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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A Brief History of Senate Reconciliation Votes
As Democrats move forward to pass health care reform attention has focused on a key piece of Senate rules known as budget reconciliation. This post takes Senate vote records covering 13 key reconciliation votes from 1990 to 2007 to show how senators in both parties voted–and how sitting senators voted in the past–on a variety of reconciliation bills.(Click on the image to the right for a full visualization of these reconciliation votes.)
Reconciliation is a legislative process in the Senate commonly used to pass legislation concerning spending, revenues or the debt-limit. The process has been used 22 times since 1974. More often than not, these bills have been vehicles for large reforms in the tax code, health care and other social programs from education to welfare. One key reason that reconciliation is used for major reforms is that the process is subject to different rules than other bills. Most importantly, reconciliation bills are not subject to cloture votes–the 60 vote supermajority procedure to overcome a filibuster–and thus only require a 50 vote majority to pass.
The voting record shows that reconciliation is often used as a way to pass otherwise contentious legislation that could not receive sufficient bipartisan support to reach the 60 vote supermajority necessary to clear a cloture vote. Seven of the thirteen reconciliation measures examined here passed between 1990 and 2007 were almost universally opposed by the minority party while gaining almost total unity in support from the majority using the reconciliation process.
These seven reconciliation bills include the following: (Continue reading…)
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State Level Data Opening Up
This is from US Deputy CIO for Open Government Beth Noveck:
Inspired by the President’s call for more open government, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts launched its data catalogue, following in the footsteps of Washington, DC, San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere around the country (as well as cities in Canada and the UK), to provide public access to information by and about government. What makes this exciting is not merely having transportation information available in machine-readable formats, but that professional and amateur enthusiasts can then get together, as they did last weekend, to create new software applications and data visualizations to better enable public transit riders to track arrival times for the next subway, bus, or ferry. Publishing government information online facilitates this kind of useful collaboration between government and the public that transforms dry data into the tools that improve people’s lives. (For another great example, check out what happened when we published the Federal Register for people to use.)
The National Association of State CIOs is helping to spur this movement toward greater data transparency at the state level by publishing “Guidance for Opening the Doors to State Data.”
As my colleague John Wonderlich wrote earlier this year in a post about the importance of Recovery.gov, “The Internet has been recognized as having a central — even fundamental — role in enabling oversight and public access.” In the case of the state and city level bulk data you can make the case that the Internet is also being recognized as making people’s lives easier. Just ask anyone in here in Washington, D.C. about checking Metro and bus arrivals online or on your iPhone or Android. There is a large amount of information that our city releases that can be turned into useful applications that make the lives of Washingtonians easier. If you don’t live in New York or San Francisco or Toronto or Vancouver or any other city that has bulk data access, you should really be advocating for it.
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Recovery Board Chairman Can’t Certify That Data Is Accurate, Auditable
Recovery.gov is supposed to be a transparency clearing house for information on the federal stimulus spending appropriated in the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed earlier this year. Unfortunately, the reports on spending and jobs saved or created are showing errors across the board.
Clay Johnson at Sunlight Labs looked at the “dirty secret” that is FederalReporting.gov, the site where agencies and stimulus fund recipients file their reports before that data is pulled by Recovery.gov:
Looking into FederalReporting.gov is a lot tougher than Recovery.gov. Not a lot of light has shone upon this website. In terms of costs– the only thing I can find on usaspending.gov is that the EPA has set up a $4,000,000 helpdesk for the operation. It looks like right now there are three ways to send data into FederalReporting– via an Excel Spreadsheet, a Web Form, and via an XML API.
The question on my mind is– what kind of validation is being done on the data before it goes into federalreporting.gov? For instance, how is data getting being accepted by FederalReporting.gov saying that jobs are being created in Arizona’s 15th District when Arizona’s 15th district doesn’t exist? Shouldn’t FederalReporting.gov be validating that? It seems from the documentation that all three methods of submission have a validation process. Is the validation so lax that obviously wrong data can get through?
My initial reaction upon seeing the Arizona 15th District story was that this could have been a state-level agency or contractor reporting that jobs were created in the 15th District of the Arizona Legislature (Arizona elects one state senator and two state representatives from each of their 30 legislative districts). That was until I saw that jobs and spending were being reported from the 86th District and other states were seeing reporting coming from the 99th District and other non-existent legislative boundaries. This problem, which is huge for a project that is relying on transparency for legitimacy, stems from a patchwork reporting structure that, as Clay reported, is not being overseen properly. It looks like some of the state and local agencies and private contractors and subcontractors are simply putting a number into a box where they decided not to figure out the correct answer. Subsequently, the reporting site that they submit to is apparently not checking for errors.
