I Like Transparent Government, But Not This

Tom Ricks posts on an Israeli raid which was canceled because a soldier put it on Facebook.

An "A" for Obama

For transparency, at least.  From the White House blog:

Today’s release is just one example of the many efforts that were recognized by a consortium of independent outside government reform groups that gave the Administration an A for its first-year actions making government open and transparent—and these actions have also been praised by other outside experts.  This Administration’s concrete commitments to openness include issuing the Open Government Directive, putting up more government information than ever before on data.gov and recovery.gov, reforming the government’s FOIA processes, providing on-line access to White House staff financial reports and salaries, issuing an executive order to fight unnecessary secrecy and speed declassification, reversing an executive order that previously limited access to presidential records, and webcasting White House meetings and conferences.

Transparency Is Good, Even If It Hurts

The Environmental Working Group led the way with its FOIA request to get farm payment data from FSA and putting the data up on the Internet.  News organizations are following the precedent--here is a CBS report from Florida spotlighting FSA payments made to dead persons.  They matched data from the SSA's death index to payment data from EWG's database to identify such cases. 

I find the matching interesting because one of the conditions under which USDA provided the data was that social security numbers were replaced in the data by constructed numbers, meaning EWG doesn't have social security numbers.  But, given the advances in computing it was presumably easy enough for CBS to match using name and address from EWG's files to the name and address from SSA's files--they got along without the SSN.

There's some misinformation in the article--notably when an EWG type compares making welfare payments to a dead person with making farm payments to a dead person.  The comparison is invalid, because the farm payment goes with the land, not the person. And I wonder how many cases there are of the heirs leaving an estate open just out of inertia and procrastination. As usual the media and critics make things seem simpler than the reality is, at least the reality seen by a good bureaucrat.  But the bottom line is, if FSA doesn't follow its rules, people should be able to find out.  And if people think the rules are wrong, then in a democracy they can get them changed.

Under the Obama adminstration's open government initiatives, I'd like to see FSA put up its own database, including all the data it gives to EWG, plus the matching to SSA's files.  Of course, that would take resources FSA doesn't have, so maybe it's better to out-source this stuff to EWG and the media.

What "Open Government" Doesn't Cover--Subordinate Offices

Here, via OMBwatch, is the text of the Obama's administration instructions to agencies on opening government. I like it, but I think there's a major problem: it treats each agency as an entity, not as a set of interrelated offices.  For example, an agency like FSA has over 2,000 county offices, state offices, offices in Kansas City and Salt Lake City.  NRCS and RD have similar structures.

So the issue, which I've hashed with at least one county executive director, is whether you have a centralized unitary open government structure or a more decentralized one. Complying with Orszag's instructions implies a centralized structure, which in a way is contrary to the open government philosophy. I'll be trying to track how NRCS and FSA implement this directive.

I Predicted This--ARRA Transparency as Omen of the Future

As I said here, despite problems with data, Obama's effort to provide transparency on stimulus spending is important, not just for itself, but in laying down the tracks for future efforts:  From Nextgov:

"Technology that states have deployed to report how they spent federal stimulus funds is likely to permanently change information exchange across the public and private sector, despite controversy over figures on the number of jobs created and saved, said New York officials, academics and federal leaders."

Sunlight and Obama

I don't think it's a causal relationship, more a matter of riding the wave, but you still have to give Obama credit for participating in the open government/transparency movement. I say this as today the AP pointed out some problems in the recovery Act data--in some cases too many jobs were claimed. The White House has immediately fired back. And I'd refer to my rule about learning, it's still a learning curve.

But in the broader context we're developing the expectation, fed by Obama administration actions and the initiatives of many good government types, that government data will be open, accessible, manipulable, and correct.  That's a major step forward.  If you believe, as I do, the government is a congeries of organizations of people, some of which are efficient and effective and some are not, then having good data available to all will identify which are which.  In the long run that's very important--one big step to restoring and maintaining public confidence in government.

So Much for the Sunshine

All good liberals and progressives think sunshine purifies government operations. That's why they push and push for transparent governance.

We fail to remember, that our founding fathers operated in the dark, using an "Agreement of Secrecy" to cloak their treason against the king.

The USDA Blog and Garden

I wonder why they don't allow HTML syntax? Seems rather behind the times to me (although I've forgotten most of the HTML I learned in the 1990's).

And I wonder if the People's Garden at USDA has harvested its first tomato. The last list on the site is June 2.

Reading SCOTUS

Been following the Sotomayor hearings on SCOTUS.blog. I want to know why the 7th Circuit doesn't allow permalinks to their decisions?

And why did Senator Sessions agree to do that crack cocaine thing?

More Transparency Than We Need?

Transparency is on my mind, given the Obama initiative on it. We're all in favor of transparency, it's a good thing. But good things can be carried too far.

