher at the Cheyenne-based Warren Ranch, and Neil McMurry, who is identified as a partner of Casper-based Nerd Gas LLC, an energy exploration company. Each gave $25,000.

After Cheney announced her plans to drop out of the race, the pro-Enzi group announced that it would be dissolved.

The Cook Political Report rates the Senate seat as safely in the Republican column.

Update, Jan. 29, 3:08 p.m.: This story has been updated to include newly available information about the funders of the pro-Enzi super PAC.

The Defense Department has long maintained that teaching Afghan soldiers and police how to read and write is a steppingstone to their success on the battlefield against the Taliban and other insurgent forces, particularly after the U.S. Army and its coalition partners withdraw. But the effort has not been going so well, an independent government auditor reported on Jan. 28.

 “We probably won't be able to go forward in some of our … objectives if we don't increase literacy,” Brig. Gen. Thomas Putt, director of the U.S.-led military coalition's training program for Afghan security forces told reporters spiritedly at the Pentagon in Aug. 2012.

But as of Feb. 2013, roughly half the Afghan forces were still illiterate, despite the Pentagon’s expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars on a literacy program there, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, John Sopko, an independent auditor.

Moreover, the U.S. military’s stated goal of 100 percent of first grade literacy for the entire force by December 31, 2014, is probably unattainable, a report by the auditor stated. The program has been degraded by rampant absenteeism, dodgy accounting, weak oversight, and the absence of evidence that those personnel who pass the literacy tests are staying in the force, the report indicates.

These conclusions conflict with claims by the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan to the auditor last October that the U.S.-led alliance was on track to make all of the Afghan forces “Level 1” literate (equivalent to first grade proficiency,) and half of them “Level 3” literate, (third grade proficiency) by the end of 2014, when the Afghan government is supposed to take control of the literacy program.

It turns out, the audit report said, that those claims were for an Afghan force sized at 148,000, not the 352,000 personnel that the alliance now wants to equip and train before its departure.

Only one-third of Afghans can presently read or write, and the literacy rate among Afghan army recruits is even less — about 13 percent. U.S. military officers told the auditors that promoting literacy makes the Afghanis easier to train, more efficient and skilled in their work, and more knowledgeable about human rights and the rule of law. They also can keep track of their equipment better, and flag any corruption in the army’s pay practices, the audit noted.

“Literacy is a powerful capability that contributes not only to the professionalism of the Afghan forces, but to the strengthening of Afghan society,” said Maj. Gen. Dean Milner, commander of the NATO training program, in a Jan. 27 press release, shortly before the audit’s release.

Level 1 literacy translates to the ability to read and write single words, count up to 1,000, and add and subtract whole numbers. Level 3 is achieved when an individual can identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute and use printed and written materials, according to the training program. The training is meant to teach troops to read and write in either Dari or Pashto, the official languages of Afghanistan.

Officials with the training program told the auditor last October that 224,826 Afghan security personnel had been trained to Level 1 and 73,700 had been trained to Level 3. But the annual turnover rate in the security forces is between 30 and 50 percent, accounting for the persistently low residual rate. And the Afghanis have not made literacy a top priority, sending forty-five percent of their new police recruits between July 2012 and Feb. 2013 to field checkpoints “without receiving any literacy training,” the report said.

Building literacy was one of many tasks in a contract worth billions of dollars undertaken by the U.S.-led occupation between 2007 and 2010, and then it was the principal focus of  three contracts beginning in 2010 worth a total of $200 million over four years. Two of the contractors are based in Afghanistan and one, headquartered in Florida, is led by retired U.S. Army officers.

The auditor’s report found substantial fault with the terms, including provisions calling for fees to be paid according to the number of classes convened, rather than the number of trained recruits that graduated and stayed in the military. According to the audit, those conducting the training simply responded by holding “many small-size classes … for a few hours per week.” This meant, the audit report said, that U.S. government funds were “exposed to a risk of waste.”

Moreover, no effort was made to keep track of the graduates by name or military identification number, making it virtually impossible to verify that overall literacy rates in the force have increased. The training command’s response was that doing so was infeasible due to “significant limitations with the [security forces] … to differentiate and track individuals.” Literacy contractors, they said, were not obligated to become “a personnel shop” for the Afghan military.

The Western military coalition has not been watching the program closely, the audit reported, with inspections of only a fraction of the classroom sites. After an internal review by a “crisis action team” in 2012 and 2013, the coalition considered — but then abandoned — the idea of writing a new contract with more safeguards. Instead, the training program leadership has agreed, in response to the audit, to set lower goals, to try to verify learning by the recruits, and to demand larger and more frequent classes.

Initially, the coalition’s goal was to transfer the literacy program to Afghanis by last July. But the Afghan government did not support the plan that the coalition proposed, expressing particular reluctance to allow wide training to literacy level three. The program’s current priority is to train as many Afghan instructors as it can before turning over the effort at the end of this year.

“Whatever improvements of literacy within the Afghan forces that have been made up to this point, I suspect it will be marginalized when the Afghan government takes over,” said Stephen Biddle, senior fellow on defense policy for the Council on Foreign Relations. “It won’t go to zero, but it will be diminished.”

Asked to respond to the report, Major Doug McNair, a training mission spokesperson in Afghanistan, wrote in an email that “literacy training must be balanced against other warfighter training required by the Afghan forces to fight the insurgency and protect the Afghan population.”

He added: “These conditions make it difficult to forecast the literacy levels of the Afghan forces at end-year 2014.”

Exelon Corp. gave half as much money to politically active nonprofits in 2012 than what it first disclosed, an error that knocks the nuclear energy giant down to second place among Fortune 300 companies that voluntarily report such information.

Earlier this month, the Center for Public Integrity identified $185 million in donations to secretive political nonprofits from some of the nation’s biggest firms, with $26 million coming from Exelon.

The company now says it gave $13.6 million, the second largest sum behind health insurer WellPoint Inc., which reported giving $19.2 million.

This change brings the overall amount of corporate contributions to politically active nonprofits identified by the Center down to $173 million.

Exelon officials realized the company’s disclosure forms contained inaccurate information after the publication of the Center for Public Integrity’s investigation. Company officials did not raise any concerns about the figures earlier this month when contacted for fact-checking purposes.

Corporations are not legally required to disclose their dues payments or contributions to politically active nonprofits, although an increasing number have voluntarily been doing so in recent years. Likewise, politically active nonprofit groups organized under sections 501(c)(4) or 501(c)(6) of the U.S. tax code have no obligation to publicly reveal their funders.

Exelon self-reports this information not once, but twice, a year.

In Exelon’s first report for 2012, it showed $13 million in “dues or payments made from January 1, 2012, to June 30, 2012.” The company’s second report listed $13 million in “dues or payments made from July 1, 2012, to December 31, 2012.”

The company now says the second report was actually a cumulative figure for the entire calendar year, not just the six-month period. And it has changed its political contribution disclosure form to make clear that “the figures presented represent total amounts for calendar year 2012.”

In all, Exelon collectively paid $13.3 million in 2012 to trade associations such as the Nuclear Energy Institute, the Edison Electric Institute and U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The company additionally contributed a combined $317,500 to politically active social welfare nonprofits, such as the American Energy Alliance, a pro-business think tank with ties to billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch.

Exelon also amended the language in their disclosures for calendar years 2011 and 2013.

Company spokesman Paul Adams said Exelon revised the disclosure forms as part of its “ongoing commitment to transparency and clarity.”