In response to a letter sent by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee ranking member Darrell Issa, Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board chairman Earl Devaney answered questions about the accuracy of Recovery.gov reporting by stating, “Your letter specifically asks if I am able to certify that the number of jobs reported as created/saved on Recovery.gov is accurate and auditable. No, I am not able to make this certification.” The accurate part is obvious from the many examples pointed out by ABC, Sunlight Labs and others, but the auditable seems a bit shocking. Why isn’t the data able to be audited? Is it really that bad? Or is the Recovery board’s staff that over-stretched. While Devaney promises “increasingly higher levels of accuracy in the future,” this problem of accuracy and auditability should have been tackled before issuing press releases claiming the positive effects of stimulus spending.
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Looking for the Transparency Dividend in Minnesota
This year has seen more attention than ever given to transparency – most focused on the White House and federal government. That’s no surprise given the years of “rain-checked” reforms. Change is needed at a fast pace and in more areas. But the pressure to deliver extends beyond Washington DC. State legislatures across the country are starting to reexamine their own data, transparency rules and regulations. Earlier this month, Minnesota legislative staff met with department heads, IT experts and non-profit leaders to discuss possible changes.The state legislature in Minnesota finds itself in a challenging situation. Engaged citizenry who are clamoring for more access, more data and a better user interface for the legislature’s web site versus a state budget that has been cut down to the bone by massive state deficits as far as the eye can see.
Legislative staff see the need for additional transparency and real time data but are challenged to deliver with scarce financial resources on one hand and a deeply federated departmental system on the other. Politicians are loathe to legislate unfunded mandates (or a funded one for that matter).
Let’s be clear though: if introducing data standards and increasing transparency costs government more in the long run – they’re doing it wrong.
Dan McCreary, Semantic Solutions Architect at Syntactica in Minneapolis, attended the meeting with legislative staff. McCreary estimates that “$100 million per year in Minnesota alone” could be saved if the legislature adopted “National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) standards for all statewide data exchanges.” NIEM standards are developed jointly by the US Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security.Donna Roy, Chair of the NIEM National Priority Exchange Panel says the “[Minnesota] Department of Public Safety anticipates saving over $10 million over a three-year period by using the XML Data Model rather than developing its own statewide standard for information systems.” That’s just one change in one department! If state legislatures can save money by sharing information between departments they can definitely find the money to share that information with the public.
State legislators need to start seeing transparency as improving service while cutting costs. Without the grassroots backing strong legislation, change will be slow or non-existent in Minnesota.
I’ll be diving deeper into the transparency movement in Minnesota in future posts. Tell me about your challenges or success stories in getting data out of the legislature. Comment below or reach me on Twitter @noahkunin.
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Defective by Design?
David Moore at Open Congress has an excellent post up explaining how the current life of a bill in Congress is riddled with disclosure holes. I can’t do more than say, go read David’s post. Here’s some choice graphs:
The reason is that the “Baucus Bill” is only a “mark”, not yet an official Senate bill, which means (to summarize reductively) that the digital text that constitutes the .pdf does not make its way off internal government web servers to the official website of the Library of Congress, THOMAS — and in turn, does not make its way to government transparency web resources such as GovTrack and OpenCongress. Before that happens, this mark of the health care bill needs to be reconciled with other Senate committee versions of the same, which will then be put forward for consideration to the U.S. Senate as a whole. Health care reform is leading news coverage & blog analysis of American politics right now, this is a major document in the mix, and there’s not a widely-recognized, user-friendly resource for online examination by the public at large. You should have better access to this info! You should have — at your fingertips — immediate, unrestricted digital access to the full text of any piece of legislation the very moment it’s released publicly by Congress.
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The current Congressional process for publishing data is, to borrow a phrase from the Free Software Foundation, Defective By Design. As we see in many proprietary, top-down systems affecting the public interest, it’s insistently closed-off. Congress’ processes for distributing legislative info is fundamentally broken — it could and should relatively easily be fixed, starting now. Whether or not you support the Baucus markup or the House version of the health care reform bill, we hope you agree that the public has a right to read this important iteration & political volley in the process.
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Real-Time Data Program Wins Innovation Award
I know this is a couple days old, but it hasn’t been mentioned here yet. The District of Columbia’s real-time online data disclosure project was one of six winners of the Innovations in American Government awards given out by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation. The project was spearheaded by then-D.C. Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and current federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) Vivek Kundra. You can see the two sites singled out for praise below:
According to the Ash Institute, “this is the first initiative in the country that makes virtually all current district government operational data available to the public in its raw form rather than in static, edited reports.” Real-time data disclosure is becoming far more common in cities across the nation with San Francisco introducing DataSF.org and the New York City legislature examining open data legislation. (Vancouver, Canada has also endorsed the release of city data in raw form.)
