Mark Tapscott: One step forward, one back for government transparency
By: Mark Tapscott
Editorial Page Editor
November 19, 2009
It's been a rough week for advocates of government transparency and accountability, with one hero striking an almost completely unnoticed blow and a goat who by remaining silent is inflicting terrible damage on the cause.
The hero and the goat are Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and President Obama -- two guys who not that long ago were often mentioned in the same breath as Senate co-authors of "Coburn-Obama," the bill President George W. Bush signed into law in 2006 as the Federal Financial Accountability and Transparency Act.
The FFATA mandated establishment of USASpending.gov, the searchable Internet database that puts most federal spending within a few mouse clicks for every citizen. It's been up for a couple of years and has had some problems, but the basic principle of Internet-based government transparency was confirmed and a dozen or so states have followed suit.
But this week, Coburn and Obama were moving in opposite directions. Coburn continues to do what he does better than any other senator -- force votes his colleagues desperately want to avoid on issues they would rather ignore.
For years, federal agencies and departments have produced confidential reports exclusively for congressional appropriators chock-full of information about federal program costs and performance.
Coburn offered an amendment earlier this week requiring agencies and departments to post the reports on the Internet. It passed 93-0.
It's a significant win for improving government transparency and accountability because, as Coburn argued before the vote, "in today's information age, observations made by bloggers, government accountability group, students, and others can help inform the public of needs or problems within our government and society."
Curiously, the mainstream media has said nothing about Coburn's victory, which, oh by the way, will also make their job of getting the facts about government much easier.
Then there's Obama, the goat. When Congress approved his $787 billion economic stimulus package in February, he heralded establishment of Recovery.gov, a new government Web site to enable citizens to see how their tax dollars were being spent on the stimulus program.
Nine months later and the blogosphere and mainstream media are saturated with detailed investigative reports on the utter uselessness of the job creation data on Recovery.gov. The Examiner's David Freddoso and Mark Hemingway, for example, found that at least one of every 10 jobs claimed to have been created or saved almost certainly weren't, thanks to repeated errors like raises being counted as jobs "saved."
And Watchdog.org reporters in multiple states found that Recovery.gov credited the stimulus program with creating or saving 30,000 jobs costing $6.4 billion in 440 congressional districts that don't even exist.
Incredibly, G. Edward DeSeve, Obama's senior White House appointee overseeing Recovery.gov, defended it as a "great success" and dismissed the jobs data problems as mere "typos" and "data entry errors." The problems "are relatively few anddon't change the fundamental conclusions one can draw from the data," he added.
To the contrary, as every statistician well knows, such errors render a database useless as an analytical tool. DeSeve might as well as said "hey, quitcher gripin' cauz it's close enough for guvmint work."
The current flap is not the first for Recovery.gov. Earlier this year, the Obama administration awarded an $18 million contract to an obscure Southern Maryland defense contractor with little previous experience in Web design to redesign the site.
Coincidentally, two of the firm's senior executives had contributed more than $19,000 to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer's previous re-election campaigns. Now, despite the redesign, the site still looks like a Democratic National Committee propaganda outlet, but with less credible data.
The result is that Recovery.gov is making a mockery of the idea that the Internet can be a revolutionary tool for making government more transparent and thus more accountable to the people it is supposed to serve.
Obama has been silent thus far on these matters, but his silence speaks volumes.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott's Copy Desk blog on washingtonexaminer.com.
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