Editor’s note, Jan. 30: This story has been updated to include a summary of a draft report on the Tesoro accident by the Chemical Safety Board, and a statement by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.

In the almost four years since an explosion at the Tesoro Corp. oil refinery in Anacortes, Wash., killed seven workers, the independent federal agency investigating the accident has faced criticism from members of Congress and unions for failing to complete its final report.

That delay was scheduled to come to an end Thursday with a public meeting in Anacortes that would include a vote by the agency’s board on the final report. Instead, the chairman’s last-minute decision to change the gathering to a “listening session” and delay a vote has drawn a sharp rebuke from the congressman representing the area and exposed broader divisions between the chairman and the board’s other two members, all three of whom were Obama selections.

“We are embarrassed by the pattern of unmet promises” about the Tesoro report, the two board members wrote to Democratic Rep. Rick Larsen, saying they had not been consulted by the chairman about the most recent change of plans.

The productivity of the agency, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, has dropped substantially since 2006, a Center for Public Integrity analysis found, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general said in a report last August that the CSB’s growing backlog of unfinished investigations has hindered its ability to fulfill its mission of making recommendations to prevent catastrophes.

An agency spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment, but officials previously have said they are doing what they can in light of limited resources and constant congressional demands for investigations of serious accidents. The agency is investigating, among other things, the blowout of the Macondo well that led to the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010; the explosion of a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, last April; and the release of toxic substances into the Elk River near Charleston, W.Va., this month.

The draft report, released Thursday, sharply criticizes Tesoro’s safety culture, saying the company failed to identify and fix the damaged equipment that led to the explosion, even after repeated leaks and small fires. It also found that safety standards set by the American Petroleum Institute, the industry trade association, were inadequate and that the state regulatory agency didn’t have enough qualified experts and had failed to detect problems in inspections of the refinery.

In a statement, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said, “The draft report released today is an important step in the process of avoiding another tragedy, but I am extremely frustrated that after nearly four years, the Chemical Safety Board has still failed to produce a final report. This delay is emblematic of poor leadership at CSB, which continues to be a disservice to workers, companies, and the economy.  Without dramatically improved performance, substantial leadership changes at CSB will be necessary.”

The CSB announced Thursday’s meeting on Dec. 23 but issued the changes on January 23. Rather than a meeting that includes a discussion and vote by the board, the session will feature a presentation by CSB staff members. There would be an opportunity for public comment in both cases.

The problem, Larsen wrote to the agency on Jan. 24, is that the report will not be released until the meeting, so the public won’t have time to examine it and ask informed questions. Larsen said he expected the CSB to do what it had promised in 2013: provide a draft report to the public in advance and allow discussion at the meeting.

That is what the agency did with a report released earlier this month on the 2012 fire at the Chevron refinery in Richmond, Calif.

Responding to Larsen, the board’s chairman, Rafael Moure-Eraso, wrote that the public will have adequate opportunity to weigh in, as the agency will take written comments during a 45-day period following the listening session.

It’s not clear whether the CSB will hold another meeting at the end of that period. Larsen wants the CSB to return to Anacortes and allow the public to discuss the report in person after being able to study it, a spokesman said, but the agency has not indicated it has any plans to do so.

“That’s what the community in Richmond got, and that’s what we were expecting,” the spokesman, Bryan Thomas, said.

The letter from board members Mark Griffon and Beth Rosenberg suggests that Moure-Eraso’s decision to postpone a vote on the Tesoro report was an attempt to avoid a repeat of the 2-1 defeat in a vote related to the Chevron report.

The disagreement in that vote was over a policy recommendation contained in the report that called for adoption of the “safety case” method — a significant overhaul of the regulatory system that would require companies regularly to analyze dangers and convince government officials that they were driving risk as low as possible. This model is more adaptive to changing environments and advancing technology than the current U.S. method, which relies on compliance with set standards, proponents argue. It has been implemented in the United Kingdom, Australia and Norway.

Industry representatives, experts and union officials, however, expressed concern that the method has not been shown to be effective and would be extremely difficult to implement. “[A] great deal more work needs to be done before a safety case system can be fully considered as a regulatory model for California or the United States,” the United Steelworkers wrote in comments to the CSB.

Griffon and Rosenberg voted to postpone the decision on the Chevron report for 120 days to allow further consideration of the merits of the model. In their Jan. 27 letter to Larsen, the two board members wrote, “The draft Tesoro report essentially cut and pasted the recommendations for the ‘safety case’ regime from the report on the Chevron fire.”

Former board members told the Center they believed Moure-Eraso’s decision to morph Thursday’s meeting into a listening session fit with a pattern of advocating particular policies and stifling dissent.

“Somebody is trying to push safety case, apparently at all costs,” former board member Bill Wright said. William Wark, another former board member, agreed, saying, “There’s no management of the place.”

Both Wright and Wark were nominated by George W. Bush and left the board in 2011.

Griffon’s and Rosenberg’s letter indicates growing concern by Moure-Eraso’s fellow Obama nominees. “The lack of urgency to complete this investigation is very troubling,” they wrote to Larsen. “It is simply inexcusable that multiple commitments made to you and others are not being honored.”

For the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency is agreeing to regulate the disposal of coal ash as part of a settlement in a lawsuit filed against the agency by environmental groups.

In a consent decree Wednesday, the agency sets December 19 as its deadline for “taking final action regarding EPA’s proposed . . . regulations pertaining to coal combustion residuals.” The settlement follows an earlier judicial order, issued last fall, partly ruling in favor of Earthjustice and 10 other groups in a lawsuit challenging the slow pace of EPA’s regulatory action.

The agency is now weighing how to regulate coal ash, waste from the production of electricity. One of the nation’s largest refuse streams at 136 million tons a year, coal ash has fouled water supplies and threatened communities across the country.

In a series of stories, the Center for Public Integrity highlighted the consequences of coal ash.

Debate over federal regulation has dragged on for decades. After a disastrous December 2008 coal-ash spill in eastern Tennessee, the EPA pledged to act. Two years later, in June 2010, the agency announced its proposal to begin regulating the disposal of coal ash, presenting two alternatives in a 563-page draft. Under the first option, the EPA would classify the ash as “hazardous,” triggering a series of strict controls for its dumping. The second option would deem coal ash “non-hazardous” and subject it to less stringent national standards that amount to guidelines for states.

Three years after unveiling its plan, however, the EPA has delayed the rules, sparking the environmental groups’ legal challenge.

In October, a federal court judge sided with the groups in finding that, under federal waste law, the EPA has a duty to review and, if necessary, revise rules every three years. But the agency has not done so for rules governing coal-ash disposal since 2000.

The settlement does not direct EPA how to regulate coal ash or “address in any way the substance of the final action that EPA must take,” the agency said in a statement. “EPA has informed the public about the risks that will form the basis for its decision in a proposed rule . . . and we will make a final decision about a rule by the December deadline.”

After years of delay, environmental advocates are celebrating the court-sanctioned deadline. “It’s really good news we’ll have a final rule by the end of this year after waiting for so long for action from EPA,” said Lisa Widawsky-Hallowell, of the Environmental Integrity Project, which participated in the suit.

Without federal protections, she notes, hundreds of communities situated near coal-ash ponds, landfill and mine pits have suffered damage, and numbers are rising. “The patchwork of state regulations has not done enough to protect the environment or human health,” Hallowell adds. “Now, we need EPA to issue a final rule that protects the communities.”

