The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation announced today that the Deposit Insurance Fund has dipped to a low of $10.4 billion at the end of June — that’s a decrease of 77 percent from a year ago when the fund, which covers deposits in a bank failure, had $45.2 billion.

The FDIC report also found that one in four financial institutions are currently unprofitable.

Subsidyscope.com, a joint project between the Sunlight Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts, has been keeping track of failed banks as as well as its effect on the deposit insurance fund.

Source: FDIC Quarterly Banking Profile

The fund is dangerously close to being depleted — it’s reserve ratio, a measurement of the fund against insured deposits, was .22 percent at the end of June. By law, the fund is supposed to remain within 1.15 percent and 1.5 percent of all insured deposits. If the ratio falls below the lower limit, the FDIC must raise assessment rates on covered financial institutions.

In May, Congress approved an increase in a line of credit at the Department of Treasury to the FDIC, should the fund be depleted. The line of credit was increased to $100 billion with temporary borrowing authority of $500 billion. FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair said today that they do not expect to tap that line of credit “at this point in time.”

The only time that the fund was depleted was during the savings and loan crisis in the 1980s, when the FDIC borrowed $15 billion from the Treasury Department.

Real Times Investigations’ Luke Roziak uses the Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker to expose an Israeli spy with “one of the richest contracts to lobby for a foreign client.” Anything that involves $6.5 million and bizarre land deals in Zimbabwe is worth reading.

The Washington Post profiled super-lobbyist Heather Podesta a couple of days ago. A big focus in the story is the jet-setting life a top lobbyist must lead to get to the big fundraising parties. Dancing with the Ways & Means Chair one night (”Doesn’t get any better than that … A kiss from the chairman.”) and tasting wines at Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s vineyard a few days later. This is “the Summer of the Lobbyist.”

Tim O’Reilly asks, “What does Gov 2.0 mean to you?”

Even though we haven’t discussed the disclosure of detainee abuse photos or memos, I found this post by Marc Ambinder illuminating as to how a commitment to transparency can have unintended consequences.

And then there were three. After 47 great entries, we have three finalists in the Apps for America contest, and now it is time for us to figure out the winners. After taking a look at the winners, there’s instructions on how to vote at the end of the post. The finalists are in random order:

GovPulse.us

GovPulse is a Federal Register browser. The Federal Register is the official journal of the federal government of the United States. In it, you find any kind of notice, notification and solicitation that a federal agency puts out. GovPulse parses it and gives you a way to browse the tens-of-thousands-of-pages-log register by agency, category or date. What’s also compelling about it is the visualizations and analysis the software does on top of the register. For instance, check out the agency page to see sparklines of the notices from each agency, or the map of places mentioned by an agency.

ThisWeKnow.org

This we know is probably best described as the EveryBlock for federal data. Type in your zip code or city and state, and ThisWeKnow will provide you with details that the federal government has about your community. The depth of information in the site is incredible. You can see the mass exodus occurring in Bellevue, NE or the breakdown of people diagnosed with cancer in Los Angeles.

DataMasher

Datamasher allows you to take two different public data sources and mash them up with an operator (+ – * /). Then you can share them with your friends and comment on the mashups of others. A few of my favorite mashups include: High School Graduation vs. Guns in Household, % Total Population in Prison, and my favorite: People per US Representative.

Now for the voting– in order to keep down on fraud, we’re going to require registration for voting. And the place where we have the best user registration system is our brand new (very beta) Sunlight Labs website. So as a voting participant, you can vote in our contest. Here’s how–

1. Register for a new Sunlight Labs account. (and excuse our mess as we construct the site!)
2. Take a look at all three apps and figure out which one you like best.
3. Cast your ballot

You’re only able to vote for one, so choose wisely. You can change your vote up until the day the winners are announced.

Congratulations to all the finalists. We’ll be in touch with you soon!

By Scott Bittle, Public Agenda

Enough is enough in many of the nation’s lowest-performing schools, according to Arne Duncan, the new secretary of education. He’s announced that one of his major goals will be to have 250 of the worst schools closed, reorganized and reopened next year.

Duncan doesn’t actually have the power to order schools closed – that rests with local school boards. But Duncan does have $3 billion in federal stimulus money earmarked to pay for turning around troubled schools, and that’s a powerful inducement to local authorities.

Most experts do agree that a relatively small number of schools, sometimes tagged “dropout factories,” account for a huge share of our educational problems. Yet trying to fix them has baffled educators and policymakers for decades. If we’re going to rebuild these schools, how do we go about it?

One vital element is going to be leadership, the kind of people we put in charge of these schools. In our Mission of the Heart study, we conducted focus groups and interviews with principals and superintendents in high-needs districts, the people struggling with the tough problems.

The striking difference was how the administrators broke down into two distinct groups: the “copers” and the “transformers.” They all had similar complaints: red tape, a lack of administrative support, parents who have their own daunting challenges. But how educators dealt with them was drastically different. Copers were struggling to keep from being overwhelmed; transformers took a “can-do” attitude and had an explicit vision of the school culture they wanted.

Obviously, the nation’s schools need more “transformers” to lead the schools Duncan wants to rebuild. But Public Agenda’s researchers were left with two big questions: First, are transformers “born” or “made?” The transformers we talked to were talented, committed people, but so were many of the copers. Many of the transformers had the advantage of being in school systems that nurtured their talents. With better support, could more copers become transformers?

Secondly, running a high-needs school is a grueling job, and the administrators we talked to were putting in long, hard days. How long can we expect transformers to keep up the brutal pace needed to keep ahead of the problems they face? Are we burning out our best school leaders? And if so, how do we keep them in the game – just when we may need them the most?

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