NYTimes has a piece about Air New Zealand, titled: Nothing to Hide, Really:

"The instructions in Air New Zealand’s new in-flight safety video are given by employees who are nude except for body paint and strategically placed seat belts."

There is, after all, a reason we mostly have doors on bathrooms.

Personal Information

Back in the day, when the Privacy Act was first enacted, we notified all program participants their information was personal and protected from disclosure. Then, in the early 1990's, the Environmental Working Group took ASCS/USDA to court, saying that farm and program information was not personal. They won, at least at the circuit court level, and DOJ decided not to appeal to the Supreme Court. So our IT folks had to figure out how to provide the data to EWG, while masking the social security number (which was the primary key to a number of the files).

They did, and EWG put it online. I've used this data as an example of the problems of providing governmental transparency.

Meanwhile, FSA has been dealing with the current rules and issued an interesting notice AS-2179. Looking at the list of data which is protected, I'm not sure I see a clear line between what FSA is providing to EWG and what FSA has to protect. The notice doesn't provide a rationale for the division. But it's another example of the complexity the administration will run into as they push for open government.

The Decline of Intermediaries?

Yesterday I commented on a OSTP blog post asking about how to improve "public" participation in rulemaking. It's part of a bigger effort by the Obama administration to be open and elicit input on various e-government issues. It stimulated a chain of thought on intermediary institutions.

Today newspapers are in trouble. Consider them as intermediaries which gather news, vet and authenticate it, and provide it to individuals. Along with the news comes ads, which pay the freight. But now the Internet is allowing individuals to get their own news more directly and newspapers suffer.

Consider "interest groups", people like the Farm Bureau, the Corn Growers, the Sustainable Agriculture people, groups large and small. One way to look at them is as intermediaries: they search out news, they identify concerns of their members, they carry the concerns to Congress and the executive branch, they give news to their members. Suppose Obama (or his successors) succeed in adapting Web 2.0 to make strong connections between the public, or subsets of the public with their own hot issues, and the government, or subsets of the government concerned with writing laws and implementing them. What happens to the intermediaries?

Do we possibly have an arms race, a competition between private interest groups and public institutions to serve citizens?

Consider IRS. Back in the day tax returns were simple. As they grew more complicated people like H&R Block developed into intermediaries between taxpayer and IRS. As PC's came along we started getting software packages which allow the individual to do tax returns. And now IRS has its own software to do returns.

Kudos for CDC

CDC is doing what all government sites should: publish their metrics. (Are you listening, USDA?) That's one small step for an agency; one giant leap for good government.

[Updated--Though I'd like to see more than 1 month's data, which is all CDC is showing.]

Wingnuts and Open Gov

Federal Computer Week has a piece on the open.gov episode. The optimistic ending: do more open gov and the "birthers" will lose their zeal. In other words, you gotta outlast them.

Federal Employees Have No Imagination?

One possible interpretation of the failure of employees to take advantage of a new website. See this story in Politico.

The Limits of Public Input II

Here's the Open Gov site, which is accepting proposals for better and more transparent government. At the risk of sounding arrogant and condescending (okay, I am) it's amusing and dismaying to see proposals for releasing Kennedy assassination records and the true facts of 9/11, plus a bunch of other idiocies posted to it. (The best and most practical suggestion I saw was for each government web site to display its usage stats.)

The Limits of Public Input

According to this Post piece:

Forget about the economic crisis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and saving Social Security: An online opinion survey released by the White House this week ranks legalizing pot, playing online poker and cracking down on Scientologists as far more important issues

It reflects the limits of the public involvement campaign by the Obama administration.

Heritage Agrees: Bush Site Is Poor

I've made some adverse comments in the past about the regulations.gov site the Bush administration touted as part of their e-government initiative. Heritage agrees it's not good:

Davis said the official Web site for submitting comments electronically, Regulations.gov, is hard to navigate. "If you go to Regulations.gov, that Web site is inherently confusing. It's a travesty, really," she said. "We have set up a system where [citizens] don't have to worry about remembering the docket number."

Of course, regardless of how good a process to submit comments you have, the $64,000 question is whether the comments have any value and whether they are used by the agency in any worthwhile manner.

Plain English--Been There, Done That

Government Executive reports on a "plain English" bill-requiring gov documents to be written in such.

I recall Jimmy Carter had the same thought. As a matter of fact, if I had the energy I suspect I could find there's still a requirement that regulations, to be published in the Federal Register, must be accompanied by a certification that they are in plain English. (That was back in the day when part of my area of supervision was the processing of documents to the Register.)

Senators Are Like Horses

Publicity about "Sunshine Week"--making government more open. But a cautionary note pops up in a Post op-ed on the Charles Freeman fight (the pick for the National Intelligence Council who withdrew). The writer, in minimizing the importance of the council, notes the National Intelligence Estimate prepared before the Iraq war was read by only 6 senators, and 77 voted in favor of the resolution. So senators are like horses, you can make the document available, but you can't make them drink it in.