Two Center for Public Integrity projects were among the six finalists announced Thursday for the prestigious Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.

The Center is the only news organization with more than a single finalist for the award, which is given by the Joan Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The annual prize, widely considered one of the field’s most important, recognizes journalism “which promotes more effective and ethical conduct of government, the making of public policy, or the practice of politics by disclosing excessive secrecy, impropriety and mismanagement, or instances of particularly commendable government performance.”

One Center for Public Integrity finalist, “Breathless and Burdened: Dying from Black Lung, Buried by Law and Medicine,” was a year-long investigation done in partnership with the ABC News Brian Ross investigative unit. The series detailed how doctors and lawyers working at the behest of the coal industry helped defeat benefit claims of coal miners who were sick and dying of black lung disease.

The Center reporting team explored previously classified legal filings and created a database of medical evidence revealing how lawyers withheld key evidence and how doctors at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions consistently denied the existence of advanced black lung on X-rays.

Following the online and network news reports, Johns Hopkins suspended its black lung program, U.S. senators began crafting reform legislation and members of Congress asked for a federal investigation.

The other finalist, “Secrecy for Sale: Inside the Global Offshore Money Maze,” was produced by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), a project of the Center. 

Based on more than 2.5 million leaked files, the 50-story investigation involved 112 journalists and 42 media partners in 58 nations. 

The ICIJ project was an unprecedented media collaboration that took 18 months to report, and revealed more than 120,000 names and companies in a hidden parallel economy of offshore tax havens. The articles prompted multiple international tax investigations, including those by the IRS, in partnership with UK and Australian tax authorities.

The 15-year-old International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, headquartered at The Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C., is made up of 175 ICIJ members who work as investigative reporters in more than 60 countries.

“I’m proud of the fact that two of The Center for Public Integrity’s investigative projects are being recognized as finalists for this important prize,” said Center Executive Director Bill Buzenberg. “Both of these projects took more than a year of hard work and were extraordinary in their depth, breadth and impact. This work represents the best of what the Center for Public Integrity is about.”

Other finalists are the Miami New Times, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Wall Street Journal and a collaboration involving the University of California’s investigative reporting program, The Center for Investigative Reporting, FRONTLINE, Univision Documentaries and KQED.

“The finalists this year are emblematic of the future of journalism: non-profit news organizations working with for-profits, individual investigations alongside enormous team investigations, big media companies, a weekly newspaper—and excellence all around. It’s thrilling,” said Alex S. Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center.

The investigative reporting prize carries a $10,000 award for finalists, and $25,000 for the winning news organization. The winner will be announced in a March 5 event at a Goldsmith Awards ceremony at Harvard’s Kennedy School.  

With 36 gubernatorial seats up for election this year, a key Republican political organization reported a significant fundraising advantage over its Democratic counterpart.

The Republican Governors Association, the biggest outside spending group at the state level, outraised the Democratic Governors Association, by more than $22 million in 2013 — $50.3 million for Republicans for the year compared to $28 million for the Democratic organization and its related super PAC and non-profit arm.

The DGA’s top donors in 2013 were labor unions and pharmaceutical companies, according to filings submitted to the Internal Revenue Service.

The International Association of Firefighters and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, donated $400,000 and $375,000, respectively. The drug industry’s top lobbying group, the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America, donated $325,000.

Health insurer Aetna gave $300,000 and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer gave $275,650. Other top donors included hedge fund billionaire environmentalists Paul Tudor Jones of Connecticut and Thomas Steyer of California, who each gave $250,000.

The DGA’s filing covered the last six months of 2013. The RGA has yet to file that report. Top donors to the RGA in the first half of 2013 include David Koch and deceased Republican donors Bob Perry and Contran Corp. owner Harold Simmons, each of whom contributed $1 million.

The two organizations, based in Washington, D.C., are known as “527” groups. They can accept unlimited donations from individuals, corporations and unions. They then funnel that money into state races through direct contributions and independent expenditures, which usually come in the form of advertisements.

In some states, the groups are the top donors to the candidates.

Democrats hope to avoid a repeat of 2010. That year, Republicans gained five gubernatorial seats, thanks largely to a record fundraising haul that year by the RGA, which took in $87 million under the leadership of then-Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour.

Update, Jan. 30, 2014, 7:25 p.m.: This story has been updated to include information regarding individual donors to the Democratic Governors Association.

The 50 states and the District of Columbia award $12 billion a year in subsidies to businesses each year, but fewer than a quarter of 246 incentive programs disclose how many jobs were created or how many workers were trained, according to a new study.

Fewer than half of those that do report disclose wages paid to workers, according to Good Jobs First, an economic subsidy watchdog group. The report notes that disclosure of subsidies has improved, with all but four states posting at least some information online.

Critics of tax breaks, low-interest loans, grants and other corporate subsidies say government officials should do more to prove the subsidies are needed and ensure promises about jobs and other taxpayer benefits are delivered.

“Taxpayers have the right to know exactly what they are getting in return for their economic development investments,” said Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, which gets about 90 percent of its funding from foundations and also receives some union contributions.

Scrutiny of subsidies is especially important when state budgets are tight, said Phineas Baxandall, senior tax and budget policy analyst for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a consumer advocacy organization. “The misperception is this is free money, especially if gets given out as tax breaks. Every subsidy dollar has to be offset by some cut to another public priority or higher taxes," he said.

Subsidies are popular with politicians because they can help them get elected in two ways: by scoring points with companies that bankroll campaigns and with voters for promises of jobs.

Take Washington, which successfully clinched a deal to have Boeing build its planned 777X airplanes in-state thanks in part to an $8.7 billion tax deal, which Good Jobs First says is “by far the largest in U.S. history.”

Boeing has contributed millions of dollars in campaign contributions the past few decades to state officials and candidates, and two of the top three state subsidies over time have gone to Boeing from Washington.

Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat who pushed for the recent tax deal, received $58,718 in contributions for his 2012 campaign from the Boeing's political action commiteee and its employees — second most among companies and their employees, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of Washington State Public Disclosure Commission’s online campaign finance records.

The analysis also showed campaign contributions from Boeing and its PAC, voluntarily funded by employees, to all candidates and groups spiked in 2002 and contributions from individuals identifying themselves as Boeing employees spiked in 2012 — the election years before the legislature approved the subsidies, $3.2 billion in 2003 and the recent one in 2013.

“There’s just a lot of potential for these kinds of campaign contributions by contractors to be unduly influencing decisions," said Baxandall, of PIRG. He said there should be restrictions on campaign contributions from contractors or companies receiving subsidies and state disclosures about subsidies should include campaign finance data about groups winning deals.

A spokesman for Boeing declined to comment.

It's too early to say how many jobs have been generated from the recent tax deal

But the 2003 pact, where Boeing agreed to build 787s, generated 14,000 jobs, $2.3 million in wages and benefits, and $13.9 million in tax payments in 2012, according to an economic impact study commissioned by Washington Aerospace Partnership, a coalition of business and labor groups and elected officials.

A spokeswoman for Inslee said he has publicly defended the Boeing subsidy.

“For every dollar we put into that, we’re going to get $3 back in increased tax revenue. So it’s a fair thing for taxpayers and it’s a great incentive package for Boeing,” Inslee told TVW, a nonprofit television network in Washington.

The state invested an estimated $1.4 billion from 2004 to 2012 in tax incentives and other investments supporting the aerospace industry, according to the Washington Aerospace Partnership report.

