There were more than a few skeptical chuckles seven years ago when I first wrote in a Knight Ridder column that posting federal contracts and other spending documents on the Internet could restore public confidence in government by making it more transparent.
They aren’t laughing anymore. Using the Internet to foster greater transparency and accountability in government has not only become one of the few points of agreement between liberals and conservatives, it has even become official government policy.
Exhibit A here, of course, is passage last year of Coburn-Obama, aka the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, co-sponsored by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and enthusiastically signed into law by President Bush.
Coburn-Obama directs the U.S. Office of Management and Budget to establish a Google-like searchable database of most federal spending by 2009. You can view the preliminary Web site at FederalSpending.gov. You can also get a good idea of the benefits to come by checking OMB Watch’s superb Fedspending.org, a precursor to the Coburn-Obama database.
But Coburn-Obama is only the most visible manifestation of an immensely significant political trend that has so far generated only perfunctory coverage in a mainstream media obsessed with campaign horse races and our bitterly polarized politics.
True, red- and blue-state Americans have little in common these days, but, despite their many differences on other issues, groups on the left and right of the political spectrum are moving in the same direction in using the Internet to open up government.
Opening up Congress ispresently the major objective here. Eyes were opened last year when the bipartisan Porkbusters coalition forced public disclosure of the secret holds placed by Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, and Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.V., in their failed effort to kill Coburn-0bama.
Now, bipartisan efforts are being waged to open even more of Congress to the sunshine via the Internet. Most notable here is the Sunlight Foundation’s OpenHouse Project, led by coordinators Matt Stover of MyDD blog, John Wonderlich of Daily Kos blog and Rob Bluey, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Media and Public Policy.
The OpenHouse Project is preparing a report for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that will contain numerous recommendations on how the Internet can be used to make Congress more transparent to taxpayers, including such measures as posting texts of bills and committee reports, making members daily schedules public and putting congressional office and management accounts online.
Many others are looking at ways the Internet can be used to increase citizen understanding of and participation in the legislative process. Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the spark behind WashingtonWatch.com.
Harper’s new site is meant to “deliver the numbers behind proposed legislation and regulation” by providing readers with calculations based upon the government’s own numbers of the actual long-term costs to individuals and families of proposals before Congress.
Even more important, WashingtonWatch.com includes a wiki, an Internet program that allows members of the public to share their knowledge by continuously updating the site’s database on the true costs of proposed legislation.
Another exciting development are the APIs found at the National Institute on Money in State Politics. An API — Application Program Interface — is a tool for web developers to write programs that link data from other sources to data from NIMSP and then display it in a useful way on a third site.
Such an API could link data from state legislative committee votes to NIMSP’s data on campaign contributions to state legislators by special interest groups. An API at the federal level could link data about federal contracts to data on congressional votes and federal campaign contributions. This API would shed dramatic new light on who benefits from the growth of government programs.
This sunlight movement is bound to grow because there are literally millions of Internet-savvy people in America representing every variety of political opinions and interests. What they all have in common is the idea that everybody benefits when we all know more about what government is doing with our tax dollars.
Those on the left think the good done by government will be more widely appreciated as a result of greater transparency, while folks on the right believe taxpayers will demand that government programs actually work as promised when they see where their tax dollars are going.
We are only beginning to get glimpses of how the politicians and bureaucrats are going to have to clean up their acts as a result.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and a member of The Examiner Newspaper’s national editorial board.
