Data-transparent government is still a ways off, but some small steps forward are underway. To wit, my project WashingtonWatch.com, which is adding new data going to the costs of bills in Congress.

As detailed in an announcement that went up this morning, many more bills on the site will have cost estimates associated with them, the product of research being done at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. Some bills spend pennies or less per U.S. family. Some spend $5,000 per family and more. Wouldn’t you like to know which are which?

The site has also begun displaying national debt information on a per-family, per-person, and per-couple basis. (Your debt—just for being an American—is about $45,000 dollars.)

I’ll have much more to say on government transparency in the coming months. In the meantime, you might do your part to avoid the next calamitous debt ceiling debate by following the day-to-day, month-to-month, and year-to-year in Congress using things like the WashingtonWatch.com weekly email newsletter.

This morning, a database of FY 2011 earmark requests was released by Taxpayers Against Earmarks, Taxpayers for Common Sense, and my own WashingtonWatch.com. With House Republicans generally eschewing earmarks this year, members of Congress and senators still sought over 39,000 earmarks, valued at over $130 billion dollars. Learn more on the relevant pages at Taxpayers for Common Sense, Taxpayers Against Earmarks, and WashingtonWatch.com.

This is transparency. The production of organized, machine-readable data has allowed these differing groups—an advocacy organization, a spending analysis group, and a “Web 2.0” transparency site—to expand the discussion about earmarks. The data is available to any group, to the press, and to political scientists and researchers.

Earmarking is a questionable practice, and, anticipating public scrutiny, House and Senate Republicans have determined to eschew earmarks for the time being. But the earmark requests in this database are still very much “live.” They could be approved in whatever spending legislation Congress passes for the 2011 fiscal year. They also tell us how our representatives acted before they got careful about earmarks.

Earmarks are a small corner of the federal policy process, of course, but when all legislation, budgeting, spending, and regulation has become more transparent—truly transparent, Senator Durbin—the public’s oversight of Congress will be much, much better. As I noted at the December 2008 Cato Institute conference, “Just Give Us the Data,” progressives believe that it would validate government programs and root out corruption. (That’s fine—corruption and ongoing failure in federal programs are not preferable.) I believe that demand for government will drop. The average American family pays about $100 per day for the operation of the federal government currently. That’s a lot.

Again, you can see how this data is in use, and you can use it yourself, by visiting Taxpayers for Common Sense, Taxpayers Against Earmarks, and WashingtonWatch.com. On the latter site, you can see a map of earmarks in your state and lists of earmarks by member of Congress and representative, then vote and comment on individual earmarks.

At considerable expense and effort, these sites have done what President Obama asked Congress to do in January. If earmarking is to continue, Congress could produce earmark data as a matter of course itself: The appropriations committees could take earmark requests online and immediately publish them, rather than using the opaque exchange of letters, phone calls, and—who knows—homing pigeons.

Congress should modernize and make itself more transparent. We’re showing the way.

If you’re in the D.C. area, come join the fun next Monday, November 15th, as the Advisory Committee on Transparency kicks off with its first event: The Future of Earmark Transparency (2:00 p.m., 2203 Rayburn House Office Building).

The Sunlight Foundation’s Daniel Schuman moderates a discussion that includes Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense and yours truly. My WashingtonWatch.com project crowdsourced over 40,000 earmark requests last year, which we displayed on this map.

Earmarks are a hot topic right now. The new Republican Congress may make a move to ban them, but the Senate leadership may not be ready to go quite that far.

Will full-fledged earmark transparency be the compromise? It might provide a model for far more transparent processes throughout Congress.

Taxpayers Against Earmarks is a new effort to rid the federal legislative process of some of its most acute horse-trading: earmarks. Find it at the cleverly named URL, EndingSpending.com.

My project WashingtonWatch.com has worked to generate earmark transparency. Here’s the earmarks main page, and you should expect to see FY 2011 earmarks there soon.

There’s little doubt that many spending earmarks are part of a subtle—or not-so-subtle—quid pro quo in which federal legislators buy votes by directing funds to favored home-state or home-district interests. Taxpayers Against Earmarks has a well-produced web site that invites people to sign up and join the anti-earmark effort.

Earmarked spending is a small part of the overall budget, of course, but earmarking is emblematic of the “favor factory” that Congress has become as the federal budget and federal power have bloated. Federal spending is appropriate in the small number of cases when it provides national public goods that benefit the country as a whole, but refurbishing local museums, funding projects at state universities, and requiring the military to buy from a particular defense contractor do not benefit the general welfare. Taxpayers Against Earmarks is working to begin the process of getting federal spending under control.

The Contract From America is a very interesting political document, seeking to rally people around a set of policies that—unlike the Contract With America from years ago—was generated from the bottom up.

On the WashingtonWatch.com blog, I’ve been assessing the ten items in the Contract From America. The Tea Party movement stands for a lot of ideas in a lot of people’s minds. Here’s a chance to see what substantive policies are important to a large cross-section of this political movement.

A bill introduced in the Senate yesterday would require Congress to bring earmarks out of the shadows, producing earmark data in a format that the public can easily use.

