The Washington Examiner was kind enough to publish an Op-Ed I wrote on transparency in the new administration.

The starting paragraphs:

The history of the American experiment has seen a constant struggle for fundamental change and reinvention. President-elect Obama ran on change, and now faces high expectations for a radical transformation in how the public relates to the presidency.

At the core of every “government reform” initiative has been the urgent sense that government was failing in its basic responsibilities, and that citizens’ needs were not being adequately represented in Washington.

Caused by economic hardship, government waste, flagrant corruption or over-concentrated power, these eras all saw constituents’ hostility coalesce into new expectations, to which public officials were forced to respond.

Now is no different. Obama campaigned in accord with the anti-incumbent mood, placing change and innovation over tradition and experience, running as an agent of reform.

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Almost two years ago, a coalition of conservative, libertarian and progressive groups (including Sunlight) began to collectively study government secrecy and ways to fix it. Shepherded by OMB Watch (and partially funded by Sunlight), the groups are calling on Congress and the incoming Obama Administration to embrace Web 2.0 tools and the access, accountability and transparency they promise.

Renewing Government: Recommendations to President-elect Obama and the 111th Congress, provides an exhaustive, nearly 100-page report titled “Moving Towards a 21st Century Right to Know Agenda: Recommendations to President-Elect Obama and Congress” (pdf). The report includes a list for the new administration on actions it should take in its first 100 days in office, such as President Obama clearly stating in inaugural address that he will oversee the “most open, honest, and accountable government ever” to improve our trust in our government. Other themes of the report include the need for government to employ easily-to-use technology, and that they should strive to create an environment of transparency throughout the agencies.

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After my post this morning about how the next Administration can make their communications more interactive, I ran across a nice piece by Dan Manatt, founder of PoliticsTV.com and TechPresident contributor, who wrote the Obama Tech Team a memo giving advice on what Web video programs they should create and implement to better govern.

Dan says:

Your campaign platform on digital democracy, ethics and transparency, lays out an excellent roadmap to begin bringing the Presidency into the 21st century. And of course the speculation has already begun on how change.gov will morph into whitehouse.gov - and what becomes of barackobama.com….

The technological transformation of the presidency - and its use of technology to make the executive branch more responsive, interactive, and transparent - can, from day one, be the first great achievement and legacy of the Obama Presidency. It can also be a means to continue togenerate political good will and capital - commodities that often evaporate quickly after a typical presidential honeymoon. So it not only makes good policy sense, it makes good political sense.

Here’s the short version:

(1)   WhiteHouse.gov/TV; (2) Weekly Obama Webcast; (3) GovTube; (4) Video Content on Non-Governmental sites; (5) in every executive branch agency, create New Media, Transparency, and Technology offices; (6) have cabinet members/agency heads give monthly Webcasts; (7) Webcast the Inauguration; (8) make the State of the Union an interactive, multimedia event; (9) make the President’s annual budget a digital, multimedia document; (10) enact all of this and more first by executive order, then through legislation, so future Administrations can’t just hard reboot your digital legacy.

Check out the full post.

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Change.org is asking people to submit ideas and then vote them up. The top ideas will be submitted to the Obama Administration during inauguration. Our always intrepid Board Member Craig Newmark submitted the cause Act Now for Transparency!

Now is definitely the time to act. Vote for Transparency and let’s send a message to the new administration that we are serious about a real open and accountable government.

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So this morning Jose Vargas reports in the Washington Post that the President-elect will record YouTube videos of his regular Saturday morning radio chats. The new administration is touting this as partial delivery on its pledge to use the Internet to engage with citizens and to create more transparency. But I actually don’t see it that way.

Yes, this move will give the new Administration another way to broadcast its message to  folks. And people on the receiving end don’t have to tune in at a specific time, the way you do for the radio address. No doubt more people will hear these weekly messages because of that and that’s a good thing. But what does a YouTubing talking head really do in terms of engaging citizens or for providing more transparency?

The way it’s been outlined thus far, we’re still looking at an old style  ”Fireside” chat in a new format. How about providing for a little more interactivity around it? Use the White House YouTube channel to solicit questions from people, and invite the public to vote their favorites to the top? That’s what David Cameron, the British Conservative Party Leader, did with “WebCameron.” And that’s what the bigdialog.org coalition is trying to do now. How about creating real conversations such as online chats with the president or cabinet officials? Or how about simply providing opportunities for people to respond to the messages, by opening up comments on the YouTube Platform.

And as for transparency, I don’t see how one-way messages provide any more transparency for the work of the White House or government than the current old style radio addresses.

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Looking for a job in the transparency field? Well, lots of folks are, so in response to the recent commitment by the incoming administration to increase government transparency, Sunlight has created Transparency Jobs to aggregate all the employment opportunities for transparency-related careers. We launched the site a couple of minutes ago.

Transparency Jobs features opportunities in government and in nonprofits.

We want to take President-elect Obama up on his word to create a more transparent government and so we are calling on everyone to get ready to change the culture in Washington by making the inner workings of our government transparent. We’ve created Transparency Jobs to help connect those who want to dedicate their careers to opening up Washington with the opportunities that currently exist. We hope to build it into a vital resource.

