The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board has finally made the first big move toward building Recovery.gov. According to Federal Times:
GSA announced last night that it has awarded a contract for the Recovery.gov redesign; the $18 million contract went to Smartronix, a Maryland-based IT firm. It beat out 58 other bidders.
The first part of the contract is worth about $9.5 million through January; other options, which extend through January 2014, are worth another $8.5 million or so.
Does anyone have a link to the actual contract? I’d like to know what we’re getting for $9.5 million. The core functionality of USASpending.gov, which is supposed to track
all federal spending, was acquired for less than $1 million. In a recent Mercatus briefing paper I took a look at the spending transparency sites of 10 states and the most expensive one cost $300,000. So what is this $9.5 million website going to have on it? Is Smartronix also building out the central reporting database at FederalReporting.gov?
Quick drum bang: Make the raw spending data available and you will see corporations, non-profits, newspapers, and opengov nerds put up dozens of Recovery.govs with more features than the RAT Board can conceive or afford.
UPDATE: Crack reporter Aliya Sternstein at Nextgov has been doing a fantastic job covering the Recovery.gov story and she reports today that the RAT Board promises to make all the raw data available. Also in her piece, FederalReporting.gov has its own contractor, CGI Federal. So, that can’t account for the $9.5 million price tag. Still looking for the contract.
UPDATE 2: Folks have been saying that Smartronix beat out 58 other bidders for the contract. That is not correct. If you read the GSA release carefully, they say “59 companies were eligible to compete for the award.” There were reports last week that there were only two bidders. Today Jason Miller said on the radio that he could only confirm 3 bidders, including Smartronix.
I have been asked to testify at a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Thursday, March 19, 2009. It is entitled “Preventing Stimulus Waste and Fraud: Who Are the Watchdogs?” [PDF] and it will focus on accountability for stimulus spending. I will talk about how third parties can build interesting tools to help citizens find and sort spending, jobs, and performance information if only government provides the data in a complete, timely, and standardized manner.
As a way to illustrate the concept of crowdsourcing to the Committee (and to make myself seem smarter than I am) I thought I would ask you all to help me edit the testimony. I have set up a wiki with my draft written testimony on it. Please feel free to add anything I may have missed and to make any changes you see fit.
To contribute, you will need to click the “Edit” button and then ask for permission to edit the wiki (it doesn’t let me give automatic access). I will grant you permission immediately. My testimony is due by C.O.B. tomorrow, and I will incorporate all changes that I would feel comfortable testifying to.
Thanks for your help!
Yesterday I wrote about some of the questions left open at the launch of Recovery.gov. Today some of these questions are answered in a memo issued by OMB to all agency heads, giving guidance on implementing the Recover Act (PDF). Among other things, the memo lays out their obligations regarding accountability and transparency.
First, I asked yesterday whether the Recovery.gov site being run out of the White House is in fact the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board website mandated by the Act. The answer seems to be that it is. Everything in today’s OMB memo points to Recovery.gov being treated as the one and only site to comply with the Act’s requirements. I’m not sure this poses a problem for transparency, but we need to be clear that Recovery.gov is not in the Board’s control
per se as the Act seems to mandate.
More importantly, however, I asked yesterday how deep reporting would go, and whether reports from stimulus money grantees would be standardized and centrally housed. I wrote:
The problem is that a federal grant could be $10 million to Miami from DoT for roads, and that’s it. There is no requirement that the city then publish its contractors and subcontractors on the Board site. This is a big gap; if the only that must be disclosed on the Board site is the contract or grant award, then the trail will run cold very quickly.
Well, today the OMB helpfully answers me directly:
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The much anticipated site Recovery.gov has just been launched. It has been advertised by the administration as the place where stimulus spending will be completely disclosed to the public. As President Obama says in an introductory video on the home page, “once the money starts to go out to build new roads, modernize schools, and create new jobs, you’ll be able to see how, when and where it is spent” on the web site.
Reading the transparency and accountability portion of the stimulus bill today, however, I’m left with a few questions:
- The House bill called for the creation of a site to be called Recovery.gov, but that was stripped out from the final legislation. Instead, the Act calls for the independent Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board to create a website to house stimulus-related disclosures. Is the newly launched Recovery.gov that website? If so, is it indeed under the control of the independent Board? Right now the site’s content is certainly not independent of the president. If Recovery.gov is not the same thing as the legislatively created Board website, then won’t the launch of Recovery.gov serve to confuse citizens?
- I don’t see any mandate in the legislation for deep reporting of how stimulus funding is spent. The Act requires fund recipients to report on a quarterly basis to the agencies from which they received funds (HUD, DoT, DoE, etc.) how they have spent the funds. Thirty days after receiving these reports, the Act requires agencies to publish not necessarily the recipient reports themselves, but “the information submitted in reports” publicly available on “a website.” That is, not necessarily on Recovery.gov or the board website (if they are separate sites).
Can we be assured that the full text of all recipient reports will be published? And can we be assured that they won’t be scattered across dozens of sites, but placed in a central and easy to access place?
