Making Government Transparent and Accountable
The Sunlight Foundation uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable. Underlying all of our efforts is a fundamental belief that increased transparency will improve the public's confidence in government
The Sunlight Foundation Blog
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Improvements Needed For High Value Datasets On Data.gov
This morning a number of organizations — POGO, OMB Watch, CREW, National Security Archive, the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Open The Government coalition– and Sunlight sent a letter to Vivek Kundra, Federal CIO, about improvements needed to the release of High Value Datasets on Data.gov. Here are the core recommendations included. Please tell us what you think in the comments below.
As advocates for government openness, we support the Administration’s efforts to provide the public with access to information through Data.gov. We are eager to work with you to ensure the success of Data.gov and, in that spirit, write to raise our concerns with the datasets submitted by agencies to fulfill their requirement under the Open Government Directive to post three high value datasets by January 22, and to offer constructive suggestions for improving their usefulness.
As an overall recommendation, we urge you to add public representatives to the Open Government Initiative interagency working committee and ask the committee to address the problems and recommendations identified below.
Release Format and Usability by the Public
We understand one of the primary purposes of Data.gov is to enable the technology community and transparency advocates to most effectively use the data to make a direct impact on the daily lives of the American people. The format of the data plays a key role in its usability; many within the community of advocates who re-use and repackage government data would prefer data in CSV format, rather than the XML format in which many of the posted databases are provided. Accordingly, we recommend that you strike an appropriate balance between formats (such as XML) that serve the coding community and web-based presentations by agencies that can be used and understood by the general public.
In addition, some of the currently posted files are quite large, ranging upward to several hundred megabytes. Their large size undermines their usefulness for most people or organizations. The large number of currently posted datasets also makes it difficult to find a particular database of interest. We therefore recommend that if a Data.gov dataset is available from an agency through a web-based interface, Data.gov link to that interface on the dataset’s Data.gov landing page. For a consumer looking for information on a car seat, for example, it would be far easier to search the Department of Transportation’s online database rather than scrolling through screen after screen of raw data in XML format. Additionally, as agencies continue to post datasets to Data.gov, efforts should be made to identify those of greatest public interest that lack such interfaces and develop web interfaces that allow the data to be explored online.
Further, while we agree there is value in aggregating government data in a single site, it is questionable how much the collocation of the currently posted information on Data.gov actually benefits the public. The site is not searchable by topic and does not provide any way to bring together data from different sources on similar topics.
As an enhancement to the organization of the site, we recommend that you use tagging or metadata to enable the public to bring together information on a topic. The thesaurus that USA.gov uses provides a useful example of the needed vocabulary.
Value of Data
The release of the datasets also has prompted discussions about the value and the quality of the released data, and the additional value provided by access to existing data in a new format. We believe repackaging old information is of marginal value, yet that is what many agencies have done with their recent postings on Data.gov. According to the Sunlight Foundation, of 58 datasets posted by major agencies, only 16 were previously unavailable in some format online. This leaves the impression that agencies posted easily available data, the proverbial low-hanging fruit, rather than seriously considering which of their datasets truly are of high value. While these initial postings can be considered a test run, more attention needs to be directed toward ensuring the overall quality and usefulness of the data.
In addition, sustained attention should be paid to the possibility of making some of the datasets available as feeds that are constantly up to date, rather than as static datasets that are pulled down and then reposted on an occasional basis. We recommend that agencies be required to explain why the data is high value by having them designate which of the “high value criteria” the data meets: information that can be used to increase agency accountability and responsiveness; improve public knowledge of the agency and its operations; further the core mission of the agency; create economic opportunity; or respond to need and demand as identified through public consultation. Similarly, we recommend requiring agencies to indicate whether a high value dataset was previously unavailable, available only with a FOIA request, available only for purchase, or available, but in a less user-friendly format. Going forward, this will make it much easier to track how agencies are complying with the other requirements of the Open Government Directive. While we appreciate the value of data that furthers the mission of an agency, we believe it is equally important to make available to the public data that holds an agency accountable for its policy and spending decisions. We hope to see more datasets of this type available in the near future.
Quality
As is to be expected in efforts of this type, there were a number of glitches–datasets that could not be downloaded or, once downloaded, could not be opened (the Central Contractor Registration FOIA extract from the General Services Administration seems to have caused several users problems). Additionally, some datasets were incomplete (the Hazard Grant Mitigation Program data released by FEMA is missing 23 years of data between 1966 and 1989). Even more troubling, some did not have header rows, and for those that did, their Data.gov pages did not always link to code sheets explaining what those header rows meant. Without this information, the data cannot be used.
