Keeping Congress Honest

Congress people like to pontificate about the faults of the executive branch, but there's often some hypocrisy involved. That makes a provision of the stimulus bill noteworthy--see this OMBWatch post for details. As the writer says:

The LOC [Library of Congress] database, THOMAS, provides a lot of good information and gives access to full text bills and Congressional Research Summaries. However, it is outdated and lacks a decent user interface and persistent URL’s. Browsing and searching are difficult…don’t even think about asking for an RSS feed. GovTrack.us, OpenCongress.org, and MAPLight.org provide similar Congressional information but with a far more usable format. The downside to them is that they are forced to rely on THOMAS as their source of information. That is, until now.

Stimulus Watch

An article in the NYTimes on the Interior IG who's moved over to oversee the stimulus mentioned this site as better than recovery.gov. I can see why. The voting pattern seems to favor big projects over small, but that's to be expected. When I checked, just before posting, the Laurel, MS doorbells were the top item. (After reconsideration,I removed "(the $155 doorbell)" from the title of this post--it's perhaps unfair. Let's see what the bid is.)

First Reading

Understanding Government has a post in praise of the Sunlight Foundation's proposal that no bills should be passed before they have been available for reading for 3 days. It's the sort of good government reform I'm okay with (my lack of enthusiasm is based on cynicism).

Makes me wonder though. If I recall my days of reading the Congressional Record (back in college, when I got seriously lost in doing a term paper amidst the debates on naval building at the turn of the century), parliamentary procedure calls for three "readings" of a bill, once when it's introduced, once when referred to committee, and then upon consideration. (See this link for more precise information.) Problem is, the "readings" are pro forma and are waived. I suspect that practice evolved because people could rely on reading the printed page. And, where time became critical, people just acted on trust. I think now the pattern is--the clerk reads the title of the bill (or amendment) and it's considered read, and GPO inserts the text when the Record is printed.

My point: rules on paper can only go so far in making people use their heads. Cynically, thinking is hard work and people are often lazy. (Until their ox is the one gored [to use a good old agricultural metaphor]).

Obama's Bureaucratic Problems

First he has problems in filling slots, just today three candidates (for Surgeon General and two posts in Treasury withdrew), that's after two withdrew yesterday. Prof. Light has been compiling figures on the number of nominees and the number confirmed, he needs to keep score on those withdrew. That's one downside of proclaiming high ethical standards.

Another problem is implementing good ideas, like "recovery.gov". See this Federal Computer Week article on the problems in feeding data from the agencies into the site.

A third problem is confirmations--two nominees for the Council of Economic Advisors are being held up in Congress.

Sec. 1619 in Kansas

Yes, we're in Kansas, via EWG.org, and the Salina paper has a long article on the problems the Sec. 1619 restriction causes for assessors.

FOIA and Sec 1619

A commenter asks whether Obama's executive order on FOIA impacts Sec. 1619 of the 2008 farm bill. (See my previous post.) My answer, given with a little research but no law degree is: No.

I think 5 USC Sec.552, the FOIA, has the answer in

(b) This section does not apply to matters that are-- ... (3) specifically exempted from disclosure by statute (other than section 552b of this title), provided that such statute (A) requires that the matters be withheld from the public in such a manner as to leave no discretion on the issue, or (B) establishes particular criteria for withholding or refers to particular types of matters to be withheld;

I think Sec. 1619 exempts the data from disclosure.

Transparency and Obama

Why doesn't the Change site carry the prepared testimony of the cabinet nominees? Looked for Vilsack's testimony from yesterday--not available.

Transparency in USDA

I've blogged on this before, but the Environmental Working Group has an article from the Salina Journal. The issue is the extent to which FSA/NRCS information is publicly available--the 2008 farm bill inserted a prohibition on releasing data:

From the end of the article:

"When we got wind this was going to be inserted without any debate, we heard from two camps in the FSA," Cook said. "One saying they didn't agree with it, and thought we ought to know -- while another side helped draft it."

The privacy provision was inserted in conference committee, after both the House and Senate had approved different versions of the bill. Conference committees generally work out compromises between those different versions, but can also insert new provisions, which Cook said is what happened in this case.

Although I don't always like EWG's stands, I'm in favor of transparency here. (Though, inconsistently, I don't like the idea of private entities making bucks by serving as middlemen with the government.)