Over that time, the industry generated more than $4 billion in tax revenue for the state, meaning “every $1 of state resources committed to aerospace over this period is associated with more than $2.90 in tax revenues,” according to the report.

Just as a federal effort to reform school discipline gets underway, the country’s most populous state — California — has released new data showing a significant one-year drop in suspensions and expulsions of schoolchildren.

However, Latino and black students in California continue to be affected disproportionately by discipline that removes them from classrooms and often leaves them further behind academically, as the Center for Public Integrity has reported in stories about San Francisco and rural Kern County.

The new data released by California’s Department of Education show that total student expulsions in the Golden State in the 2012-2013 academic year fell by about 12 percent from the previous year. That means about 8,560 students were ordered removed last year for a semester or an entire academic year from their regular schools.

State law requires they be referred to alternative education campuses.

The total number of in-school or out-of-school suspensions fell by 14 percent, to about 609,470 students suspended for a day or several days at one time. 

Black students represent about 6 percent of all students in California, but accounted for 16 percent of suspensions. Latino students are about 53 percent of all students, but were 55 percent of those suspended. White students, 26 percent of enrollment, were 21 percent of those suspended. 

Concerned by research showing that suspensions and expulsions lead to student failure — rather than reversing it — the Obama Administration released an unprecedented set of guidelines in early January urging schools to embrace alternative disciplinary methods that have proven effective at resolving conflict without kicking kids out.  

The administration’s guidelines also advise school districts that students’ civil rights must be respected; both the Department of Education and Justice have fielded complaints about disproportionate punishment meted out to students who are ethnic minorities — for the same infractions as white students — or overly harsh treatment of students who have special needs. 

California’s new data also reveals that a region with a reputation for tough school discipline — the Central Valley’s Kern County — has cut its expulsions but continues to remove students in raw numbers that rival far more populous Los Angeles County.

Kern had an enrollment of only about 178,600 students compared to Los Angeles County’s more than 1.5 million students last year. But in Kern County, 509 students were expelled last year compared to 577 in Los Angeles County.

In the 2010-2011 school year, Kern reported more than 2,570 expulsions.

The Center and KQED Public Radio in San Francisco reported last year on expelled Kern students who were adrift because they were assigned to alternative schools so far away away — up to 40 miles — that their farmworker parents were unable to drive them there.

One student, 13, was isolated at home on independent study except for the one day a week his mother could drive him to school. Despite this arrangement, the alternative school collected full funding as if the boy was on an alternative campus every day; hundreds of other independent study students were subject to similar funding arrangements.    

Additional expelled Kern students were effectively forced to drop out because their farmworker parents could not do their field jobs and drive children to distant alternative campuses. One girl’s parents sent her to a rural Mexican school for several months because her alternative school in Kern was 20 miles away. 

After media exposure and pressure from local community activists, the teens who had dropped out were admitted back into their home high school.

California’s Superintendent of Education, Tom Torlakson, credited the statewide decline in suspensions and expulsions in the 2012-2013 academic year to a concerted drive in many school districts to embrace new discipline methods.  

“Educators across California work hard to keep students in school and learning,” Torlakson said in a press release. “It can be a challenge to find the balance between maintaining a safe learning environment and giving young people the tools and opportunities they need to succeed. But we're working with schools and districts throughout the state to do exactly that.”

A purportedly pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC known as Time for Hillary — which was launched in August by individuals with long histories of financial woes— appears to be partway through a vanishing act.

For months, the Time for Hillary super PAC advertised pro-Clinton apparel for sale on its website, which was little more than an online store.

One tweet in the group’s early days thanked the “hundreds who have donated by purchasing shirts or donating directly.” Another apologized for being “sold out” of pink pro-Hillary t-shirts, promising to “restock asap.”

And as recently as Oct. 1, the group boasted on Twitter that “The government may be shut down but @Time4Hillary is still up and taking orders so you can show your support for @HillaryClinton.”

Yet the super PAC’s website is no longer operational, and a campaign finance document submitted Thursday to the Federal Election Commission says the group didn’t raise or spend a penny in 2013.

The Time for Hillary super PAC — which said its ultimate aim was to register more than 1 million voters —  is connected to Leigh Angelle Gibson and her husband, John A. Gibson, Jr., who may have been using the alias J.R. Worthington in connection with the group.

Leigh Gibson went through Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceedings in 2012, and that same year, a California court ruled that John Gibson owed a developmentally disabled man roughly $10,000. A private investigator has been attempting to find Gibson in relation to that case since March 2013.

"I am still looking for him," said Mike Pirouzian, the private investigator. "He's hiding."

The Center for Public Integrity first highlighted the Gibsons’ connection to the pro-Clinton super PAC in September. Since then, not only has the group’s website gone dark, but several Facebook and Twitter accounts linked to the Gibsons have also been deleted or had their privacy settings increased.

Because super PACs are relatively easy to create and easily branded as vehicles that support popular politicians, they can be attractive ventures not just for political professionals and grassroots activists but also grifters.

Gibson, whose previous business ventures include food trucks, car rental companies, a financial self-help book and an illustrated e-book inspired by the “Power Rangers,” did not respond to emails requesting comment.

One of the last publicly available tweets from a Twitter account linked to him, however, offers this assessment: “Money money money we all need it so why not learn how to manage it.”

American Crossroads, one of the most high-profile conservative groups in the country, donated $53,000 last year to a political group that backs Republicans who support same-sex marriage, records show.

The donation was made to American Unity PAC, a super PAC whose slogan is “promoting and protecting inclusive Republicans.”  Super PACs are political action committees that are allowed to accept unlimited contributions.

American Crossroads, one of the first super PACs, was co-founded by GOP strategists Ed Gillespie and Karl Rove, a former adviser to President George W. Bush. Gillespie himself is now running for the U.S. Senate in Virginia.

Federal Election Commission records show that American Crossroads and its nonprofit sister group, Crossroads GPS, spent $175 million during the 2012 election cycle, mostly on advertising aimed at defeating President Barack Obama.

American Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio said the contribution was designed to aid Republican Gabriel Gomez, a pro-gay marriage U.S. Senate candidate, who was defeated by Democratic Rep. Ed Markey in a June special election.

“Crossroads helped fund some mail, phone and online GOTV efforts by American Unity PAC in the last 10 days of the special election for the U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts,” Collegio wrote in an email.

American Crossroads has backed many more candidates who oppose marriage for gay couples.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, for example, has said that his view is that “marriage itself is a relationship between a man and a woman” and that “a federal amendment to define marriage is necessary.”

The super PAC spent more than $90 million on ads in 2012 trying to boost Romney or urging voters to reject Obama.

American Crossroads also spent $1.3 million in 2012 supporting Tommy Thompson, the Republican nominee for a U.S. Senate seat in Wisconsin, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Thompson, who has opposed gay marriage measures, was defeated by Democrat Tammy Baldwin, the first openly gay person elected to the U.S. Senate.

American Crossroads also spent about $428,000 in 2012 to support former Rep. Heather Wilson, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in New Mexico, who opposed gay marriage. During a 2012 debate on C-SPAN, she said: “I believe that marriage is the union of one man and one woman as husband and wife. And I will stand up and defend that in the United States Senate.”

For his part, Gillespie has said that he believes “marriage is between one man and one woman.”

The contribution was a welcome sign to some Republicans who support marriage rights for gays and lesbians. 