- Finally, how deep will the data go? The Board website mandated in the Act only requires the publication of “detailed information on Federal Government contracts and grants that expend covered funds” in the same fashion that USASpending.gov now employs. (Emphasis added.) The problem is that a federal grant could be $10 million to Miami from DoT for roads, and that’s it. There is no requirement that the city then publish its contractors and subcontractors on the Board site. This is a big gap; if the only that must be disclosed on the Board site is the contract or grant award, then the trail will run cold very quickly.
That said, there is a requirement for contractor and subcontractor reporting, but it comes in the recipient report mandate I explained in question 2, and like I said, there is no guarantee that we will get the full report data, nor that it will be centrally housed. Can we get that assurance?
As Recovery.gov and any other official stimulus accountability sites come on line, StimulusWatch.org and other will be looking to make the data useful to citizens. We can only do this, however, if the administration keeps its pledge to be transparent. Mr. President, just give us the data.
Witness the majesty of the internet: Less than two months ago I blogged on this site about an idea to build a website to crowdsource the task of rating the slew of “shovel ready” projects proposed by localities. I asked for volunteers to help develop the site, and to my amazement, it worked. With the help of all-around heroes Peter Snyder and Kevin Dwyer, today we launch StimulusWatch.org.
Stimulus Watch looks at the 10,000+ projects listed in the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ “MainStreet Economic Recovery Report.” The mayors and local officials around the country have asked that these projects be funded with federal money. Here are some of the proposed projects of interest to readers of this blog:
Once the stimulus bill passes, however, not every project will be funded. The agencies that administer the federal grant-making programs, which Congress will fund through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, will have to decide which of these projects to fund.
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UPDATE: I’ve created a Google Group for this project. I hope you’ll join it and help us build this tool.
Last Thursday I asked for help creating a site that would facilitate crowdsourcing the task of prioritizing the 11,000+ projects proposed in the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ $73 billion “Main Street Economic Recovery” stimulus plan. The point of doing this is to help President-Elect Obama keep his promise that any stimulus spending will be directed at critical infrastructure, and not pork. Roads and bridges and schoolhouses are infrastructure, but dog parks and tennis centers in wealthy neighborhoods probably don’t count.
Software developer Kevin Dwyer stepped up to the plate, took the mayors’ report, and parsed out the projects into an SQLite database. You can find the database here and Kevin’s take on what he did here. Now that we have the data in an easy-to-remix format, I’d like to ask for your help developing the backend for the site.
Going forward I can offer graphic design and copywriting to the project, as well as cat-hearding, which are my comparative advantages. What I don’t have are the technical chops to code the backend. If you are a developer, or know someone who is, and might be willing to help, please read on.
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The stimulus plan President-Elect Barack Obama has recently described would help jump-start the economy at the same time it renews our country’s vital infrastructure. And the president-elect is serious about making smart investments. Here he is on Meet the Press last Sunday (emphasis mine):
Well, I think we can get a lot of work done fast. When I met with the governors, all of them have projects that are shovel ready, that are going to require us to get the money out the door, but they’ve already lined up the projects and they can make them work. And now, we’re going to have to prioritize it and do it not in the old traditional politics first wave. What we need to do is examine what are the projects where we’re going to get the most bang for the buck, how are we going to make sure taxpayers are protected. You know, the days of just pork coming out of Congress as a strategy, those days are over.
Well, it’s not just the governors that have “shovel-ready” projects lined up for federal funding, the nation’s mayors also have plenty of projects at the ready. You can see what these projects are at the U.S. Conference of Mayors site where they have published a “MainStreet Economic Recovery Report” along with a database of the projects, their cost, how many jobs they are expected to create, all sorted by state.
As Reason’s Robert Poole points out in the Wall Street Journal, however, not all of the 11,391 ready-to-go projects would qualify as smart investments:
What vital infrastructure projects would cash-strapped taxpayers get for their $73 billion? Here’s a sampling:
– Hercules, Calif., wants $2.5 million in hard-earned taxpayer money for a “Waterfront Duck Pond Park,” and another $200,000 for a dog park.
– Euless, Texas, wants $15 million for the Midway Park Family Life Center, which, you’ll be glad to note, includes both a senior center and aquatic facility.
– Natchez, Miss., “needs” a new $9.5 million sports complex “which would allow our city to host major regional and national sports tournaments.”
– Henderson, Nev., is asking for $20 million to help “develop a 60 acre multi-use sports field complex.”
– Brigham City, Utah, wants $15 million for a sports park.
– Arlington, Texas, needs $4 million to expand its tennis center.
– Miami, Fla., needs $15 million for a “Moore Park Community Center, Tennis Center and Day Care” facility. The city is also desperate for $3.6 million to build a covered basketball court and a new tennis court at Robert King High Park. Then there’s the $94 million Orange Bowl parking garage you are being asked to pay for.
– La Porte, Texas, wants $7.6 million for a “Life Style Center.” And Oakland, Calif., needs $1 million for Fruitvale Latino Cultural and Performing Arts Center.