S. 3335 calls for a “unified and searchable database on a public website for congressional earmarks.” This is something President Obama called for in his 2010 State of the Union speech, though we haven’t heard much more from him about it since then.

The bill was introduced by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), and is currently cosponsored by Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA), Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), and Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO). Its House counterpart is H.R. 5258 (Cassidy R-LA), which also has bipartisan support.

Importantly the bill is not just about a web site. The bill would enable the public to “programmatically search and access all data in a serialized machine readable format via a web-services application programming interface.” That gobbledegook means that people could access the data for themselves, slicing and dicing it to learn whatever they want or to display it however they want.

I’ve noted here before the efforts of my government transparency web site WashingtonWatch.com to capture earmark data and the related effort to get earmark data directly from Congress at Earmarkdata.org.

Support for these bills across parties and ideologies suggests good things may be in store for earmark transparency.

The “Cyber Privacy Act”? No it ain’t!

Michigan Representative Thaddeus McCotter (R) has introduced a bill to create a take-down regime for personal information akin to the widely abused DMCA process. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act established a system where copyright holders could as a practical matter force content off the Internet simply by requesting it.

McCotter’s proposal would similarly regulate every Internet site that has a comment section. He thinks it’s going to protect privacy, but he’s sorely mistaken. Its passage would undermine privacy and limit free speech.

I’ll take you through how McCotter’s gotten it wrong.

The operative language of H.R. 5108 is:

Any Internet website that makes available to the public personal information of individuals shall– (1) provide, in a clear and conspicuous location on the Internet website, a means for individuals whose personal information it contains to request the removal of such information; and (2) promptly remove the personal information of any individual who requests its removal.

The Federal Trade Commission would enforce the failure to abide by requests as it does unfair and deceptive trade practices. (Meaning: penalties.)

So if someone posts his or her name in a comment section and later regrets it, the operator of that web site would have to take it down. Sounds nice—and that is the right thing for webmasters to do when the circumstances warrant. But what about when they don’t?

Let’s say you run a site that receives hundreds or thousands of comments per day, many of them from anonymous visitors. Let’s say the site deals with controversial issues, and some visitors are angry at each other—they’re even angry at the site for hosting the discussion. Those visitors start working to undermine the conversation. They personally attack others, adopt false names, tell lies, and use vulgarities. This kind of person is well known on the web. They’re called “trolls.”

What would trolls do if federal law required webmasters to take down personal information by request? Simple: They would post the personal information of others. They would pose as others and falsely ask to have information taken down.

It’s a great way to attack a site: require it to consider hundreds or thousands of personal information take-down requests, each one backed by the threat of federal penalties.

What do you do as a webmaster to counter that? You require all comments to be tied to a fixed identity. Require a log-in before site visitors can comment. Then you can figure out later if the person requesting a take-down of personal information is the person who it pertains to.

What’s the result of that? Web sites collect and store more information about visitors. Then they turn around and use it for tracking and marketing. The information is available to litigators and government investigators, of course, through subpoenas and warrants.

Are you doing the math? McCotter’s “Cyber Privacy” bill is a proposal to increase Internet surveillance. Maybe he intends to improve Internet courtesy and decency. But decency is not a federal government project. It’s bottom-up, not top-down.

I write, of course, as a spare-time webmaster myself. The bills on WashingtonWatch.com get hundreds of comments per day. Many bills get lots of comments, but one in particular—subject of dispute, controversy, and trolling, along with productive political organizing—has over 130,000 comments.

I do a lot to foster a good visitor experience, consistent with maintaining the space available for free speech. I advise people about how to deal with trolls, I allow people to register so their stable identities can build trustworthy reputations, I proctor commenters about controlling vulgarities—sometimes strongly editing comments when they don’t, and I allow users to block commenters and words they don’t want to see.

When the context warrants it, I do remove personal information at the request of people that I believe are making honest, good faith requests. I think it’s part of what builds allegiance to the site.

But if I were required by law to do this, it would be an entirely different calculation. Each request would present me with a veiled legal threat, not a small customer service opportunity.

As trolls figured out how to exploit the law—the way some copyright holders exploit the DMCA—they could inundate small sites with requests. Webmasters would be right to treat all requests with suspicion. Confirming requests would require them to convert to greater surveillance. A percentage of the small sites and blogs that are hobbies or money-losers would just shut down comments rather than deal with the nonsense.

Representative McCotter’s plan to regulate Internet communications this way is no “Cyber Privacy” act. It’s anti-privacy, and it’s anti-free-speech.

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.

The reason why I’m so confident of a prospective violation—aside from the promise being flouted more often than not—is that the White House has posted the Senate-passed health care overhaul bill on the “Pending Legislation” page of Whitehouse.gov. H.R. 3590 as passed by the Senate is right there in among the bills Congress has passed, which are getting their five-day public review.

If the White House plans to argue that the health care overhaul legislation got the five-day public review President Obama promised, that will not fly at all.

The substance of the Sunlight Before Signing promise is to post bills for five days after Congress’ final vote. (I’ve recommended starting the clock at “presentment,” the formal constitutional step when the president receives a bill from Congress.)