“I’m encouraged by the news,” said Fred Karger, a 2012 GOP presidential candidate and gay rights activist. “Hopefully this Republican Party, which I’ve been a member of since my youth, will come around and do what it did in the middle of the last century when it led the fight in many instances, for civil rights for African-Americans.”

Most of the $263,000 raised by the American Unity PAC in 2013 came from Paul Singer, a billionaire hedge fund manager who co-founded the group in 2012. American Crossroads’ contribution makes up one-fifth of its receipts, according to a newly filed report with the FEC.

Republican Sen. David Vitter, who announced last week he’ll be running for governor of Louisiana in 2015, joins the race with powerful energy interests at his side.

A super PAC that supports his candidacy, the Fund for Louisiana's Future, raised $1.5 million last year, according to a new Federal Election Commission filing.

More than $900,000, or nearly two-thirds of the total the group reported receiving in 2013, came from energy and energy services companies, as well as their employees and their advocates.

Lockport, La.-based Bollinger Shipyards, Inc., for instance, gave the fund $100,000, while Hornbeck Offshore Operators LLC, which is based in Covington, La., gave $25,000.

The political group also received $100,000 from the American Chemistry Council — whose members include Marathon Petroleum, Northern Tier Energy and affiliates of BP, Chevron, Shell and ExxonMobil — and $30,000 from Valero Energy's political action committee.

Many of the contributions were tied to offshore drilling — which helps fuel Louisiana’s economy but has also been antagonistic to other key industries such as fishing and tourism.

The PAC hunted for cash — and alligators— last year at its Louisiana Bayou Weekend fundraiser, which featured Vitter as a guest. Vitter and the PAC can’t coordinate their spending but they can hold fundraisers together, with some restrictions.

The Fund for Louisiana’s Future is currently pushing to make Louisiana lift its $100,000 limit on contributions to PACs.

Neither Vitter nor a representative of the Fund for Louisiana’s Future immediately responded to calls and emails seeking comment.

Alison Fitzgerald contributed to this report.

Democrats are embracing super PACs — the independent political money groups they once derided — and are easily outpacing Republicans in the race for cash, according to the most recent campaign finance filings.

In 2013, the three highest-profile Democratic super PACs focused on congressional elections collectively raised more than $22 million — about four times more than their five mainstream GOP counterparts, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of new filings submitted to the Federal Election Commission.

Republicans, meanwhile, are again facing an intraparty struggle as tea party-affiliated super PACs take aim at mainstream Republicans in primary battles.

Super PACs, which roared to life after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, differ from campaign committees and traditional political action committees because they can raise unlimited amounts of money from individuals, unions and corporations. Liberals blasted the Citizens United decision and have scoffed at the groups it spawned.

Still, super PACs are key to the Democrats’ plans for this year’s congressional elections.

Senate in play

The Senate Majority PAC, which aims to help Democrats retain control of Congress’ upper chamber, raised $8.6 million in 2013, and the House Majority PAC raised $7.8 million.

Additionally, the Democratic-aligned American Bridge 21st Century super PAC — which specializes in opposition research, the type of information that often makes it into campaign ads as segments of damning video or audio — raised $5.9 million.

“Senate Majority PAC is necessary because we have to fight back against the Koch brothers and other conservative outside groups who are flooding millions of dollars into races trying to buy the Senate,” said spokesman Ty Matsdorf. “We can't fight with one arm tied behind our back.”

Billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch have spent millions backing conservative causes — the specter of their involvement this year has become an effective fundraising tool for the Democrats.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an independent, ranked as Senate Majority PAC’s biggest backer last year, giving $2.5 million, while hedge fund executive Donald Sussman — the husband of Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine — was top donor to the House Majority PAC, at $850,000.

Liberal billionaire George Soros, meanwhile, contributed $500,000 to American Bridge in December, earning him the top spot among that group’s 2013 donors.

Several labor unions also pumped sizeable sums into the three groups’ coffers.

While Democratic-aligned groups are winning the fundraising race as of now, deep-pocketed donors can shift the scales overnight should they choose to pour new money into either super PACs or politically active nonprofits, the favored vehicles of the Kochs.

Poor showing for GOP

American Crossroads and the Conservative Victory Project, two super PACs connected to GOP strategist Karl Rove, each reported comparatively paltry receipts in 2013. American Crossroads, which was the top-spending super PAC during the 2010 midterm election, raised about $3.6 million in 2013. And the Conservative Victory Project raised just $16,500.

Two other GOP-aligned super PACs focused on helping the party retain control of the House — the Congressional Leadership Fund and the YG Action Fund —raised $1.1 million and $344,000, respectively.

And a recently launched super PAC called America Rising, which specializes in opposition research, much like the Democrats’ American Bridge, raised about $478,000. One of its top donors was Restore Our Future, the super PAC that attempted to boost Republican Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential race, that gave it $100,000.

Texas billionaire Harold Simmons, who died in December, ranked as the top giver to the Congressional Leadership Fund, at $200,000. His company, Contran Corp., ranked as the No. 1 donor to American Crossroads last year, having contributed $1 million.

American Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio vowed that his group would “make a big impact in the 2014 elections” and help “win a GOP majority in the Senate and help expand the majority in the House.”

First though, the GOP establishment must survive an intraparty fight, where conservative hardliners — armed with their own super PACs and nonprofits — are pushing Republican candidates rightward and even angling for their preferred candidates to triumph over incumbents they dislike.

Groups such as the Club for Growth and Senate Conservatives Fund — which have tapped into the energy and pocketbooks of tea party and anti-tax activists — are looking to replace GOP senators who they deem insufficiently conservative.

Republicans vs. Republicans

The potential targets include Mississippi’s Sen. Thad Cochran, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Club for Growth President Chris Chocola, a former Republican congressman from Indiana, has made it clear that his group is not afraid to go after incumbents.

Club for Growth’s political machine, he said last year“helps elect candidates who support limited government and free markets. Unfortunately, the two goals coincide less often than the Republican establishment cares to admit. “

The sentiment has also been echoed by Jim DeMint, the former South Carolina Republican senator who founded the Senate Conservatives Fund and now serves as president of the Heritage Foundation.

“We must remember that there is a distinction between the Republican Party and the conservative movement,” DeMint declared at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. “National Republican leaders have not advanced a conservative agenda for almost 20 years.”

Already, the Club for Growth’s super PAC has spent more than $200,000 on ads backing Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel, who is challenging Cochran. And the Senate Conservatives Fund, through its super PAC and traditional political action committee arm, has spent nearly $1 million combined on ads backing either McDaniel or Matt Bevin, the conservative businessman challenging McConnell.

In 2013, the Club for Growth Action super PAC raised $2.6 million, and the Senate Conservatives Action super PAC raised $1.6 million.

Wealthy home builder Bob Perry, a Texan who died in April, ranked as the top donor to Senate Conservatives Action, giving $1 million.

Meanwhile, investor Virginia James of New Jersey and Illinois businessman Richard Uihlein each gave $500,000 to the Club for Growth’s super PAC last year, ranking as top donors to the anti-tax group.

Super PACs to ‘scare off opponents’

Super PACs supporting the candidacy of a single politician have become increasingly commonplace.

“Candidate-specific super PACs can help scare off opponents or signal to opponents and potential opponents that their favored candidate will have ample funding,” said Jessica Levinson, a professor at the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

That phenomenon is already unfolding in Kentucky, Mississippi and South Carolina — and a host of other states from Alaska to North Carolina.

