Posts Tagged ‘transparency’
Daley’s amusing FOIA revenge
A couple of weeks ago I spoke at the launch of the Congressional Transparency Caucus. A (somewhat weird) idea that was discussed was improving Freedom of Information Act requests for the purpose of helping the dying newspaper industry. Like I said, weird.
In general, though, the FOIA process definitely stands improvement. Once a federal agency receives and complies with a FOIA request, it should not only give the requested information to the requester, but also publish it to its website so it’s available to all. Today, the same in-demand documents can be laboriously requested many times by different individuals.
Transparency Caucus co-chair Rep. Darrell Issa made the interesting suggestion that there might need to be a deliberate delay between when an agency complies with a journalist’s FOIA request and when it publishes it on the web. Otherwise competing journalists will be able to see what the requesting journalist is sniffing around for thereby destroying any investigative scoop. Issa likened his suggestion to a patent or copyright for journalistic ingenuity.
Now comes word that Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago is doing exactly the opposite. To annoy his enemies in the press, his new transparency policy goes out of its way to disclose what all is being FOIA’d and by whom:
In the name of “transparency,” Mayor Daley on Thursday got some measure of revenge against the investigative reporters who’ve made his life miserable by digging up dirt on the Hired Truck, city hiring and minority contracting scandals.
He revamped the city’s new website to include a log of all Freedom of Information Act requests. The list includes the name and organization of each applicant, documents demanded and dates the information was requested and is due to be released.
A new state law merely requires city departments to maintain such a log — not to post it on the Internet to tip investigative reporters about the trail being followed by competitors.
But Daley gleefully declared that he was going “above and beyond what’s required” in the interest of “transparency, openness and the free-flow of information.”
“If you want transparency in government, you have to have this. I’m sorry. This has nothing to do with [getting even with] the Sun-Times, Tribune, media or anything. This is what you want,” Daley said.
This is very amusing. For what it’s worth, I don’t think the government owes journalists or any other profession any special consideration. I also don’t understand why the requester’s identity should be disclosed, either.
Just give us the earmark data
Today is the first day of Sunshine Week and I want to tell you about a project Jim Harper, Gunnar Hellekson and I have organized called EarmarkData.org.
Congress recently changed its rules to require members to disclose their earmark requests online. Unfortunately, they don’t disclose these in any consistent way. You have to hunt for where each member has decided to place their disclosure, so there’s no way to systematically analyze earmark data. The White House has promised to give us a unified database of earmarks, but so far hasn’t acted.
EarmarkData.org serves two purposes: First, it’s a petition that you can sign, asking the president and members of Congress to keep their promise and to give us earmark information in a meaningful data format that is truly transparent. Second, it’s a place for techies to help refine a data standard that Congress and the administration can use. We have a draft schema that we’re happy to give to Congress.
Now, I know what many of you are thinking. Why waste our time on earmarks when they only make such a tiny fraction of federal spending? Several reasons. First, I believe in incremental change, and if we can make a difference on this margin, I feel I’m earning my keep. Second, earmark spending may be small, but it is an enabler for bigger spending. Earmarks are how members are often repaid for their votes, and shedding light on this is a worthwhile endeavor. Finally, a more transparent earmark process can only help underscore what’s wrong with Washington and why we need institutional reform.
So check out the site, sign the petition, and tell your friends!
Cass Sunstein and other people’s transparency
Cass Sunstein gave a talk at Brookings today about “the power of open government.” (Transcript here.) He stressed the key points of the administration’s Open Government Directive: transparency, collaboration, and participation. What I found interesting, though, is that all the examples he gave of open government were in fact examples of someone besides government being open.
He cited the new product recall database from the Consumer Product Safety Commission as a great example of open government. He also mentioned a tire safety ratings database from DoT, the toxic release inventory from EPA, nutrition labeling, FAA flight delay information, and OSHA workplace death tallies. I’m glad these data are public, but these are not about open government.
As Sunstein said, disclosure is a “high impact, low cost” form of regulation. It keeps actors accountable for their performance and this nudges them to behave well. But if disclosure works for regulated industries, it should work for government, too. To me that’s what open government is about–government disclosing its own performance, not just the performance of those it regulates.
Sunstein did mention the new OIRA dashboard, which is meant to give users a view to all of the Office’s open proceedings. (The site, however, was down during his talk–and still is as of this writing–because it is “experiencing technical difficulties.”) First, I haven’t seen any data in the new dashboard that wasn’t previously available at RegInfo.gov. Second, we need more than just disclosure of what matters are before OIRA now, we need information on performance, something Brookings’s Ted Gayer alluded to when he asked about the prospects of more retrospective review.
For example, Sunstein talked about the President’s SAVE Award program, which asks federal employees to submit ideas for budget savings. Thousands were collected and voted on and the winner was a VA employee who suggested that patients be allowed to take unused medicines home with them. Previously, unused portions of medicine were thrown away when the patient was discharged. Wonderful idea and a very laudable process of collaboration and participation to get at it.
My question is about transparency in performance: what happened to the administator(s) under whom drugs were systematically wasted? Were they fired or reprimanded? Did we at least have a management review of how such a policy came to be? Not to be punitive, but accountability must have consequences.
