Obama’s signature on the stimulus bill yesterday brought with it further complaints that the new administration isn’t living up to its transparency pledges. It seems that the White House is having trouble squaring the need for emergency legislation with their explicit promise to post bills for five days before the President signs them. A better question, which Micah Sifry raised again last week, might be: what’s the point of fulfilling this promise? Any useful public input into the process would need to happen before the bill hits the President’s desk.
But with the stimulus bill’s approval also comes the full launch of Recovery.gov, which holds out hope for the kind of transparency we actually need. Naturally, the site features Obama’s trademark blue-box Web design. And some of the initial features like the spending breakdown charts and the recovery timeline are interesting, as others have observed.
But the true measure of the site will be in the amount and the detail of the data, about how the money is actually spent and how many jobs are actually created. That data should not only be presented on the site, but released in a machine-readable form like XML so that anyone and everyone can parse it. In a new piece on Portfolio.com, I make the case that dumping federal data in such formats can actually be a stimulus in and of itself, as it both improves the contracting process and allows people build businesses around the data. But at the very least, people will find ways to interpret and display the progress of the stimulus in ways that Obama’s people would never think of or have the wherewithal to carry out.
The site’s FAQ promises that the data is on its way, but as we’ve seen with the current lack of a federal CTO, of any streamed cabinet meetings, and of the five day comment period on legislation — all explicit Obama campaign pledges — promises are just that. In one worrisome sign, ProPublica reports that there is no defined method by which states and localities have to provide information on their spending.
Last night I was speaking to a local supervisor for Daly City, south of San Francisco, who is on a committee overseeing the deployment of several million dollars in stimulus money. He said much of the money would go, literally, to purchasing concrete and asphalt for construction projects. (And interestingly, he was concerned that with several local cities doing the same, the price of local cement mixers and the like would skyrocket). I asked him if he knew of any requirement that they keep track of how many specific jobs the purchases created. His answer: “not that I’m aware of.”
Posted at 1:05 pm | Filed under Politics, Technology |
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August 27th, 2009 6:15 am
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