SPARC and OSTP Got Cozy
"SPARC <-> OSTP" shows how deceiving government employees made for some coziness leading to the Nelson Memo.
I’ve been writing about SPARC for some time now, unearthing some interesting facts and potentialities about the entity which aren’t part of the prevailing narrative of SPARC as an independent non-profit coalition rather than a subsidiary project inside a lobbying firm.
- SPARC is a project of the New Venture Fund (NVF), a “dark money” political fundraising entity taxed as a 501(c)3 and registered as a lobbying firm.
- SPARC is not an independent non-profit
- The Executive Director (Heather Joseph) has her salary paid by NVF, a registered lobbying firm
- What was formerly known as the SPARC Steering Committee is now referred to as the NVF-SPARC Steering Committee in governance documents
- NVF retains for itself “ultimate discretion” in the selection of SPARC’s Executive Director
- SPARC has not portrayed itself accurately for most of its existence, only divulging its relationship to NVF after reporting here and elsewhere exposed the NVF relationship
- SPARC has variously attempted to portray itself as a grassroots organization, a non-profit, or a coalition, and not as a project of a registered lobbying firm
- It has scrupulously avoided divulging its relationship with NVF when interacting with government employees
- SPARC has variously attempted to portray itself as a grassroots organization, a non-profit, or a coalition, and not as a project of a registered lobbying firm
Over the past few years, I’ve been using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to get more information about what SPARC has been up to with the NIH and OSTP. You can read various posts about their inordinate influence on policy, government employee’s reliance on SPARC (assuming it was a non-profit or coalition, and not a lobbying firm’s project), SPARC’s poor governance, their employees’ dalliances with oligarchs, their undisclosed conflicts of interest, how they were briefly named to an NIH Search Committee until a FOIA request and reporting ruined that, and so forth via these posts (there are more, as well, so feel free to search):
- Dear SPARC Steering Committee (a good omnibus of problems at SPARC)
- NCBI, SPARC, NVF, and FOIA
- SPARC Quietly Divulges Information, Adds a Risky Fib
- SPARC’s Thumb on the Scale
- SPARC’s Anvil on the Scale
- SPARC, the Dark, and Oligarchs
Now, I have the final deliverable from a FOIA request to OSTP covering the time of the Nelson Memo’s formulation and release.