We therefore urge the implementation of a responsive feedback mechanism that allows the public to alert an agency that a specific dataset is not working, lacks information, or is missing explanatory material and provides a response to the concerns within a specified time. One way to address this may be to include an agency contact with the ability to resolve any database problems or provide information about the database. The interagency working group could sample the quality of these agency-specific dialogues to ensure that they are having an impact and to develop recommendations on best practices to improve the responsiveness. Additionally, we strongly recommend that all datasets on Data.gov be directly associated with their code sheets.
Finally, we are concerned with the current lack of public notice when data is removed from the site. We respectfully urge you to note all raw tools and data that are removed from Data.gov, and to provide an explanation for their removal.
Many of the concerns outlined above apply across all or many of the agencies’ datasets. Accordingly, we think that standards for handling these types of problems can easily be addressed through the interagency working group and then disseminated amongst the agencies.
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White House Takes Huge Step Toward Transparency
Early this morning, the White House took a huge step toward a more transparent government by announcing a historic new policy to voluntarily disclose White House visitor access records. Each month, records of visitors from the previous 90-120 days will be made available online.
From the President’s statement:
For the first time in history, records of White House visitors will be made available to the public on an ongoing basis. We will achieve our goal of making this administration the most open and transparent administration in history not only by opening the doors of the White House to more Americans, but by shining a light on the business conducted inside it. Americans have a right to know whose voices are being heard in the policymaking process.
Aside from a small group of appointments that cannot be disclosed because of national security imperatives or their necessarily confidential nature (such as a visit by a possible Supreme Court nominee), the record of every visitor who comes to the White House for an appointment, a tour, or to conduct business will be released. Read the full policy here.
The Administration has also agreed with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) to settle four pending cases requesting specific White House visitor access records, including those dating from the Bush administration (read the transmittal letter here). We have provided CREW with the records relating to their requests….
You can read all the details of this new policy at Norm Eisen’s blog.
There are a couple of important things to note. First, I understand that the president was personally involved in pushing this new policy forward and that generally around the White House there was not a lot of sympathy for this dramatic change. This is very significant and illustrates a fundamental commitment by this president to the campaign pledges he made toward openness of government.
Second, the White House has given itself wiggle room in that they will exercise discretion in deleting the names of certain visitors — personal friends, national security related meetings, and for some other reasons. We are going to trust them to make the right decisions. (We don’t need to know, don’t want to know the name of Sascha and Malia’s friends as one example.) One misstep and the good will we are offering them right now goes out the window.
Third, there is a substantial delay in making this information available to the public, 90-120 days. This latter point does give me some considerable pause. I understand that it will take at least 60 days for the Secret Service records to make their way to the White House and then some time to clean the data of personal information like social security numbers and phone numbers, but I would also bet it would be pretty darn easy to design a system that could provide that information on a daily basis. (Why shouldn’t the White House have access to the back end database that the Secret Service uses on a daily basis?) Hopefully, the White House will look into technological fixes for what they now assume will be a manual review and cleansing of the records. Real time, online is the standard to which we should hold all government information. That’s what “public” information means in the 21st century.
That critique aside, this is indeed a historic step. This kind of disclosure pioneered by the White House can keep government strong, keep citizens informed, provide an opportunity for all of us to monitor at close hand the work of the White House, providing an insurance policy for our citizens against those who want to keep them in the dark.
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Dodd, Conrad Cleared of Ethics Violations In Countrywide VIP Case
The Senate Ethics Committee released two letters (Dodd, Conrad) today clearing Sens. Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad of ethics violations in a case where both senators were members of a Countrywide “VIP” loan program. These letters concluded a year-long investigation into the “VIP” program and the loans the senators received.
The Committee found that the two senators did not violate Senate ethics rules prohibiting members from accepting outside gifts. The rule in question does not cover “loans from banks and other financial institutions on terms generally available to the public.” The committee also ruled that while the “VIP” loans did offer “quicker, more efficient loan processing and some discounts,” the discounts provided “were not the best deals that were available at Countrywide or in the marketplace at large.”
