Citizens who want to know how the federal government is spending tax dollars can go to FedSpending.org, a Web site maintained by the liberal advocacy group, OMB Watch. The site shines much-needed light on the federal budget by making it easy to get data on federal grants and contracts. Unfortunately, too many dark corners remain at all levels of government. Among the worst are state attorneys general who can award multimillion-dollar, no-bid contracts to friends and political allies.

Exhibit A is California state treasurer Bill Lockyer, who in his previous job as the Golden State’s attorney general concealed more than 1,700 contracts worth in excess of $100 million. When The Associated Press investigated, Jerry Brown, Lockyer’s attorney general successor, took a closer look at 131 contracts and found that only a dozen warranted the confidential classification. The AP now suggests that more than 1,000 of the 1,700-plus contracts classified confidential should have been made public. The confidential classification removed the contracts from the state government’s computer system, thus effectively putting them beyond California’s open records law.