Over on the WashingtonWatch.com blog, I’ve laid out in the simplest terms I could what’s going on in terms of procedure with health care overhaul legislation. The post, called “What is Deeming, Anyway?“, comes in at a mere 900 words… If you’re a real public policy junkie, you might like it.
But what about the transparency oriented processes that President Obama and leaders like Speaker Pelosi promised the public? Recall that the Speaker promised to post the health care bill online for 72 hours before a vote back in September.
There was debate about whether she stuck to her promise then. And it was probably a one-time promise. It’s almost certain that she will not do so now. If she lines up the votes to pass the bill, the vote will happen. Right. Then.
What about President Obama’s promise to put health care negotiations on C-SPAN? The daylong roundtable debate on health care was an engaging illustration of what happens when you do transparent legislating. Voters got a clearer picture of where each side stands—and perhaps saw that there actually is some competence on both sides of the aisle. Some competence.
The health care negotiations going on right now are the ones that matter. This is when the most important details are being hammered out. This is when the bargaining that draws the public’s ire is happening. But I’m not seeing it on C-SPAN.
President Obama’s promise may have been naive, but that doesn’t excuse it. The inside negotiations going on this week represent an ongoing violation of the president’s C-SPAN promise.
And there’s good reason to anticipate that the president will violate his Sunlight Before Signing promise as well. This was his promise to post bills online for five days after he receives them from Congress before signing them into law. Continue reading →
This morning, a small group of us open government collaborators (joined by others) rolled out a transparency campaign called “Just Give Us the Earmark Data!”
Visitors to EarmarkData.org are encouraged there to sign a petition asking Congress to publish data about earmarks in formats that are useful for public oversight. Developers can also participate in perfecting the data schema that will capture the “earmarks ecosystem” in the best possible way.
There has been a lot of action on earmarks recently. House Democrats announced last week that they would restrict their earmarking only to non-profits. The next day, House Republicans announced that they would forgo earmarking entirely. That’s House Democrats and House Republicans. Don’t assume that earmarking is going to go away.
Whatever happens, our demand is simple: Just give us the data!
If you agree that Congress should make good information about earmarking available, please sign the petition—and pass along the word with a Tweet, a Facebook post, an email, or whatever communication you like!
(If you’re a developer, take a look at the schema and join in the conversation about it on our Google group.)
As I’ve detailed in a WashingtonWatch.com blog post, the president called for earmark transparency in his state-of-the-union speech tonight. A fact sheet put out by the White House goes beyond the president’s words to call for “a comprehensive, bipartisan, state-of-the-art disclosure database that allows Americans to examine the details of every proposed earmark before a vote is taken—one that is fully searchable and otherwise user-friendly.”
This is very good news for transparency coming out of the state-of-the-union speech. And I’ll be working to make sure that the good practices that take root in the earmark area branch out to other areas as well.
AFF’s Doublethink has a nice story on “Open Source Democracy,” featuring TLF’s own Jerry Brito, founder of StimulusWatch.org.
Yours truly and WashingtonWatch.com get a little mention too. Media darling Jerry gets top billing because he’s so darn good looking. And yes, a very clunky early version of WashingtonWatch.com was launched in 2001. The story slightly overstates the capabilities of my project, but we’ve got improvements along those lines in the works.
Today the House of Representatives is debating H. Res. 672, which would call on the government of Vietnam to release imprisoned bloggers and respect Internet freedom.
Here is an article or two about what is happening with Vietnamese bloggers.
And here’s the current WashingtonWatch.com vote on H. Res. 672.
ArsTechnica has a great write-up of WashingtonWatch.com’s earmarks project and a top earmark hunter, Andi Osiek.
Back from vacation and digging out, I will be furiously working over the weekend to check the data we collected, flag earmarks that made it into bills, and award the prizes to the top earmark hunters in the contest.
I was very pleased to read in Federal Computer Week this morning that the Office of Management and Budget will begin tracking earmark requests next year for the fiscal 2011 budget cycle.
OMB makes available some years’ approved earmarks, but not the earmark requests put forward by members of Congress. Tracking and publishing requests will shed light on the whole ecosystem of congressional earmarks—the favor factory, if you will.
OMB’s move follows a project WashingtonWatch.com has conducted this summer: asking the public to plug earmark disclosures into a database. The site now maps over 20,000 earmarks. (Well, technically, that much data breaks the mapping tool, but you can see state-by-state earmark maps.)
Earlier this year, the House and Senate Appropriations Committees required their members to disclose earmark requests. These disclosures—published as Web pages and PDF documents—were not useful, but public interest in this area is strong, and the public made them useful by entering them into WashingtonWatch.com’s database.
The project isn’t over, by the way, and the current focus is collecting earmarks requested by Appropriations Committee members.
It’s great news that next year the Obama Administration will track and disclose earmarks, from request all the way through to enactment. Given his struggle in the area lately, this is a chance to score some transparency points. President Obama campaigned against earmarks, promising reform, and this is an important step toward delivering on that promise.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
WashingtonWatch.com: Over 100,000 Comments on One Bill
by Jim Harper on February 11, 2010 · Comments
It’s not the highest-toned debate the world of public policy has ever seen, but the WashingtonWatch.com discussion on Public Law 111-92, the Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2009, has now reached over 100,000 comments.
I’ve discussed the astounding level of commentary—and all the efforts to keep it civil—in a post on the WashingtonWatch.com blog.