Something other than that, such as posting the Senate bill before it passes the House—while failing to post the “fixer” bill for five days—would fundamentally violate the president’s transparency promise.

What an irony if all this were to happen this week, which, after all, is Sunshine Week!

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.)

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.

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.

The WashingtonWatch.com blog is entering its second year.

They can be so entertaining.

. . . with calls to televise the conference committee on the economic stimulus bill.

A good idea, with reservations which I discuss on the WashingtonWatch.com blog.

. . . have been announced on the WashingtonWatch.com blog.

On this week’s show, we discuss government transparency—a topic a number of us here at the TLF have written about lately.  Among other things, we discuss:

• Why transparency is important
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• What data the government should provide and how
• Good and bad examples of transparency
• President Obama’s promise to have the most accountable administration in history
• Obama’s plans to appoint a Chief Technology Officer

My guests for this show are:

• TLFer Jerry Brito of the Mercatus Institute, who’s written extensively about transparency and has recently launched an e-Government project called StimulusWatch
• TLFer Jim Harper of the Cato Institute and WashingtonWatch.com, another very successful e-Government project, who’s asked some tough questions about the Administration’s implementation of e-Government thus far and led a great Cato policy forum on this issue (featuring Jerry, among others)
• John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation, the leading e-Government non-profit whose “non-partisan mission [is to use] the revolutionary power of the Internet to make information about Congress and the federal government more meaningfully accessible to citizens”

You can subscribe to our podcast here or through iTunes here.  Or, you can play or download this podcast using the online player below.

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(Before you finish reading this, if you’re in D.C., you’ll want to sign up for this policy forum.)

Ben Goddard’s most recent column in The Hill is called “Obama Marketing Lesson,” and he reviews how the Internet and savvy use of media energized President-Elect Obama’s campaign effort. “[S]ocial networks have returned as one of the most powerful forces in politics,” he says.

President-elect Obama has a database of some 10 million names and e-mail addresses, and those who built it have made clear they’ll activate that army to support the new president. MoveOn.org is already preparing its supporters to advocate for progressive policies. Groups like Divided We Fail, Healthcare for America Now! and the American Medical Association are already running television and online campaigns to advocate for healthcare reform.

(Goddard will be lending some of his insights about communications strategies to secure the country against fear and overreaction at our January conference on counterterrorism strategy, by the way.)

The substance of the campaigns he talks about might be far from encouraging for libertarians. None of these are limited government advocates. Politicized online social networks could be the agar in which a new mobocracy grows – something our republican form of government was designed to prevent.

But what’s the solution? To oppose democracy and an active citizenry? Other than restoring constitutional limits on government, I don’t think so. As with speech, the cure for bad democracy is more of it, but good.

It’s not a given that online politics will amount to crowds of avatars with digital pitchforks and torches. The Internet is a fertile medium for careful debate about our public policies. Social networks can be smart and informed – if they get the data.

That process is starting. USASpending.gov delivers data about where federal contracting dollars and grant awards go. This was a project of President-Elect Barack Obama who, with Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), made transparency a signature issue in the Senate. The non-profit effort that broke ground for this is OMBWatch’s FedSpending.org,which logged its 10 millionth search in June.

My humble effort, WashingtonWatch.com, attaches cost estimates to the bills in Congress and recently welcomed its millionth visitor for the year. The Sunlight Foundation has a list of insanely useful Web sites, each exposing some dimension of government action to greater public scrutiny. The organization is dedicated to developing a stable of private, non-profit, and volunteer efforts that promise revolutionary change once they can access standardized, structured, and open government data.

And that’s the bottleneck: access to good data. Government information now comes to us mediated by government Web sites and government-defined database queries. Getting the raw data would allow all kinds of actors to generate all kinds of new information about government. All citizens would have better information to work with, not only about taxes and spending, but about the results of government programs.

Libertarians bet that this would reduce demand for government. Liberals and progressives believe that this would deliver on the promise of government. If either side wins, we’re better off than we are here in the dark disappointment of government today.

On December 10th, the Cato Institute is having a policy forum on this topic. The title is “Just Give us the Data!“

My legislative tracking project/site has welcomed 1,000,000 visitors so far this year, a nice threshold to cross.

Oh, and the Senate economic stimulus bill amounts to about $750 per U.S. family in spending.

Members of Congress whose votes changed, allowing the financial services bailout bill to pass.

You must fear the MEGA! FEAR THE MEGA AND SUPPORT IT!

The WashingtonWatch.com blog has a breakout of all 36 bills in the “Coburn Omnibus.”

#36: a greenhouse in Suitland, Maryland!

Just wanted to highlight some of the fun I’m having at the new WashingtonWatch.com blog.

The second post in the insanely popular “and a pony” series is up.

On whether to subsidize commercial fishing, we capture the essence of the seagoing entrepreneur: “This government isn’t doing squat.”

And just when we’re getting a handle on what’s happening, Will the Budget and Spending Process Collapse?

Click over, vent your spleen in the comments, subscribe to the feed, whatever.

Now back to the show . . .