The senators did receive a chiding for not exhibiting care in their dealings with Countrywide. The Committee told both senators that they “should have excercised more vigilance in [their] dealings with Countrywide in order to avoid the appearance that [they] were receiving preferential treatment based on [their] status as Senator[s].”
In response to the investigation that Committee declared that it should have issued guidance on the receipt of loans and the involvement of senators in special loan programs. The Committee expects to issue a guidance to members in the future.
The organization that filed the initial ethics complaint, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), stated in a blog post that this amounts to “battered wife” syndrome.
“Like a battered woman who explains she brought the beating on herself, the committee faulted itself for failing to ‘provide more guidance to the Senate community about issues surrounding mortgage negotiations.’ Over a year has passed since CREW filed its complaint and the committee became aware of this issue. Now would be a good time for the committee to start proactively providing its promised advice.”
The Ethics Committee could also review legislation that has been introduced requiring limited disclosure of home loan information on personal financial disclosure forms (S. 1632).
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White House Refuses to Disclose Visits From Health Care Lobbyists, Execs
During the 2008 presidential primary campaign between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, then-Sen. Obama promised to hold open, televised negotiations on health care reform, a direct swipe at his opponent’s approach to health care reform when she was First Lady and in charge of the White House’s health care reform efforts. As it turns out, that was all just politics. As President, Obama has not held televised negotiations on his health care reform efforts. Now, the Secret Service is refusing to release a list of health care lobbyists and executives visiting the White House for these not-so-televised negotiations.
Invoking an argument used by President George W. Bush, the Obama administration has turned down a request from a watchdog group for a list of health industry executives who have visited the White House to discuss the massive healthcare overhaul.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sent a letter to the Secret Service asking about visits from 18 executives representing health insurers, drug makers, doctors and other players in the debate. The group wants the material in order to gauge the influence of those executives in crafting a new healthcare policy.
While the administration required lobbyists to meet a pretty high transparency burden for the stimulus funds, health care lobbying is allowed to fester without the transparency Obama repeatedly promised during the campaign. Now, negotiations do not necessarily need to be televised — in fact that’s probably a bad idea — but disclosing who is meeting with White House officials is crucial to gauging the power of groups and organizations trying to influence the final outcome.
The same is true with all major issues that the White House has put forward: cap and trade, financial regulation and health care. The New York Times reported that industry officials and lobbyists are seeking to work with the administration, in an effort to have their voices heard, rather than throw bombs from the outside. All of these organizations are seeking to influence White House decisions and ultimately to lobby Congress to set the final outcome, yet there is no mechanism for disclosure of their interactions with government officials.
If President Obama wants to meet his campaign promises of fighting lobbyists and increasing the transparency of the influence sector, he should consider applying the same disclosure rules (not the meeting restrictions) that cover stimulus lobbying to all lobbyists and executives. Or, at the very least, release a list of health care lobbyists and executives visiting the White House, per CREW’s request.
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Ensign Tried to Stymie Ethics Committee, Calls Come for Committee to Investigate
Since Wednesday, when the sex scandal engulfing Sen. John Ensign morphed into a public expense scandal, we’ve learned quite a few new details. Ensign was not blackmailed by Douglas Hampton. Cynthia Hampton’s salary at Ensign’s campaign doubled during the time of their affair. Ensign helped get jobs for Douglas Hampton and his son after they left Ensign’s Senate office and the NRSC, respectively.
What we still don’t know is whether Douglas Hampton was handsomely paid with taxpayer money when he left Ensign’s Senate office and whether this could constitute as hush money. There are beginning to be calls for a Senate Ethics Committee investigation with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) asking for the committee to investigate and require disclosure from Ensign. This is just such an awesome idea and here’s why:
Back in 2007, around the time that Ensign was pursuing his close friend’s wife, Ensign was leading a crusade to derail a bill that would require electronic filing of Senate campaign finance reports. (Yes, this bill, the one Sunlight has been advocating for since 2006.) How was Ensign trying to derail the bill? By offering an amendment that would require any group filing an ethics complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee against a senator to disclose all of their donors (pretty much any lawyer will tell you that this is unconstitutional). This would, in effect, stymie the open process by which the Senate Ethics Committee accepts complaints and would likely stop the committee from pursuing investigations. The Senate Ethics Committee is currently far more active than the House Ethics Committee, which does not accept outside complaints.
