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The Center for Responsive Politics joins other watchdog organizations in urging House and Senate committees to make their deficit recommendations public.

A bipartisan group of congressional representatives has introduced legislation to require the 12 members of the debt supercommittee to immediately enact transparency measures that would bring its work in full view of the public. And it can't come soon enough. Tell your representative to support H.R. 2860!

We can't leave it up to campaigns to voluntarily disclose the names of their major fund-raisers. The public needs to be able to gauge for itself whether the people elevated to political appointments got there based on the merits or by virtue of their prowess as elite "bundlers." Ahead of the 2008 presidential election, prodding from watchdogs including the Center for Responsive Politics helped force campaigns to voluntarily release information about their top bundlers, but no law requires the release of this vital information. As Democrat Barack Obama plans to raise upwards of $1 billion for his 2012 re-election campaign, we need to know who is helping haul in these massive sums. Learn more at OpenSecrets.org

The Transparency in Government Act of 2011 is a broad legislative effort intended to make the work of Congress and the executive branch more transparent by creating laws and regulations that would bring more information online and available to the public in a timely manner. The draft legislation is an amalgamation of bills that have already been introduced, along with new provisions. If enacted, it would create historic changes in the way the executive and legislative branches provide information to the public, and it would foster a better and more complete understanding by the public of how the government works. Learn more at OpenSecrets.org.

Is a candidate near you charging his morning coffee and haircuts to his donors? It's hard to tell. Currently, donors who want to know how their money was spent can't really tell, and watchdog groups fear that the vague and generic terms can mask conflicts of interest or cover up inordinate and inappropriate spending. The Federal Election Commission should develop a list of acceptable descriptions so that one campaign's "flowers" are not another's "fundraising expenses." Learn more at OpenSecrets.org

The loose rules surrounding this type of political action committee has led some to describe them as giant slush funds. Currently, there is no explicit ban on personal use of leadership PAC funds by politicians. This raises major ethical questions. In addition, contributors can give far more money to leadership PACs than to the sponsoring politicians' campaign committees, which can help certain individual contributors court extra undue influence. New regulation should bring these committees closer in line with their campaign counterparts, with higher scrutiny and tighter restriction on expenditures. Learn more at OpenSecrets.org.

The Federal Election Commission's rulemaking regarding donor disclosure requirements for the political advertisements known as independent expenditures is entirely insufficient. Under current rules, nonprofit groups can raise money directly from corporations, unions and whatever other domestic sources, and, as long as those contributions or dues were not made for the express purpose of making independent expenditures, they do not need to disclose those donors. The Supreme Court justices that affirmed the crucial role played by disclosure in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010 clearly did not examine the exact language of the FEC's rulemaking in this area. Strengthening disclosure requirements to close this loophole is urgently needed. Learn more at OpenSecrets.org

Congressional financial disclosure reports are filed once a year, but they aren't easy reading. These materials—which provide crucial information about lawmakers' finances and potential conflicts of interest -- ought to be available in a searchable, sortable, downloadable and machine-readable format. Currently, the U.S. House of Representatives makes these documents available as .pdf files, while the U.S. Senate delivers only paper copies of this information to people who visit its Capitol Hill perch. Tell Congress it's time to make a leap forward into the Internet age! Learn more at OpenSecrets.org.

Senate campaign committees remain the only federal political committees not required to file their financial disclosure reports electronically with the Federal Election Commission. This means that it often take weeks, and sometimes months, to get detailed information about who is funding these politicians' war chests. All the while, the government spends hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money to enter the Senate's paper records into digital databases, and hundreds of thousands of pages of paper are wasted. Luckily, some lawmakers are trying to change this.

Five things that the Super Congress should post on its website: *Live webcasts of all official meetings and hearings *The Committee's report should be posted for 72 hours before a final committee vote *Disclosure of every meeting held with lobbyists and other powerful interests *Disclosure of campaign contributions as they are received (on campaign sites, not the committee site) *Financial disclosures of Committee members and staffers