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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Federal toy and product safety database delayed
Several weeks back I wrote about how this easy-to-use database over at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration where you can check if your peanut butter is salmonella free. But if a parent wants to find out if that Thomas and Friends wooden railway the kid has been hankering for is free of lead paint or easy-to-swallow parts, you won’t have much luck over at the Consumer Product Safety Commission–yet. The agency is over two months late with a required report to Congress on plans to build a new searchable database for its website that will contain information on reports of hazardous toys and other products. With this new database in place, parents should be able to quickly discover whether any other parent out there–or health professional, or child care center operator–has reported a safety problem with a toy, long before there is an official recall.Last summer, largely in response to public uproar following the recall of millions of lead-contaminated popular toys imported from China–Big Birds and Elmos and Thomas the Tank Engines among them–Congress approved the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. As part of that law, the agency was required to produce, within 180 days, or by February 10, a detailed plan to Congress for the new database. Once the report is submitted, the agency then has 18 months to make it available to the public.
Yet February 10 came and went without the agency submitting the plan, with the agency claiming it had not received the funding to work on it. With the passage of the 2009 appropriations bill, Jacquie Elder, deputy executive director staff now says the money is in and that staff are “beginning our work on developing the plan for the database.” As the law is written, every day in delay for the submission of the database plan to Congress also translates into a day of delay before the database is required to be made available to the public.
Nancy Nord, the acting chairman of the commission and a Bush appointee, was notoriously hostile to the idea of the database when it was originally debated on Congress. At a May 2008 speech before the National Retail Federation, she reportedly told attendees to fight the database provision. Nord had testified earlier that the database requirement would be too costly. In March, Sen. Dick Durbin sent Nord a blistering letter, saying “Recent comments you have made in the press…show your continued resistance to modernizing your agency and addressing the genuine public concern over unsafe products.” Nord has come under fire in the past for taking trips on the dime of the industries she regulates. The CPSC is also hamstrung because one of three commissioner slots has been vacant for some three years.
The new database is required to go beyond information currently available to consumers by requiring disclosure of any reports of harm that are submitted by consumers; local, state, or federal government; health care providers; child service providers; and public safety groups. You’ll be able to find out the types of injuries that have occurred, where they occurred, and other information typically now available only through a formal Freedom of Information Act request. Manufacturers will be identified, which ought to make it possible to mash that information up with lobbying and campaign finance information.
However, there’s no explicit language in the law requiring that the raw data underlying the database be made available to the public in a format such as XML or a text file. Offering the data in this format would make it easy for programmers to mash it up with other information, enhancing its reach. Imagine, for example, maps showing where product injuries are occuring. Or an application that helps you check out toy safety on your cell phone. Every day the CPSC runs late on getting this data out to the public is a day when that information could have helped prevent new injuries.
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The Feds Embrace Social Media
Last week Doug Belzer at Federal Computer Week has an encouraging article about how Twitter, blogs and other Web 2.0 tools are revolutionizing government business. Belzer writes how government managers and elected officials are using social media to network and collaborate online, quickly connecting with audiences like never before.
“If they’re looking for information about an obscure contract vehicle, they can post a message on a messaging service such as Twitter and see if someone can help them learn about it,” he writes. “Or if they run across a particularly useful piece of information on a community-created Web page, they can give it a high rating so others can find it easily in the future.”
Belzer gives five examples of how bureaucrats have used social media “to take care of business,” contrasting this new and effective strategy with how they would have approached the project or problem before Web 2.0 tools were available and in use, with less impressive results.
One of Belzer’s examples, as a un-recovered peanut butter fan, is near and dear to my heart. When salmonella-tainted peanut butter was found in a number of food products, it was the responsibility of the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration to get the word out about the recalls. In the past, the agencies would attempt to raise the alarm by employing press releases, posts on Web sites, toll-free telephone lines, but the agencies never knew how effective these efforts were at alerting the public. But with this emergency the agencies are using Web 2.0 tools, such as a widgets, blogs, Twitter feeds and other social networks, as well as other social media outreach efforts. The CDC first offered their peanut-butter widget in early February. And since then, Belzer reports, about 16,000 sites, including newspapers, health agencies and personal Web sites, posted the widget, resulting in more than 6.8 million views. “That viral effect is really pretty amazing,” he quotes a CDC information officer as saying. “The reach of the widget grows exponentially.”
The promise of Government 2.0 is just beginning to dawn.
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Check out your peanut butter here
This morning I visited the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) website to check, in the face of the current salmonella outbreak, if the Kroger “natural creamy” peanut butter that had been sitting in our cupboards was safe to feed my four-year-old son. I typed in the UPC code from the jar into the search bar on the page and discovered that it was not part of the recall. That was great—easy and quick. And Leo got his peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Here at the Sunlight Foundation, we’re often critical of the government’s forays into internet communication. But this is an occasion for praise. In the weeks since the salmonella outbreak occurred, sickening at least 550 people in 43 states and contributing to eight deaths, the FDA has harnessed the internet and social media to get the word out to consumers.
The main agency web page about the outbreak summarizes the situation, gives helpful health information and provides links to congressional investigations and testimony. A “widget” that allows people to paste a recall search box on their web pages was used 1.4 million times in nine days, and the website itself was searched 20 million times. The FDA also made use of twitter (@FDArecalls), blogs, mobile alerts, and online videos to alert the public about the danger.
The FDA also offers a feed of the recall information in a variety of formats—the underlying raw, structured data on which products are affected by the outbreak—so that inventive programmers can mash it up with other information should inspiration strike. Over at the blog “Development in a Blink,” Doug Finke took the information and ran it through a social mapping program to come up with this visualization on the relationships among the companies and brands involved in the recall.
There’s certainly more the agency could do. For example, it could create a way that people could text the name of a product to them from their cell phones and receive back a text saying whether the item is affected by the recall or not.
And there’s another long investigation to be told in how we’re in this salmonella mess in the first place. The food processing industry has long lobbied against giving the FDA stronger authority to regulate food safety, contributing $11.5 million in the 2008 federal elections alone and spending $29 million on lobbying last year. But with the salmonella crisis upon us, we commend the FDA for taking advantage of what the internet can offer in getting the word out.