(Currently, Sen. Pat Roberts is trying to block the same electronic filing bill with Ensign’s anti-investigation amendment. If you want to get rid of this Ensign protecting amendment, you can help out here.)
Now, I don’t know if Sen. Ensign was trying to make the ethics process difficult to protect his own hide, but give a listen to how important he takes this issue.
He even states that ethics complaints could be written on a bar napkin. I’d gander that writing on bar napkins is something that Ensign is more used to than the Senate Ethics Committee.
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Meeting Becomes Example for Lobbyist Contact Disclosure
Recently, the White House and a trio of groups — American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Citizens for Responsibility in Washington (CREW), and the American League of Lobbyists (ALL) — have been in conflict over new rules on lobbying the administration in relation to the stimulus bill. On Friday, Norm Eisen, special counsel to the president for ethics and government reform, hosted a meeting with representatives from these three dissenting organizations. While the meeting may not have resolved the policy differences between the two sides, it did provide a moment for White House to live up to the standards that they are trying to set.
The White House blog carries an update on the meeting from Eisen, in which he notes the topic of discussion, the places of agreement and disagreement, and the people attending the meeting. This is very good example of how meetings with government officials should occur — with full transparency of who is taking part and what is being discussed. Great to see that a meeting to discuss the necessity of lobbying rules can be a shining example for lobbying contact disclosure.
Eisen also noted that the administration is looking “to hear from everyone affected during the 60-day initial evaluation period for the stimulus lobbying restrictions.”
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One More Post on Daschle, Revolving Door
This Feb. 2nd Newshour segment is from before Tom Daschle dropped out, but the discussion regarding the revolving door and President Obama’s reliance on Washington insiders between Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington’s Melanie Sloan and lawyer Kenneth Gross is well worth watching. It starts at around the 5:00 minute mark.
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CREW Examines the Revolving Door
Earlier today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Government (CREW) released Revolving Door, the results of their six-month investigation into the activities of 24 members of President Bush’s cabinet. The 108-page report, as their release says, demonstrates that the “revolving door” remains open. Many of the former cabinet officers now work for corporations that they had regulated. And in other cases, these individuals helped the companies receive large government grants and contracts.
Melanie Sloan, CREW’s executive director, calls out these former “public servants” for using their government positions as springboards to new lucrative corporate jobs, making a mint on the backs of American taxpayers in the process. “It may be legal, but it is certainly not honorable,” she adds.
The Center for Responsive Politics has a useful Revolving Door database that tracks anyone whose résumé includes positions of influence in both the private and public sectors. The Project On Government Oversight has also done a number of good investigations exposing the revolving door between official Washington and corporate America.
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CREW Victory on White House Records
Yesterday, in a major victory for open government and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW), a federal judge ruled against the Bush Administration latest attempt to keep secret the identities of White House visitors and declared the White House illegally deleted Secret Service computer records.
CREW has been trying to get access to White House records of visits made by nine conservative religious leaders. They are also interested in seeing the records of visits by Stephen Payne, a lobbyist who was filmed in a video sting operation organized by the Sunday Times of London, in which he promised to arrange meetings with officials in the Bush administration in exchange for a fee of $600,000 to $750,000, of which $200-250,000 would be given as a donation to the George W. Bush Presidential Library.
At the direction of the White House, the Secret Service was deleting visitor records from the beginning of the Bush Administration until October 2004, when the deletions were discovered when open government activists attempted to get access to them.
Even though the good guys won the legal battle, the Bush Administration did succeed in dragging out the case until the very final days in office.
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Transparency Victory on Missing White House Emails
On Monday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the National Security Archive won an important victory for transparency when a D.C. District Court judge upheld their challenges regarding the White House’s failure to properly store and recover millions of emails dating from March 2003 through October 2005. Rejecting the government’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, the judge ruled that the Federal Records Act permits a private plaintiff to bring suit to require the administration to notify Congress or ask the attorney general to initiate action to recover destroyed or missing e-mail records, according to the Archive.
In September 2007, both groups filed separate suits seeking the recovery and preservation of more than 5 million e-mails under the Federal Records Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. Later that year, the judge consolidated the cases. The National Security Archive has compiled a nifty chronology of the case.
The judge held that the two groups have the right to sue to force the administration to restore the deleted emails before they become unrecoverable, that the court has the authority to review the adequacy of the White House’s recordkeeping practices, and the administration has a duty to prevent the destruction of federal records, according to wallstreet.online.
