Administration Web Sites, Comments Process, Promise Change
Government is becoming more open in fits and starts, a sampling of activists’ opinions shows. The much-anticipated Data.gov and a plan to overhaul the much-derided Regulations.gov are a good start, as is the comments process for open government ideas in general, the activists said. The sites are hardly perfect, they said, saying they don’t expect perfection. They do expect some basics, though, and at least one critic thinks the Obama administration is letting the bells and whistles get ahead of simple ideas like providing information that can be found easily.
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The trio of Web site changes is a neat thing, said Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute. “But the basics are going by the wayside,” he said. Whitehouse.gov should be maintained as a useful place to get information, he said. When Harper recently looked in the “speeches” section of Whitehouse.gov for President Barack Obama’s security speech at the National Archives, the most recent speech listed had been given in February. He thinks there should be one place on the site for posting legislation yet to be signed and the president should stick to his campaign pledge to post legislation for five days before signing it.
By Harper’s count, only once has the president posted legislation for the promised five days before signing. And the postings have referred users to thomas.gov, where they find multiple versions of the same bill. He'd rather the text were posted on the White House site, so interested parties, civics classes, and others could easily find bills. The White House disputed Harper’s count but couldn’t provide its own numbers right away. One point of contention could be when the five-day clock begins: Harper thinks it should begin when the bill is presented at the White House, though it’s possible others are counting from the time a bill is cleared by both houses of Congress. A look at thomas.gov shows that, of the 24 bills signed, nine were signed more than five days after presentment, and an additional five more than five days after clearing. The site doesn’t indicate whether it was linked to by the White House. Some of the bills that didn’t meet the five-day posting pledge could qualify as emergencies, particularly if Congress waits until the last moment to pass legislation: A bill extending authorization for programs under the Small Business Act was signed the same day the old authorizations expired. Other bills that didn’t meet the five-day promise include the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Credit CARD Act. One bill passed by Congress and presented to the president remains unsigned: HR-131, which would establish a Ronald Reagan Centennial Commission. That bill doesn’t seem to be on the White House site.
Having bills posted for five days before being signed would be great, but it would be even better if Congress would post bills for a time before voting on them, said Heather West, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy & Technology. She said Data.gov and the requests for comments on Regulations.gov and opengov.ideascale.com, which is hosting the public comments that will be incorporated into an Open Government Directive issued by OMB, are good starts. She said she’s excited about the possibility of Regulations.gov finally changing. West said that of the three efforts, “in the long run, it may be the most useful, because it will have very concrete results.”
Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs at the Sunlight Foundation, is ready to see results from Data.gov. “Sunlight isn’t demanding that the government change overnight,” he said: “We're not crazy. And we don’t have unrealistic expectations.” If someone wanted to mash up data from multiple agencies, it might be possible -- but because the data isn’t in a standard format, the person has to write code for each agency separately. Imagine, he said, if one could write an app and access all federal information with one line of code.
Data.gov offers 47 data feeds, almost half of them GIS data -- “stuff on a map,” Johnson said. He'd like information from the foreign agent registration database, lists of people serving on federal advisory committees, and eventually Congressional data. He'd also like Data.gov to be a true repository. Now it’s a catalog that points to the data on agency Web sites, which gets to the nonstandardized format problem.
Johnson likes the comments process on opengov.ideascale.com. “I think it’s a great initiative,” he said. The site takes suggestions in several open government categories and allows people to vote yea or nay. The comment period will be followed by a deeper discussion period and a wiki directive-writing period. Right now the top vote-getter on the site is Minority Leader John Boehner, who advocated a 72-hour mandatory public review on major spending bills, an idea initially promoted by open government advocates like the Sunlight Foundation. Boehner’s idea got 632 yea votes and 58 nays. Among other ideas: a suggestion to disclose UFO presence and end the truth embargo on the presence of extraterrestrials. The idea received seven votes for and 24 against.