Anyone can submit a post to the site, though all listings are moderated by Sunlight staff.

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The Presidential transition is a costly effort for both the incoming and outgoing administrations. The Presidential Transitions Act appropriates $5.2 million to the transition, but the Obama transition team is anticipating much higher costs.

According to the transition chief John Podesta, the Obama-Biden Transition Project (change.gov) intends to solicit private donations with a contribution limit of $5,000 from private individuals, excluding federally registered lobbyists. In the end, Podesta expects the transition to spend $12 million (including the publicly allocated funds) and employ 450 people.

The immediate issue that comes to mind when discussing contributions of money to an organization representing the President-elect is disclosure. How? What? When? Where? After spending a few hours today trying to gather this information myself, I clicked on the Open Secrets blog, Capital Eye, and found this short and sweet answer:

According to the Presidential Transitions Effectiveness Act, a single donor can contribute a total of $5,000 to the transition effort, even if the donor already gave money to Obama’s candidate committee or leadership PAC. Unlike contributions to these committees, however, donations to the nonprofit won’t have to be reported to the Federal Election Commission as political contributions because the organization is set up as a 501(c)(4), as designated by the Internal Revenue Service (these contributions are generally not tax-deductible as charitable contributions). Instead, Obama will have to disclose the source, date and amount of each contribution to the General Services Administration by February 20, a month after he’s already taken office.

Obama’s transition chief, John Podesta, told the Washington Post the team would be disclosing the names of all donors at the end of every month. Obama has also decided to bar registered lobbyists from contributing to his transition team, continuing his ethics rules on the campaign trail.

In 2000, then President-elect George W. Bush posted the donors to his transition online (although I’m not entirely sure as to whether this occurred prior to or after his inauguration). Back then, however, disclosure involved posting a giant .zip file on the front page of his bushcheneytransition.com web site.

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Here’s an opportunity for the new Administration. Develop a model system for government transparency in the context of bailout of Wall Street.

ProPublica has been doing an admirable job of providing some transparency for the financial bailout by the federal government, including putting it all in perspective. They are keeping a running tally of the banks that have announced preliminary approval by the Treasury Department for participation in the bailout, along with the dollar amounts to each bank. They are going to update the list as they receive more information. And here’s a chart providing some historical perspective, with a bubble chart representing the size of the 13 U.S. government bailouts of corporations (and one city) since 1970, calculated in 2008 dollars. They’ve also set up another chart listing the results of each bailout.

Others are keeping an eye on what’s going on. Bloomberg News is demanding that the Federal Reserve comply with congressional demands for transparency in the $2 trillion bailout of the banking system (BailoutSleuth.com says that it’s more like $2.5 trillion). In September, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson promised Congress they would open the books. Currently, Congress and the American people have no idea where their money is going or what securities the banks are pledging in return. Bloomberg has filed both a Freedom of Information Act and a federal lawsuit hoping to force disclosure.  We going to dig a bit deeper into this and see if we can figure out what the requirements for transparency are.

This is a real opportunity for the Obama team. Make reporting on the bailout a model of the transparent government that they have so strongly advocated. Daily reporting, online in usable data formats would be a good place to start.

Update: From Columbia Journalism Review.

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As we at the Sunlight Foundation watch the Presidential transition begin in earnest, we’re particularly interested in President-elect Obama’s history and promise for a more open, transparent and connected government, as articulated throughout his Senate career, Presidential campaign, and now through his newly posted agenda, on change.gov. Obama’s disposition toward government reform and transparency makes it a really good time to be an open government advocate.

Throughout his four years in the U.S. Senate, Obama has compiled an impressive record on government openness and transparency. He sponsored the Federal Finance Accounability and Transparency Act, which created USAspending.gov, a database of government grants and contracts developed in the image of FedSpending.org, which OMBWatch created with the support of the Sunlight Foundation. He also sponsored or cosponsored two successful amendments to the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, requiring Senate committees to post transcripts of their public meetings, and to add a fundraising disclosure requirement for lobbists (S.Amdt 41). Other measures that Obama has proposed include a bill to set up an outside ethics commission to receive complaints from the public on alleged ethics violations (S. 2259 ), a bill (S. 2261) to shed light on earmarks, and a bill to radically open conference committee proceedings.

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Lots of folks are starting to think about the transition to a new Administration.  We know of at least 2 dozen such efforts thus far.  And so we’ll blog about them as they start to get released. 

POGO, the Project on Government Oversight, just released a list of recommendations of major reforms they believe the new presidential administration should adopt to make the federal government more effective, accountable, open, and honest. And we sure like their list! POGO sent their list to both the McCain and Obama transition teams.

As Mandy Smithberger writes at the POGO blog, they are advising the transition teams to making agency missions more modern and relevant, keeping government’s role federalized, protecting whistleblowers, stopping the revolving door between government and private industry, strengthen the Freedom of Information Act and other transparency reforms, and other reforms to provide better government oversight.

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