Participatory Budgeting

 Apparently the recent elections authorized something called "participatory budgeting" in Boston (the link seems to say it's more of an exploration than a cut and dried deal). First I'd heard of it, although there's an organization devoted to promoting it.

Without knowing anything about it I don't like it.  I don't get many comments on this blog, but the longest exchange I had with anyone was on this issue, although neither the proponent nor I called it that.  I think my resistance is based on inheriting some "Progressive" or "goo-goo" ideas--the concept that professionals in management know better than mere citizens about what is needed and how to do it.  (I wrote the preceding sentence with tongue-in-cheek, and am only half serious.) 

I may look at it more seriously now, or I may get lazy and pass. 

A Good Reform on Shell Corporations?

 I saw a report today, which I've since lost, that House and Senate conferees have agreed on an important reform: requiring what we used to call in ASCS the "live bodies" who own a corporation to be identified.  Under current law if you want to hide the ownership of something, you set up a shell corporation to own it, and then set up more shell entities to own the shell corporation and so on. 

I hope the reform goes through, but there's lots of hurdles between a deal on Capitol Hill and having it in the law signed by the Presideb. We'll see.

[update--the politico article]

Transparency and Doctors

HHS has released data on Medicare payments to doctors, which are discussed here.  The Post had a good article this morning, discussing some of the reasons for variations in payments among specialties, etc.  Putting that story and the Wonkblog post together gives the usual conclusion: it's complicated.  Maybe I'm biased, but when I read articles about farm policy and the food movement that's my usual reaction: you're oversimplifying, it's more complicated than that.  I'd venture to state a general rule: the knowledge an insider has is more complicated than the knowledge an outsider can discover. 

Having said that, I have to go back 20 years when EWG was suing USDA for payments to farmers.  My reaction then, in discussions with an IT person, was reserved--it seemed to me that we treated farmers as persons under the Privacy Act, which meant their data should be private as well.  The Court of Appeals for the district disagreed with my opinion.  Over the years I've come to believe that government payments should be public.  Even though I've little faith in the ability of the media to get a good understanding of the issues, either with farm payments or doctors payments, more data is better than less.

Why We Need Metrics

From a Federal Computer Week piece on blogging:

"Perhaps it's ironic that many substandard federal blogs slog on forever while one of the best [Navy CIO's] was killed. Drapeau said the weak blogs endure because they do not call attention to themselves.
“Who complains about horrible, obscure movies that they haven't seen?” he asked. “And given that the financial cost of having a bad blog is very low, there's little to stop most bad blogs from persisting.”

CDC Does What Every Gov Website Should Do

And that's publish their website metrics.

Of interest, in the list of referring websites, usa.gov ranks just below google.de and google.co.za at no. 38.  That tells me the theory that people will look at usa.gov and then go to other government sites is rather dubious. But that's my preconception. Maybe it's a reflection of poor design between usa.gov and cdc.

A Test of Open Government

The following language has been included in most recent USDA appropriations acts.  (Do a search in Thomas.loc.gov.)  It's a gag order imposed by the appropriations sub-committee.  It's also a test of whether the Republicans will adhere to their call for open government. Note the language prohibits telling the President or OMB of information provided to appropriations.

Sec 710 of 2010 Ag Appropriations Act

Sec. 710. None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available to the Department of Agriculture or the Food and Drug Administration shall be used to transmit or otherwise make available to any non-Department of Agriculture or non-Department of Health and Human Services employee questions or responses to questions that are a result of information requested for the appropriations hearing process.

Open Government and Political Violence

Lots of discussion in the wake of the Arizona shooting. What I've not seen is a whole lot of facts about political violence.  The closest I've seen is an assertion that threats against the President have increased since Obama assumed office.  Maybe the Obama administration should apply a little open government: put a running total of threats and assaults against the President, justices, Congresspeople, and federal employees on its data.gov.  It'd take a while to build up a baseline, but it'd give a reasonable basis for some discussions.

Earmarks and Congressional Clout

Steve Benen posted a discussion of earmarks, on which I commented.  David Farenthold had an article in the Post on the lame duck House members, who have now moved out of their fancy offices into temporary offices in the basement until the House adjourns.  I see these two paragraphs as relating to earmarks:

The departing members also remembered, fondly, their power to intercede for constituents. As lowly as a freshman is on Capitol Hill, he is a giant to a bureaucrat.
"I was surprised by the extent of power that I had," said Rep. Anh "Joseph" Cao (R-La.). Cao recalled his ability to make Federal Emergency Management Agency officials help his constituents still recovering from Hurricane Katrina. "I can go into a federal agency, and people would jump."

The point being, even if earmarks are banned, a bureaucrat is still going to jump when a member of Congress contacts her. So my fear is we'll replace earmarks which are in writing and fairly transparent with less transparent meetings and letters, all of which arrive at understandings, a wink and a nod as it were. Things might be helped if Congress agreed to post all correspondence with the bureaucracy and list all meetings on their web sites.