Those Special Interests and Public Data

One of the things that's problematic these days is the line between public data and non-public data. Obama ran on transparent government, meaning government data should be freely available. But you run into problems, as is illustrated in the following, when private interests have found a way to exploit public data and sell it, or perhaps some farmers are trying to claim a privacy interest:

"If you are an FSA/NRCS/RD employee or have an E-Authentication account, go directly to the USDA Geospatial Data Gateway to order the Common Land Unit (CLU) data. Be sure to click on the Login menu item for the E-Authentication.

Please be advised that with the enactment of The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008, Title I - Commodity Programs, Subtitle F - Administration, Section 1619 on May 22, 2008, the Farm Service Agency (FSA) is no longer allowed to make the geospatial data, including access to the Common Land Unit records, available to the public, even through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Section 1619 is an Exemption 3 statute that prohibits FSA from sharing this data with the public."

This isn't an "earmark", mandating the spending of taxpayer money on a particular project, but it works the same, because a narrow interest is being served without a proper debate.

Transparency in Government II

John Dickerson of Slate is dubious over Obama's transparency promises, particularly his Saturday video broadcast.

The bottom line is few people (outside of the relevant bureaucrats and lobbyists and interest groups) are really interested in the nitty-gritty of government. I'm not aware C-Span puts up high ratings. In terms of feeding the beast, any government has to hope to catch the attention of filters, whether a news media type, or now a blogger type, which can start to amplify the information.

Transparency in Government

Slate has a good post summarizing 10 ways in which Obama can make government more transparent (drawn from various think-tank proposals), and the drawbacks of each. Because I've blogged in the past about transparency, I feel an obligation to comment on some of Slate's comments.

2. Lobbyist disclosure. I favor disclosure, but not prohibitions. (There was a piece in the paper, perhaps the Post, this week reporting academic research that said lobbyists gave the most money to the committee members who asked the best (i.e., not grandstanding) questions in committee hearings.

3. Broadcast cabinet meetings. That's idiotic. Not broadcasting, but the idea of having cabinet meetings. The meetings which matter are not formal meetings of the full cabinet, but the meetings the cabinet member has with the director of OMB at budget time, the meetings the President has with his staff, with maybe one or two Cabinet secretaries.

5. Get rid of pseudo classifications. I agree. Each piece of paper should have two attributes: its bureaucratic distribution (i.e., Eye-only, etc.) and its classification level.

6 Make all filings electronic. Yes. Also all documents.

Welcome to the Glass House: Program Payments and Donations

The Tulsa World has a two-part series on farm program payments and their recipients. By matching the payments against the public records of those who make political donations they identified many Oklahomans who are professionals and receive the payments.

In the second part they identified farmers who received payments but who were also fined for violations (apparently mostly CAFO's who violated environmental rules). An FSA official was quoted, correctly, as saying there was no cross-compliance provision--eligibility for FSA program payments is independent of violations/eligibility for other programs.

This is just a start. President-elect Obama included a pledge of transparency in his platform and today, with databases and the Internet, you can see it working in some areas. I'd start a pool on how long it takes EWG and/or other publications to emulate the Tulsa paper, and then on how long it is before members of Congress start pushing to bar payments to environmental violations.

And for people who aren't involved in agriculture or farm programs, your turn is next. Farm program payments are a test case for transparency simply because EWG was able to obtain the data and put it online back in the 1990's, well ahead of similar efforts in other areas.

Yale and Public Information-Sshhh

Colin McKay at SoSaidThe Organization secretly tells us of a document we are commanded not to cite from Yale Law. It's well worth reading. It proposes [emphasis removed]:

In order for public data to benefit from the same innovation and dynamism that characterize private parties’ use of the Internet, the federal government must reimagine its role as an information provider. Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, it should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that “exposes” the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data. The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large.

Some comments:

• the authors could productively cite the GPO's "reengineering" initiative--as GPO is officially responsible for all government documents (repository libraries) it particularly aggravates me that their effort seems to be a solo silo, (see this link) particularly as their aim is to please their library stakeholders, not the public.
  
• the authors do not deal with the problem of private data, that is, data that can't be made public. Their examples include FCC dockets, regulations, Congressional actions (bills, votes, etc.), SEC filings--all things that are supposed to be public. In other words, they're viewing government as lawyers, and the data they want is lawyers' data. They might profitably look at the EWG's database of federal payments to farmers--a long-existing example of the problems (and gains) in providing government data on-line.
  