Real-time, raw data disclosure is the cutting edge in transparency and government innovation. While the federal government has released Data.gov, a raw data site similar to D.C.’s, there are countless sets of public data compiled by the federal government that are in one or more of the following three categories: 1) Not online; 2) Not in a structured format; 3) Not compiled and disclosed in real-time. As many public data sets as possible should meet these three criteria. For some data it is unreasonable to ask for real-time disclosure. These sets should then, at least, meet the first two.
Side note: It’s great to see my city defy our Rodney Dangerfield-like existence and finally get some respect.
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AM Links
Politico looks at health care lobbyists-turned-staffers on the Senate Finance Committee with the aid of LittleSis. For a look at staffers-turned-health care lobbyists you can see our research here.
Former Abramoff lobbyist Kevin Ring is on trial in, perhaps, the most interesting corruption trial in Washington in quite some time. Neil Volz, another Abramoff crony and former staffer to Rep. Bob Ney, testified the other day and included tons of gory details:
Volz described his lobbying team’s practice of giving tickets, meals and drinks to public officials and staffers who were deemed valuable, as well as taking those individuals on trips.
“Really we just wanted to party,” Volz said about a trip he took to New Orleans with Ney, former Ney chief of staff Will Heaton, and other lobbyists. He said the group met a client and toured some homes, but those were not the main objectives of the trip, which he described as “part of the corrupt relationship” he had with Ney and his staffers.
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Volz described a discussion he had with Ring about “getting the joke,” a term used for a lobbyist getting a staffer to prioritize an issue because the lobbyist is “taking care of them,” after the Abramoff scandal began to surface in 2004.
“We thought, ‘Boy, it would be pretty difficult to defend the idea of getting the joke,’” he said of his conversation with Ring.
Over the weekend, the New York Times posted this great visualization of Clean Water Act violations and the lack of enforcement in all 50 states. One of the primary reasons why government data needs to be online and in accessible formats is for news organizations, designers and coders to create visualizations or databases that can concisely explain an issue, or reveal a problem, to the public at large.
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Journalism’s “Raw Data” Future
ReadWriteWeb published an interesting article written by Zach Beauvais with Talis and editor of Nodalities Magazine on how data is increasingly key to journalism as we proceed further into the 21st century. He differentiates data from facts by pointing out that, even though data are facts, data “can be computed, analyzed, and made use of in a more abstract way, especially by a computer.” Data-driven reporting, Beauvais writes, will increasingly become second nature to reporters.
He points to the raw data evangelism of Tim Berners-Lee and links to his TED talk and interviews where he advocates for the importance of governments and institutions putting their data online. I blogged about Tim’s “raw data” gospel back in May. “Data-driven journalism could be the first step,” Beauvais wrote. “The best stories would then come from innovators who read about trends reported in news media and are then able to draw new conclusions and solve bigger problems.” Going for the low-hanging fruit, so to speak.
As Tim had them chanting at the end of the TED talk, “Raw data now!”
Sunlight couldn’t agree more.
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A Little Help for Open Data Policy? A Call to Data Wonks
If you check out phase III of the Open Government Dialog going on now, there’s currently a pretty glaring omission:
Data Transparency via Data.gov: Putting More Data Online0 Contributors, 0 Ratings,
0 VersionsMost of the administration-led dialog’s sections are showing healthy activity, while the data section is languishing.
The page above has links back to the earlier sessions of the process, so you can review what has already been uncovered.
It seems to me that we have a double stake in the success of their project — we benefit if the policy (the Directive) that results from the process is solid — putting more data online, and we benefit if the risks the administration has taken through this open process serve are rewarded, creating a positive incentive for future officials who will have to decide whether engaging in such a process is worth the trouble.
These communities have an enormous amount to share (and debate), and we should make sure our ideas are well represented in the official recommendations crafted toward the Open Government Directive.
Give the Data section a little help!
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Prison Incarceration Rates and the National Criminal Justice Commission Act
This post exists in the service of taking government data and showing what you can do with it.
Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the National Criminal Justice Commission Act (S. 714), a bill proposed by Sen. Jim Webb to create a commission to study and make recommendations on the reform of our nation’s criminal justice laws and practices. The bill is supported by 28 senators, none of whom hail from the three states with the highest incarceration rates.
Using data extracted from a .csv file from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (this data is not yet on Data.gov and really ought to be, even though I could download it very easily), state-by-state incarceration rates were put into a map of the United States by our designer Kerry:
The top three states in prison incarceration are California, Texas, and Florida. None of the senators from these three states currently support the National Criminal Justice Commission Act. The existence of a large prison population in a state may show that the endeavor of incarceration holds strong political heft. This is particularly the case with private prisons, which, as private enterprise, have considerable reason to get involved in the political process to preserve their profit. A look at private prisons and the location of them would help provide an even deeper understanding of political considerations for senators.Below is a list of senators and the prison population of their state and their support for the bill. (Continue reading…)
