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.
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.
. . . 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.
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
- 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:
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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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.