Lying for Our Own Good?

Back in the day Pierre Salinger, JFK's press secretary, got into a controversy over whether it was ever appropriate to lie to the American public. That's the way I remember it, though this Daily Beast article seems to say it was Arthur Sylvester, another aide.  Anyway, it was in the context of the Cuba Missile crisis.  I thought I remembered Salinger telling the press that Kennedy had a cold which caused him to cancel a campaign trip to Chicago, when in fact the missiles had been discovered and the administration was figuring out what to do.

Anyhow, people were shocked that the government could and would lie to the public.  Again today it seems we're shocked to find out that Dr. Fauci was lying to us back in February.  He was saying don't bother with masks, they don't do much good, when the fact was the US didn't have masks enough for health professionals and the public.

As an ex-bureaucrat I often side with the bureaucracy more than most, and I do here.

Democrats may claim the people are mature and will react well to being told the truth, but I think conservatives with their suspicion of people are closer to the mark in some cases, as here.

Corporate Transparency: Canadians Are Ahead of Us

This article shows that at least one Canadian province is going where the US ought to be (and FSA is getting to):  recording the real people behind paper entities.

Laws Need Enforcers

Congress can pass laws and the President can sign them, and the supporters applaud and then....

If there's no bureaucrat taking action, nothing happens.

The latest case of that: a revision in FOIA law:

"Among the new law’s requirements are giving those seeking information at least 90 days to file appeals of denied requests, not charging inappropriate duplication fees and informing requesters of their rights to advice from agency or governmentwide FOIA ombudsman offices"

 The GovExec article says a number of departments haven't implemented the law 9 months after signature, including USDA.   The lead office is in Justice.  I'm going to guess that there won't be 100 percent compliance by this time next year.

Score One for USDA: FOIA

Government Executive reports on a study which says USDA is tops in responding to FOIA requests, and it improved by 10 points from last year.  It's not clear to me whether they just reviewed the Departmental effort, or looked at the agencies as well; I suspect the former.

I might note, however, that USDA got the lowest score for its FOIA website of any of the departments, which may be an indication that efficiency in handling requests has little to do with effective on-line system design.  A thorough-going cynic might offer other comments, but enough for one day.

The Data Act

Vox has a long very good post on how the Data Act got passed. Should be enlightening for people with textbook images of government.  I'm still uncertain of its impact on FSA.

Revealing Payments

The Post reports on this new law.

I wonder whether it will require FSA to list farm program payments?  I tried to read the law, but couldn't interpret the language well enough (damn head cold) so gave up.  We'll see.

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.

Obama's Open Government Fail--on Obamacare

I just love to tweak IT types and goo-goo types about openness, and occasionally I like to tweak my liberal friends.  In that spirit, let me quote this from the NYTimes post on activity on the healthcare exchanges:

"It is unclear what the [healthcare] exchanges meant in citing heavy volume; most did not provide numbers, or even return phone calls in the first hours of operation. It is also unclear to what degree problems with the Web sites were due to the kind of technical hurdles that supporters of the program had warned about and that opponents had predicted would demonstrate its unwieldiness."

 Too bad HHS didn't require each exchange website to post their count of unique visitors.

More seriously, I expect the dust to settle and the glitches to get resolved (mostly) in the next few days or weeks, just as Medicare Part D did back in the Bush days.

Rep. Issa Praises Obama Administration!!

The nether reaches of hell must be starting to freeze.

This FCW article reports this comment by Rep. Issa:

"The whole Recovery.gov effort has been a great success. I’m taking no positive shots at how they spent their money, because I don't think it created jobs. But it accounted for funding in a more transparent way than ever before, and did so on a small budget," Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), said at an event hosted by the Data Transparency Coalition on Sept. 10.

I have to admit I was skeptical of it, I haven't revisited the site since its early days, and I still suspect a subject-matter expert could punch holes in the data for her subject area.  But the fact remains, even if its reputation is a tad higher than it deserves, it does set an example for the future and there weren't many scandals related to the Recovery Act spending, once we got past the early glitches about the quality of data.    So at least one gold star for the Obama administration.

(Hmm, since I'm feeling devilish today, what's the odds of having a similar database for Pigford payments?)

EWG Loses One

An issue I personally think EWG should have won on: I believe in transparency. But here's the Washington Post editorial on the farm bill:

But if there’s anything the farm lobby dislikes more than losing its subsidies, it’s letting the public follow its money. Senate leaders barred consideration of the Begich-McCain amendment, which means there won’t even be a floor debate on increasing transparency in farm programs over the next five years. It’s not an auspicious start.