• I doubt the practicality of the suggestion (that is, considered as a government-wide, top down initiative). They note the number of constraints agencies have to deal with in handling data. Each of the constraints was the result of some interest group and/or Congressional members putting their oar in. That's the way our government works. Perhaps in a parliamentary system the proposal is feasible, but not here. Appropriations committees will not give dollars to such good government suggestions. And a President Obama or McCain is unlikely to use political capital to take real action.
• I think the most likely outcome is a gradual, evolutionary, scattershot approach which, after 20-30 years or so, ends up maybe close to what the authors want.

(I'm struck by this language: "The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large." 10 years ago I was proposing the same thing to FSA, NRCS, and RD--an Internet-based front end to access documents and data with a gradual back end migration from the legacy databases and indexed files to modern web-servers. Even had a working mockup website to this effect. Alas, I'm no salesman. As far as I can see, the key technical constraint was the need to provide security at the data element level--i.e., maybe you want to show to everyone that John Doe owns a section of land in Mills County, Iowa, but you don't want to show his SSN to anyone except him and one or two people who serve him. That's tough to get the "business rules" decided on. The political constraint was the necessary impact on the organizations involved. Agencies whose raison d'etre was to serve local farmers would have to consider whether and how to change. And the politicians whose livelihood depends on customer service, meaning being able to see that the local office works for their farmers, would have to cede influence.)

Transparent Society

I've always liked the ideas in David Brin's Transparent Society. Brad DeLOng participates in a discussion of it after 10 years. IMHO federal bureaucrats, especially SES, and to a lesser degree perhaps the GS, should lose most on the job privacy. Let's stick an Internet camera in the office of each Congress person and each Federal executive. Let's let everyone know when someone in the bureaucracy is looking at their data. (Yes, it will take forever to implement, but it's the way to go.)

Sneaky Congress and Public Info

Ken Cook reports those sneaky Congress people put a provision in the conference report trying to overrule the release of acreage report data from FSA.

Earmarks, the Good and the Bad

Kevin Drum notes that "earmarks", which Sen. McCain (and the Dems) have vowed to attack, includes stuff like aid to Israel and military housing.

He has some sane comments as well.

As for me, I'm bitter about what I'll call the policy/legislative earmarks in appropriations (like one provision in many ag appropriations bills prohibiting USDA from releasing data publicly before they give it to Congress). The dollar earmarks are an invitation to corruption, as may have occurred with the highway interchange in Florida, put in by Alaska's representative's staff. (I like the idea of Alaska earmarking for Florida.) But, with some transparency, some earmarking gives a good way to bypass the bureaucracy, which does need to be bypassed occasionally.

Environmental Working Group--Pioneer in Transparency

Having been there when ASCS was responding to the initial EWG FOIA request, I was struck by this comment (from an article mostly focused on Arkansas rice):

The group’s farm-subsidy database has played a pivotal role in the policy debates surrounding U. S. agricultural policy, said Sallie James, a trade-policy analyst with the Washington-based Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

“I’m lobbying for [Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group ] to get a public service medal,” James said. “I can’t think of anything that’s been done in the public policy arena in the last 20 years that has had as much of an impact as this seemingly simple Freedom of Information request.”

It's true enough, but you have to add in the Internet as a vital enabler.

Transparency in Congress

This Government Executive article describes the tribulations of those who want Congressional Research Service reports to be routinely available to the public. "Free the CRS data".

I Quibble with Charlie Peters--Passport Flap

I've been reading Washington Monthly since it started, meaning I've been reading Charlie Peters, the founding editor. But today I disagree with him on the passport flap at State. Any long-time reader will not be surprised to see that I think the State passport system should send out an email anytime someone accesses a file. (If Abebooks can email me anytime some vendor offers a book I want, or Amazon do something similar, surely it's "technically feasible" (to use one of my favorite terms) to do so.

More on Privacy

MSNBC's Red Tape says looking at other's data goes on all the time while Government Executive finds someone to comment more generally on privacy and the problems in government agencies.

Meanwhile, innovators are ripping away the mask of privacy from government employees--the NYTimes reports on a website where you can post evaluations of police officers you encounter. (The president of the California police association isn't happy.) It's not unlike the site for rating your professor, which is now matched by a site for professors to respond, or your neighbor.

Soon everyone will rate everyone.