Last April, McConnell’s allies launched a super PAC called Kentuckians for Strong Leadership to aid in his re-election.

The group raised $2.4 million in 2013. It received large contributions from the likes of real estate mogul Donald Trump ($50,000), coal executive Joe Craft ($100,000) and Florida-based NextEra Energy, a Fortune 200 utilities company ($100,000).

Graham’s supporters, likewise, created a group called the West Main Street Values PAC, which raised about $130,000 in 2013, including $50,000 from GOP fundraiser and former U.S. ambassador to Belgium Sam Fox and $25,000 from the political action committee of Boeing.

And in mid-January, Cochran’s backers launched a super PAC called Mississippi Conservatives. That group has not yet disclosed any of its funders, but it has already spent more than $200,000 on pro-Cochran ads.

Republicans are not the only ones getting in on the action.

Allies of embattled Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina recently launched a group called Wolfheel PAC, and Sen. Mark Begich of Alaska is being backed by a super PAC called Put Alaska First.

The pro-Hagan Wolfheel PAC, which registered with the FEC in early January, has not yet been required to report its funders.

Put Alaska First, meanwhile, collected $287,500 last year.

One of the largest donors to the pro-Begich political group was actually the Senate Majority PAC, which transferred $170,000 to Put Alaska First last year. A Washington-based fishing company headed by a Begich donor named Hae Joo “Helena” Park also contributed $100,000.

Then there’s We Are Kentucky, a super PAC that is backing Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes, who is vying for McConnell’s Senate seat. It raised $260,500 since its formation in July. Two labor unions — the United Autoworkers and the plumbers and pipefitters’ United Association — each pitched in $100,000.

'Ready for Hillary' to play in midterms

At least two Democratic-aligned, candidate-specific super PACs are also already making preparations for the next presidential race.

The first is Ready for Hillary, which was formed a year ago. The other is Priorities USA Action, which helped President Barack Obama win a second term in the White House and now plans to aid Hillary Clinton, should she opt to run in 2016.

Ready for Hillary spokesman Seth Bringman told the Center for Public Integrity that his group, which raised $4 million in 2013, will engage in races in which Clinton herself has endorsed candidates.

“We will conduct additional efforts to amplify Hillary’s endorsements,” Bringman said. “Success in the midterm elections is vital to our party.”

Peter Kauffmann, a spokesman for Priorities USA Action, meanwhile, said that his group, which still has $3 million in reserves, does not intend to be involved in the 2014 midterm elections.

As Democratic and Republican groups alike look to keep increasing the size of their war chests, one thing’s for certain: The proliferation of super PACs will lead to a barrage of ads this year — particularly in the Senate’s battleground states.

“Residents of states with high-profile Senate races will be inundated with ads,” said Erika Franklin Fowler, a director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which monitors political advertising.

In many places, she continued, “ads have already started.”

Ben Wieder and Erin Quinn contributed to this report.

The Republican Governors Association heads into a crucial election year having outraised its Democratic counterpart $50.3 million to $28 million in 2013, thanks largely to donations from corporations and billionaires like industrialist David Koch.

Koch, hedge fund chief Paul Singer, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, and Leslie Wexner, CEO of the Limited Brands, each donated more than $1 million to the group last year while tobacco company Reynolds American, Koch Industries and health insurer Wellpoint each contributed more than $500,000, according to Internal Revenue Service records posted Friday.

The cash advantage is welcome given the challenges facing the RGA’s leader.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the RGA chairman, is embroiled in an ongoing scandal in his home state that could make it hard for him to bring in cash and votes in a year when 36 governors’ races are on the ballot.

With members of his party calling for him to step down, Christie may have trouble matching the Midas touch of former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who raised a staggering $87 million to help the party capture five new governorships in 2010.

In addition, two of the RGA’s most reliable and generous donors — Texans Bob Perry and Harold Simmons — died in 2013. Perry was the RGA’s most generous benefactor, contributing more than $12 million over the past five years, half the total in 2010 alone.

While the RGA will likely still outraise the Democratic Governors Association, it will have to contend with a motivated union political machine that combined with the DGA actually accounted for more outside spending than the RGA in 2012.

And money certainly doesn’t guarantee success at the ballot box.

“You can’t just buy these elections,” said Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “There are all sorts of other factors that go into it.”

2014 outlook

The early read on 2014 elections is that the Democrats are better poised to win back a few of the governorships they lost in 2010.

Recent polls show that fewer than one in four Pennsylvania voters believe Republican Gov. Tom Corbett deserves a second term, while 46 percent of Florida voters prefer Democratic-challenger (and former Republican governor) Charlie Crist to incumbent Republican Gov. Rick Scott. Maine’s GOP Gov. Paul LePage, meanwhile, faces a three-way race without a clear-cut favorite.

“The Democrats definitely have some seats to pick and choose from where they have a real chance of winning,” said Lou Jacobson, the deputy editor of fact-checking website PolitiFact and a gubernatorial handicapper for Governing magazine.

The most vulnerable Democrats, meanwhile, appear to be Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn and Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, according to recent polls by the left-leaning Public Policy Polling. Arkansas, where Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe is stepping down due to term limits, is also a toss-up.

Democrats’ advantage going into this election year is in part a logical byproduct of Republicans’ success in consolidating power in 2010. The GOP controls 29 governorships across the country and 22 are being contested this year.

“There’s just naturally going to be more targets for the party that doesn’t hold quite as many seats,” said Kondik, of Virginia.

Even so, he said that with 29 of the 36 elections featuring incumbents, there’s likely to be less change than in 2010, when only 13 incumbents were running.

The RGA and DGA are what's known as "527" groups. They can accept unlimited donations from labor unions, corporations and individuals, but cannot make donations to federal candidates. They can, however, have an impact on the states, where campaign finance rules are often much looser.

Maintenance costs

Broadly speaking, the RGA’s top donors are billionaires and corporations. The DGA relies more on labor unions, but also sees its share of corporate money as CEOs hedge their bets.

Even without Perry and Simmons, the RGA has plenty of big-money benefactors including Koch and Adelson.

Meanwhile, the DGA received first-time donations from billionaire hedge fund managers Paul Tudor Jones and Thomas Steyer, who each gave $250,000.

Still, the group’s largest donors in 2013 were labor unions and pharmaceutical companies. The International Association of Firefighters and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, donated $400,000 and $375,000, respectively, while the drug industry’s top lobbying group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, donated $325,000.

The heavy corporate and union backing of the groups has raised questions in the past about whether the organizations have avoided bans on corporate and union contributions in state races through the use of a Byzantine network of state and federal finance political action committees.

Since 2000, the RGA has given more than $50 million directly to candidates, according to data from the National Institute on Money in State Politics, while the DGA has given nearly $29 million.

The Center reported that In 2010 the Washington, D.C.-based RGA routed $1.5 million first through its state affiliate in Wisconsin and then to its state affiliate in Pennsylvania before the money found its way into Corbett’s campaign war chest. Corporate donations are illegal in both Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

That shuffling of funds is fairly common to both groups, said Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, an assistant professor of law at Stetson University who researched their activity between 2002 and 2010.

“It looks like both of the groups [are] really skirting the line,” she said.

It’s now much easier for the RGA and DGA to spend money in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which invalidated state bans and limits on outside spending by corporations and unions.

The spending often comes from groups that do not reveal their backers, and use the funds to buy negative television ads and mailers. These groups are not permitted to coordinate with the candidate, however.

