“We are forbidden from releasing any government files that contain personally identifying information,” said Ray Tyson, a spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. This is the Department of Transportation’s explanation for why it will not release detailed data on the Cash-for-Clunkers program.
The government has been selective about the data it releases. At various intervals, the department has released top-ten lists for cars traded in and purchased under the program. It has also released a complete breakdown of purchase information by brand.
But DOT has not released information on the makes of trade-ins — data which would clarify, for example, whether the program is slowly purging the roads of Detroit-model vehicles. All ten of the top trade-ins from the last release of data were Big Three cars.
Some of the government-released data has already been called into question. A private firm, which based its numbers on data taken directly from dealerships, reported last week that several of the most popular purchases under Cash-for-Clunkers were SUVs and light trucks, not the economy cars the government claimed were tops.
How hard would it be to make the information public? If you are familiar with Microsoft Excel, you might expect that any reasonably intelligent ten-year-old could purge personal information from the file by deleting columns from a spreadsheet with headers like “Name,” Address,” “VIN,” “Phone,” etc. Not so, Tyson told me. The data, he explained, “does not come in a format that is easily separable.”
Tyson did not elaborate on the technological specifics of why CARS data is stored in a format that doesn’t do what every other database management software program in the world does — make data easily separable. The Transportation Department did not quickly respond to The Examiner’s follow-up regarding the precise format in which the data is stored.
Last Friday’s data release stated only that 245,384 clunkers have been traded under the program so far, at a cost of $1.03 billion to taxpayers. Tyson said that Transportation plans to release a more complete summary report “eventually.” He could not offer a ballpark estimate for when “eventually” would be.