Do Vehicles Deserve Privacy: A Suggestion

ProPublica reports on the schemes some bus companies to evade DOT scrutiny (this in the wake of the fatal accident in VA).

I've read that trucking companies now have a gadget on their trucks permitting them to track where their trucks are. Seems to me there's room for a win-win solution, if only we agree that vehicles have no privacy rights. 

First we put the gadgets on buses as well as trucks.

Second we require companies to either make their tracking records available to the government or allow the government to track the buses and trucks.

Third we develop software to determine from the records whether drivers are driving more hours than they are permitted and whether the trucks and buses are speeding.

Tracking People, Cover Stories, Registries, and Ankle Bracelets

I've noticed and sometimes blogged about a modern trend towards tracking people.  Lots of states, maybe all states, have registries for sex offenders.  There was an article the other day on a proposal to extend such registries to other types of offenders.  Facebook and other Internet sites are making it impossible to create good cover stories for our undercover agents; Valerie Plame is one of the last native-born agents we'll have, or so it seems.  Dominique Straus-Kahn was released only after posting bail and agreeing to wear an ankle bracelet. Now Conan Friedersdorf proposes that, if any convicts are released early in California as a result of the Supreme Court's decision yesterday they would have to wear an ankle bracelet that doesn't expire until the end of their original sentence.

Perhaps more benignly, in the past there's been legislation to track parents who are in arrears on child-support.  I've seen discussion on cross-state tracking of doctors and nurses whose licenses were revoked in one state. Given today's headline that contractors who received stimulus funds from the government, or from state and local governments, are in arrears on $750 million worth of taxes, I'd expect a tracking proposal to arise there. 

The list goes on and on.  As a general proposition I tend to agree with the proposals; I view transparency as good and it's certainly less onerous to wear a bracelet than to be in an overcrowded jail.  I wonder, though, where's the discussion of this and what are the limits and guidelines we should use.

Arthur Brisbane Misses the Point

The New York Times has a new omsbudsman, Arthur Brisbane. In his piece today, he argues:

"This [a new integration of web and print operations] suggests to me a companion move The Times should make, one that would help secure a tighter bond with its audience: publishing The Times’s journalism policies in a searchable format and in a visible location on NYTimes.com. That would enable readers to see more clearly into the news operation."

Brisbane points out Times' policies are scattered in different places and are hard for the reader to find. It's all very well, but I believe he misses the main point. I, as a reader of the Times, both print and web, could give a damn about their policies. I care  more about the results.  Indeed, it's the reporters and editors of the Times who need to know and follow the policies; it's the people newly recruited to be reporters and editors of the Times who need to be trained in the policies and know where they can find them; it's the managing editors of the Times who need to see the policies in one place so they can direct the newspaper and web site to follow the policies; so finally it is the people of the Times who need to have the policies consolidated and easy to find.

I'd argue much the same is true for any bureaucracy: you can't serve your clients and customers effectively if you don't know what you're doing; clarity, like charity, begins at home.  The nice thing is once you have clarity at home you can be clear to others.

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.

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.

There's Transparency and There's Transparency Which Works

The Reston Hospital Center has tried to be more transparent, by measuring the response time in their ER and posting the expected wait time on the Internet. (It was 9 minutes when I checked in when drafting this.)

I don't know whether they're measuring the extent to which people are using this, but they should. It seems to me like something which would be useful, assuming you're a person who uses the ER as a substitute for a doctor.  Maybe I'm naive, but I'd guess there's not too many of those in Reston--it's rich enough most people will have health insurance and a doctor.

Of course there's also the issue of image building.  Even if no one uses this, it does give the image of an up-to-date institution, which one wants if you have to go to the hospital.  And it might have been easier to sell the idea of measuring ER response time to your ER staff if sold as a way to inform the customers, rather than as a way to make them more productive.  I'm assuming that if they can cut the response time, they've reengineered their business process to be more efficient.

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.

White House Garden Progress

Don't see an update on the White House garden on the website, but Obamafoodorama has a couple posts showing people in it harvesting. Looks as if it's doing well; the greens are in good shape.  However, by now their peas are probably finished and some of the lettuce has bolted (judging by our garden in Reston).  And I wonder how they harvest: do they get a bit each day to feed the First Family or do they wait and harvest lots to serve at dinners?  At least on this the Obama administration isn't very transparent; fellow gardeners want to know these things.

I Like Transparent Government, But Not This

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