It is highly doubtful that even a handful of the senators and representatives who ultimately vote on the $825 billion Obama/Reid/Pelosi economic stimulus package will have actually read all 334 pages of the bill. But that won’t prevent many of their constituents from poring over the contents of this legislative Christmas tree, which have been posted on the Internet. The daunting task of digging into the stimulus legislation has been made easier by a coalition of think tanks and activists groups organized on the ReadtheStimulus.org web site. At latest count, the coalition’s members include The Heritage Foundation, National Taxpayers Union, Citizens Against Government Waste, Taxpayers for Common Sense, Club for Growth, RedState.com, FreedomWorks, Lighthouse, Americans for Prosperity, and #TCOT.
Members of the coalition are both studying the bill in detail and jointly creating a searchable public database of the spending projects they find. They have also created online tools for helping everybody who wants to read and comment on the text. ReadtheStimulus.org is thus an online demonstration of crowd-sourcing – posting on the Internet an important document in order to enlist the knowledge, experience and analytical skills of legions of interested people. The web site also provides a publicly accessible forum in which readers of the bill can share and discuss their findings. Crowd-sourcing is potentially among the most powerful tools available to taxpayers for increasing the transparency and accountability of Congress.
One of the earliest discoveries of ReadtheStimulus.org initiative came earlier this week when Brian Faughnan of The Weekly Standard blog found $2 billion for the Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, $20 million of which is to be given by the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to the National Institute of Standards (NIST) for “advancing health care information enterprise integration” (i.e. software for managing electronic information flow in the federal health bureaucracy). Before the funds can be spent, however, the HHS Secretary must give the congressional appropriations committees an annual operating plan describing how the expenditures will align with “the specific objectives, milestones and metrics of the Federal Health Information Technology Strategic Plan.” A second report is required every six months describing how the funds were actually spent. Translated from the protective haze of legislative language and bureaucratese, the provision creates a back-channel for the appropriations committee to tell NIST how to spend the money, then monitor the agency’s compliance, without ever having to put the spending instructions – aka “earmarks’ – in a bill or bill report that would be made public. In other words, Congress is still playing “Hide the earmarks.”