Open Government and Its Limits

Got a chuckle from this use of the USDA open government site (someone decided to tweak USDA over the NYTimes dairy/cheese article by posting a tongue-in-cheek suggestion there).  I commend USDA for showing the statistics on the site on the front page: they show it's not enough to "build it and they will come", particularly in as staid and settled an environment as USDA.  TSA got traction with their blog simply because security is sexier than agriculture. I don't know what USDA and its agencies need to get more usage of their Gov. 2.0 stuff, but something is needed.

Secrecy Is Needed--If You're Rebelling, or Forming a Government:

That's the lesson of our founders. As rebels, they signed a secrecy pact. (yesterday's National Archives document of the day); as constitution writers they worked in secrecy in 1787.

OMB Watch Reports on Obama Naked Government

They give a mixed rating for the first 9 months. 

Congressionally Required Reports

Somewhere back in the dark ages there was some agreement between the executive branch and Congress on Congressionally required reports.  I forget whether it was USDA and the Ag committees, or the President and Congress.

This Project on Government Oversight post describes a bill in Congress to put all such reports online.

I'd love to see a study of these reports.  I suspect in many cases they are a sop thrown to assuage someone's pet concerns.  A Congressperson has a bee in their bonnet, or some interest group is pestering them, so instead of enacting some legislation everyone agrees on requiring the bureaucracy to submit a report.  By the time the report is completed and submitted, the bee is dead, the pesterers are disbanded or moved to something else, so the report gathers dust, unread, but having served its function in the great and glorious American political system. The only cost was the waste of a bureaucrat's time, and we all know that's not important.

Sometimes, and more perniciously, the requirement is for a periodic report.  I say more perniciously because it eats up time every year.  At least it does if the bureaucrats honor the requirement.  That doesn't always happen, because like kids suspecting a "beware the dog" sign is a bluff, bureaucrats may decide to do their business, guessing Congress will never notice the omitted report.

Some Congressionally-required reports are worthwhile--like the State Department's reports on terrorist states but I doubt the need for most.

Open Government at Agriculture

USDA ranks towards the bottom, meeting only 6 of 10 criteria.

What David Brooks Fails to Mention

In Tuesday's Times, David Brooks imagines he's a Democrat again, and from that position gives advice to Obama, who should be.

focused on the long term? He could explain that we’re facing deep fundamental problems: an aging population, overleveraged consumers, exploding government debt, state and local bankruptcies, declining human capital, widening inequality, a pattern of jobless recoveries, deteriorating trade imbalances and so on.
These long-term problems, Obama could say, won’t be solved either with centralized government or free market laissez-faire. Just as government laid railroads and built land grant colleges in the 19th century to foster deep growth, the government today should be doing the modern equivalents.

What Brooks doesn't mention is the sort of stuff in this OMB Watch post, because, as it says:

The administration gets little credit for these achievements, which are often wonky in nature and easily overshadowed by the hyper-partisan atmosphere of Washington.

On the Limits of Transparency

One of the problems with "transparency" is: who cares?  The data may be out there or available, but unless there's someone with enough interest in the submit to dig into it and make a story out of it, there's little impact.  Part of the solution can be auditors/IG's.  See this piece from the World Bank blog.

To cite one example, we did a big, RCT study on what reduces corruption in community programs. Whereas my entire team thought that increasing participation and transparency would be most effective, in actual fact increasing the frequency of locally publicized audits had far greater effects.

Either I'm Blind or Opengovtracker Disses USDA

I don't see USDA listed on this site.

Open Government at NTIS

My first contact with NTIS (which I think stands for National Technical Information Service, the techie wing of the Commerce Department) was back in 1970 or so when I was trying to research word processors and then CRT's--bought a couple publications of theirs.  Not much has changed, as Matt Yglesias discovers--their publications are now on CD's, but they still cost ($80). Matt thinks information yearns to be free; I believe the problem for NTIS is their operations are not funded by Congress, but by user fees.  This is somewhat similar to the Administrative Conference of the US which uses its online document service fees ($.08 per page to download) rather expansively.

In principle I think all information generated within the government should be on line, searchable, and available at no charge.

How To Measure Bureaucratic Output?

Count the words.  That's my initial reaction after doing a little surfing among the various documents on open government, released by the White House, OMB, USDA, and other departments.  I don't know that the flow of words emanating from DC contributes to open government, at least if defined as citizen understanding of government.  But maybe I'm feeling oppressed by the third day of record-setting heat in Reston. We'll see.

There's Always Those Who Don't Get the Word

Group files a FOIA request for the schema for a database (i.e. a description of what data elements are in which tables of a database).  The charge for it: over $110,000.

A Bill I Can Support

Requiring public information to be online.  See this Next Gov post for details.