And you thought infrastructure investment meant roads, bridges and schools. It is clear that any infrastructure stimulus money given to the country’s mayors will lead to thousands of tennis centers to nowhere.
Here is my bleg: Let’s help President-Elect Obama do what he is promising. Let’s help him “prioritize” so the projects so that we “get the most bang for the buck” and identify those that are old school “pork coming out of Congress”. We can do this through good clean fun crowdsourcing. Who can help me take the database on the Conference of Mayors site and turn each project into a wiki-page or other mechanism where local citizens can comment on whether the project is actually needed or whether it’s a boondoggle? How can we create an app that will let citizens separate the wheat from the pork and then sort for Congress and the new administration the project in descending order or relevancy?
I have some technical chops, but in many ways I wouldn’t know where to start. Any takers? If there are, my colleagues and I would love to dive into this and we can probably scrounge up some resources. Who’s with us?
Congratulations are in order for the FCC, which today celebrates five years since it last updated its online docket search system, ECFS. If you look at the bottom of the main search page, you will see the mark of this amazing feat: “updated 12/11/03”. In internet years that like a century. Kudos!
Yesterday at the Cato Institute panel on online transparency (video forthcoming here) I laid into the FCC for being an agency that’s supposed to be tech savvy, but that continues to have an online presence that is absolutely abysmal. Their docketing system is the agency’s lifeblood and yet there is no full-text search, there are no data feeds, and their robots.txt file is set to exclude search crawlers. This is totally unacceptable and I hope a tech-savvy Obama FCC will revamp the site.
Today the Washington Post features Google’s push to modernize government sites to allow it and other commercial search engines to index those sites:
[T]he U.S. government, one of the world’s largest depositories of data, has been unwilling or unable to make millions of its Web pages accessible [to search engines].
“The vast majority of information is still not searchable or findable either because it’s not published or it’s on Web sites which the government has put up which no one can index,” Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said during a recent presentation at the New America Foundation. …
Today, a wide array of public information remains largely invisible to the search engines, and therefore to the general public, because it is held in such a way that the Web search engines of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft can’t find it and index it. Not surprisingly, Yahoo and Microsoft officials agree that people would be better served if more public information became accessible to their search engines.
While an Obama administration could help solve this problem administratively by implementing Google’s sitemap scheme, Congress could also mandate that agencies make their data searchable. That’s exactly one of the thing that the Joe Lieberman-sponsored E-Government Reauthorization Act of 2007 would do. Take your pick, just give us the data!
The NY Times reports today that towns in Connecticut are shuttering their websites because they’re finding it too costly to comply with a new state transparency law that requires towns with websites to “post minutes from public meetings on the site within seven days of the meeting and must give residents at least 24 hours notice of special meetings through the site.” Seems a bit drastic to me. The story explains:
“We decided we couldn’t do what was required right away,” said Frank J. Chiaramonte, first selectman of Harwinton. “So we shut down our site.”
In many small towns, volunteers run the Web sites. Asking the volunteers to type up the minutes of a meeting and to then also put the minutes online,all within seven days, is too much to ask, Mr. Chiaramonte said.
“Some commissions still do minutes in longhand,” he added.
Here’s a tip that may or may not help towns comply with the law: record the public meeting with a cheap MP3 recorder and upload the file to the site. Boom. Instant transparency. Want to get a little fancier? Shoot the MP3 to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and for a few dollars have the audio transcribed or turned into minutes. Or set up a wiki and let citizens do it.
Like I said, these suggestions might not produce official minutes needed to comply with the law, but it’s the kind of measure I’d like to see instead of shuttering whole sites. One other thing, with storage and recording equipment so cheap, there’s no reason why every public meeting in the country, from the federal government to school boards, shouldn’t be online within a day or two. Enough excuses, folks.
First, Jim Harper would kill me if I didn’t begin this post by mentioning that I’ll be speaking at a Cato Institute lunch panel entitled, “Just Give Us the Data! Prospects for Putting Government Information to Revolutionary New Uses,” on Wednesday, Dec. 10, along with Ed Felten of Princeton and Gary Bass of OMB Watch. RSVP here. That said, I want to talk about CTOs.
A while back I engaged in a debate about whether Barack Obama’s promise to appoint a national chief technology office should be feared. I think the question turns on whether this person will be CTO of the United States or CTO of the U.S. Federal Government. While I personally believe the former should be feared, the latter should be welcomed.
The good news is that in all of Obama’s pronouncement’s on the matter the position has always been described as having a brief to open the government by employing online tools. Here’s how the position is described in Obama’s campaign position paper on technology:
Bring Government into the 21st Century: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will use technology to reform government and improve the exchange of information between the federal government and citizens while ensuring the security of our networks. Obama and Biden believe in the American people and in their intelligence, expertise, and ability and willingness to give and to give back to make government work better. Obama will appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices.
To me this sounds more like a Chief Transparency Officer, and that’s a good thing. Most federal government websites are terrible relative to the state of the art. Any effort to make them as useful or informative as the barackobama.com website should be welcomed. We can see the beginning of this transformation at the new change.gov site for the Obama transition team.
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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.