Those rulings have contributed to a spike in outside spending at the state level. Outside groups, led by the RGA and DGA, spent more than $209 million in 2012 and the amount is expected to be much greater in 2014.

It’s not clear yet whether Christie’s fundraising abilities will be hampered by the ongoing political scandal in his home state.

If he were to step down in response to the scandal, he wouldn’t be the first governor to do so. Then-South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford abdicated the position after revelations that he had secretly visited his mistress in Argentina while claiming to be hiking the Appalachian Trail.

Sanford’s departure ushered in Barbour, and with it the most lucrative fundraising period in RGA history.

John Dunbar contributed to this report.

While lawmakers in Washington and state capitals continue to obsess about Obamacare — either how to make sure it is being implemented as Congress intended, or how to make sure it isn’t — Massachusetts legislators have focused their attention on the next phase of reform: health care costs.

Massachusetts is where the nation’s most sweeping reform bill was enacted in 2006 — when Mitt Romney was governor. But like the federal Affordable Care Act, the Bay State’s “Act Providing Access to Affordable, Quality Accountable Health Care” sought primarily to change the way health insurers do business and to reduce the number of uninsured residents.

The state has made good progress. Because low-income Bay Staters were among the first to buy subsidized coverage on the country’s first Obamacare-like exchange, and because insurers there could no longer discriminate based on gender or health status, the percentage of uninsured residents fell from 8.4 percent in 2006 to 3 percent last year. Another reason for that drop is the Obamacare-like requirement that most residents must get health insurance or pay a penalty.

But while bringing more people into coverage can help reduce health care spending — in part by enabling previously uninsured folks to get care in more appropriate settings than a hospital ER — neither Romneycare nor Obamacare went far enough.

Now, once again, Massachusetts lawmakers are leading the nation, or at least trying to. And this year, we’ll likely begin to see if a broad-based and far-reaching law that passed there in 2012 will ultimately be a model for the rest of the nation.

The official name of that Romneycare follow-up law — An Act Improving the Quality of Health Care and Reducing Costs Through Increased Transparency, Efficiency and Innovation — is cumbersome, but does a pretty good job of capturing its goals. Among the first initiatives to be undertaken as a result of the law: finding out just how much waste there is in the system — and why waste exists in the first place.

After a year of data collection and analysis, the state’s newly created Health Policy Commission estimated last month that between 21 percent and 39 percent of all health spending in Massachusetts in 2012 could be considered wasteful. The panel found, for example, that the average hospital readmission rate in Massachusetts was higher than the national rate for Medicare beneficiaries for many major conditions. The group also concluded that diagnostic tools were often being used far more than necessary. More than 20 percent of patients with uncomplicated lower back pain were getting imaging studies against established medical guidelines.

Lawmakers have given the commission responsibility for ongoing monitoring of health care utilization and costs, and for setting and enforcing a benchmark for annual health care cost growth. That benchmark will be tied to growth in the state’s economy.

Among the Commission’s areas of jurisdiction: mergers and acquisitions among health care providers. Hospitals nationwide have been consolidating, which has reduced competition in many markets. As a result of the 2012 law, health care providers in Massachusetts must give 60 days’ notice to the Commission before going forward with a planned merger or acquisition.

The ability of the panel to slow or halt consolidation already is being tested. A review of a proposed merger between Partners HealthCare, the state’s largest hospital and physician network, and a smaller Boston area hospital raised red flags. Regulators are pressuring Partners to drop its plans because of concerns that the merger will lead to higher costs. Partners is pushing back, contending the merger will save $27 million a year in health care costs.

The outcome undoubtedly will depend on how successful Partners’ lobbying and PR efforts are.

Another issue on which regulators can expect pushback from doctors and hospitals is how health care providers are paid. The 2012 law requires the Medicaid office and other state agencies to implement alternatives to the prevailing fee-for-service reimbursement scheme.

The law also seeks to improve transparency around health care costs and quality. Massachusetts health plans have to offer a toll-free number and a website that allow consumers to obtain information on the estimated price of medical care and how much they likely will have to pay out of their own pockets.

In addition, the Commission has some carrots that might encourage health care providers to offer more cost-effective, patient-focused care. Last month, for example, it awarded Charlton Memorial Hospital $400,000 to improve the care of high-risk patients. The hospital will spend the money hiring three registered nurses to coordinate certain patients’ ongoing care after they’re discharged. The focus will be on complex cases and patients with multiple diagnoses who make frequent trips to the ER.

Policymakers from around the country will be watching Massachusetts closely to see if the state really can get a handle on health care costs.

Investigative reporting, done right, is an exacting and exhaustive form of specialized reporting.  A single project can consume a year or more of intensive  work, encompassing millions of pages of documents and massive datasets. An investigative series is never published without rounds of editing and rewriting, fact checking and legal review. Only then, when it is finally made public, does the point of it all become clear: more than any other form of journalism, investigative reporting matters. It is noticed. It finds a growing audience. It can have a tremendous impact, helping people and instigating real change. And sometimes, it even wins awards.

A pair of The Center for Public Integrity’s deepest investigations have just been named as two of the six finalists for the highly regarded Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. This prize is awarded annually by the Joan Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.  

I am proud that our reporting is being so recognized. I am even prouder of the hard work that has been done behind the scenes for so long by the investigative journalists, men and women, associated with the Center for Public Integrity and our global reporting arm, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

Secrecy for Sale

One of our finalists is an investigative project that involved more than 2.5 million secret files of offshore tax havens, took 18 months of work, and resulted in 50 stories by 112 journalists in 58 countries — one of the largest journalistic collaborations ever. And it has had an immediate worldwide impact. You can see the entire ICIJ Offshore Leaks Project at “Secrecy for Sale: Inside the Global Offshore Money Maze,”  and read about the global impact here.

By exposing the companies and trusts behind the hidden dealings of politicians, con men and the mega rich, ICIJ’s work has sparked official investigations, sweeping policy changes and high-profile resignations around the world. The European Union’s top tax official has called Offshore Leaks “the most significant trigger” behind Europe’s newfound resolve to crack down on offshore hideaways and global tax dodging.

Even in China, which scrambled to block online access to ICIJ reports exposing offshore holdings of political and financial elites there, says it will step up  participation in efforts to combat tax evasion and crack down on tax fraud. And ICIJ’s work continues. The fact that 120,000 names in the tax haven database are now public has generated hundreds of tips for further investigative work. And the world’s tax authorities are encouraged because the number of citizens voluntarily disclosing secret offshore accounts is going up. In Germany, for example, the number tripled in 2013and the disclosures are expected to result in a surge of revenue to the German treasury.

Breathless and Burdened

Our other Goldsmith finalist is an investigative project that took a year of work byone young, intrepid reporter, Chris Hamby, and his editors. They worked with just one media partner, ABC News. Chris focused on sick miners in central Appalachia who were denied their health benefits despite strong evidence of serious disease. He interviewed dozens of coal miners and family members, explored hundreds of thousands of previously classified legal filings and built an original database with information on more than 1,500 cases of suspected black lung.

The headline on one story makes it clear what he found: “Johns Hopkins medical unit rarely finds black lung, helping coal industry defeat miners' claims.” The entire series of reports is here.  

The impact from “Breathless and Burdened: Dying from Black Lung, Buried by Law and Medicine” is still unfolding. There will be more reports ahead. Johns Hopkins Medicine suspended its black lung program pending a review in the immediate aftermath of our reports. Our work revealed that one Johns Hopkins doctor was involved in reading a total of more than 3,400 X-rays since 2000 at the behest of the coal industry. In these cases, he never found a case of complicated black lung, and he read an X-ray as positive for the earlier stages of the disease in less than 4 percent of cases. Other doctors reading the same X-rays found  black lung indicated again and again.

The upshot of this project is that more miners are likely to get the black lung benefits they deserve because of our work.

These are just two of our recent investigative projects, representing countless hours of reporting, spanning years of effort. Once again, it’s gratifying to see this work recognized by award nominations. It’s nicer still to see the impact this work is having in Appalachia and around the world. 

The first generation of super PACs operated as shadow party committees, embodied in American Crossroads, the pro-Republican behemoth co-founded in 2010 by Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie.

Next came candidate-specific super PACs, like those that last year aided President Barack Obama and his GOP rival, Mitt Romney.

The latest iteration is the single-issue vanity super PAC — a group backed by a single, wealthy donor focusing on an issue of national importance, such as climate change or gun violence.

Case in point: Thomas Steyer.

An environmental activist and former hedge fund executive, Steyer invested more than $11.1 million into his two super PACs last year. That’s more than any other individual, union or company gave to super PACs in 2013, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of campaign finance records.

Steyer’s NextGen Climate Action Committee and CE Action Committee hammered home the message that politicians need to take action on global warming during the Virginia gubernatorial race and the special U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts.

This stands in stark contrast to the 2012 election cycle when Steyer did not donate a dime to super PACs.

Steyer "is committed to engaging in campaigns where climate is on the ballot," said Suzanne Henkels, the deputy press secretary for NextGen Climate Action, who added that the CE Action Committee "is in the process of winding down its operations."

Super PACs became a household term following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision in 2010. Unlike candidates, these political committees can accept unlimited donations from billionaires, corporations and unions and use the money to pay for ads that support or oppose candidates.

Republican groups, like American Crossroads, were quicker to welcome the new rules than Democrats. This election cycle, however, Democrats have embraced the big-money groups in a bid to retain control of the U.S. Senate.

No. 2 on the list of 2013’s super donors is a billionaire who was once a member of each party and is now an independent funding his own issue-driven super PAC.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg contributed $8.7 million to super PACs last year, mostly to his own Independence USA PAC, a group that favors stricter gun control laws.

The outfit backed Democrat Terry McAuliffe in his winning 2013 bid to be Virginia's governor. It was also active in a U.S. House race in Illinois and the special U.S. Senate election in New Jersey.

Bloomberg has said the super PAC is designed to support moderates who “will help protect Americans from the scourge of gun violence, improve our schools and advance our freedoms," including gay couples’ right to marry.

Bloomberg gave about $6 million to the Independence USA PAC in 2013.

He also contributed $2.5 million to the pro-Democratic Senate Majority PAC and $250,000 to Americans for Responsible Solutions, a pro-gun control super PAC founded by former Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords of Arizona.

Then there’s Jonathan Soros, the son of financier George Soros.

The younger Soros contributed more than $1 million last year to a hybrid super PAC he co-founded, known as Friends of Democracy. That was enough to rank Soros among the largest Democratic-leaning super PAC donors in 2013, although not quite enough to earn him a spot on the top 10 list.

The elder Soros, for his part, contributed about half as much as his son last year, including $500,000 to the Democratic-aligned American Bridge 21st Century super PAC, $25,000 to the Ready for Hillary super PAC and $5,000 to Friends of Democracy.

Friends of Democracy is designed to be the anti-super PAC super PAC. It supports candidates who favor campaign finance reform and seeks to “stop the power of money in politics.” As a hybrid super PAC, it can make direct donations to candidates from one fund that accepts only contributions of limited size and produce political ads from another fund that is unrestricted.

Numerous labor unions peppered the list of the 10 largest super PAC donors in 2013, including the National Education Association (No. 4), the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners (No. 5), the AFL-CIO (No. 7) and AFSCME (No. 8).

Also on the list: the Democratic Governors Association (No. 3), which largely used its super PAC to funnel money to McAuliffe's campaign in Virginia, and Texas trial lawyers Steve and Amber Mostyn, who mostly gave through their law firm (No. 10).

In all, the top 10 super donors collectively gave more than $47 million, accounting for nearly one-third of the roughly $150 million raised by super PACs last year, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s research.

The biggest Republican super PAC donor in 2013 was Bob Perry, who contributed $3.1 million and whose death in April has left a void in GOP fundraising circles.

That sum ranked him as No. 6 on the super donor list.

The largest beneficiary of Perry’s giving was a hybrid super PAC called Texans for a Conservative Majority, which received $2 million. That group has actively worked to help Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, fend off a conservative primary challenger.

Many of the deep-pocketed GOP donors who ranked among the most generous givers during the 2012 election cycle have yet to open their checkbooks for super PACs during this election cycle.

Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson did not contribute a cent to super PACs in 2013. Nor did his wife Miriam Adelson. The couple contributed more than $90 million to such groups during the previous election cycle.

Similarly quiet were GOP mega-donors Joe Ricketts, Robert Rowling and William Koch, the lesser-known brother of billionaire industrialists David and Charles Koch. The more famous Koch brothers have typically used nonprofits, rather than super PACs, to weigh in on policy debates and elections.

The only other Republican to break the list of the top 10 super PAC donors in 2013 was John Jordan, a California vintner who ranked ninth overall after contributing $1.7 million to a super PAC that backed underdog GOP Senate candidate Gabriel Gomez in the Massachusetts special election last June.

His super PAC has since disbanded.

Ben Wieder contributed to this report.

Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives introduced legislation to create a voluntary public financing system for House candidates Wednesday in an attempt to “combat the influence of big-money politics.”

Rep. John Sarbanes, D-Md., introduced the bill, titled the “Government by the People Act.” The legislation has more than 100 co-sponsors including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

The proposal will “make the voices of everyday citizens as important as the big donors out there,” Sarbanes said Wednesday at a press conference in Washington, D.C.

Under his plan, when politicians receive donations of $150 or less, that money would be matched at a 6-to-1 ratio. Individual contributors would also be eligible for a $25 tax credit.

Sarbanes told the Center for Public Integrity the matching fund would be paid for closing tax loopholes affecting “industries that have all this influence.”

Doing so, he continued, would allow you to “underwrite a system like this for 50 years.”

To qualify, candidates must agree to accept no more than $1,000 per donor and raise at least 50 percent of their donations from in-state contributors. (The plan would not match any portion of donations larger than $150.)

Furthermore, if a candidate agrees to fund his or her campaign exclusively with donations of $150 or less, contributions would be matched at a 9-to-1 ratio.

Candidates could also receive an additional $500,000 matching gift in the final 60-day home stretch of a campaign if they raise at least $50,000 from small-dollar givers during that period.

In addition, candidates who take political action committee money can only receive matching funds if the PAC limits the contributions it receives to $150 per individual per year.

Sarbanes and his allies argue that the matching fund incentivizes candidates to recruit grassroots donors who feel underrepresented in the nation’s capital.

A tiny fraction of Americans provide the bulk of contributions to candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Sarbanes’ bill, officially known as H.R. 20, has been endorsed by a range of advocacy groups, including Public Citizen, the Sierra Club, the NAACP and several labor unions.

It currently has just one Republican co-sponsor, Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina. The House GOP leadership is not expected to embrace it.