Helping the House Advance Data Transparency
The House of Representatives is poised to make great strides forward in transparency, and our work over the last year aims to help them do that. Here’s how this spreadsheet (.xls) will do that.
In December, the House Administration Committee announced a plan to improve the publication of House documents. In January, a new site—docs.house.gov—went live. (It’s attractive looking, but still bare-bones.) On Thursday this week, the Committee is hosting a “Legislative Data and Transparency Conference” to examine what data is out there and what data should be out there. Little information is on the Web yet, but you can sign up to attend at the link just above.
I’ll be speaking on the last panel of the day, which deals with measuring transparency success. Likely, they chose me for this panel because I’ve already been grading the government on its publication practices.
Last September, you see, we graded Congress on how well it publishes data that would assist the public in computer-aided oversight. The summary blog post is called “Needs Improvement.” And then in December, we graded the government on publication of budget, appropriations, and spending data. That’s a joint legislative-executive responsibility, but mostly executive. The message was: “‘Needs Improvement’ is Understatement.”
How do you grade Congress and the government on their data publication?
You start out by modeling the data government should publish. We put together a data model for legislative process, for example, and then a data model for budgeting, appropriating, and spending. We got a great deal of help from folks at the Sunlight Foundation, OMB Watch, and others such as the National Priorities Project, as well as data guru Josh Tauberer, whose latest project is PopVox.
Even with all this help, these models won’t be the last word—there is much to learn yet about the data structure that will serve every use the public may want to make of information. But it’s a strong start.
Then we compared the data that’s actually out there to the practices described in my paper, “Publication Practices for Transparent Government,” and out popped the grades! They were pretty bad…
The House of Representatives aims to fix that—for its part, at least.
Now to this spreadsheet: it’s a list of the things that should be identified in congressional documents so that computers can find the most salient information in them. It also indicates the “vocabularies” that already exist for identifying many of them: members of Congress, bills, laws, statutes, committees, agencies, programs, and so on. We’ve talked about how to identify “budget authority” and appropriations (spending) so that computers can capture that information from bills and committee reports. Locations, state and foreign governments, times, meetings—all these things can be put into electronic versions of documents to allow computer-aided public oversight.
Once documents contain data like this in the proper structures, literally thousands of questions about Congress will be answered instantly.
- How much new budget authority has each member of Congress proposed? Voted for? Voted against? Allowed to go through on voice vote or unanimous consent? How about this same information by state? By region? Or by seniority?
- What title of the U.S. code do members of Congress most often propose to amend? What title do they actually amend the most?
- What bills affect my state specifically, such as by naming buildings, creating wilderness areas, changing boundaries on parks, or giving land to localities?
- How often do my member of Congress and senators break with their party?
These are just a few examples. In the hands of varied users, the data will be converted to hundreds or thousands of uses. It will go into studies performed by political scientists and it will supercharge news reporting. But more importantly, it will go into services that inform people directly and quickly about how their own representatives in Congress are acting and what they’re saying.
It will give people insight into where the money goes—from the moment new spending is proposed all the way through to when Congress spends it—or declines to spend.
Credit is due to the leadership in the House of Representative for starting this work. There is a lot to do before they show clear success. But they are way ahead of President Obama, whose Sunlight Before Signing transparency promise lags badly, and who has yet to put together a machine-readable organization chart for the executive branch of the federal government. He can easily do the latter, and coordination with Congress is essential for transparency success. The sooner that happens the better.
Sunlight Before Signing, Year Three
In last night’s State of the Union speech, President Obama called for tax law reforms he says we need. Cato scholars have their doubts about much of what was in the speech, but my interest was piqued by the fact that he said, “Send me these tax reforms, and I will sign them right away.”
You see signing them “right away” would again violate his 2008 campaign promise to post the bills sent him by Congress online for five days before signing them.
That’s a cheeky point, but it is time to focus on campaign promises and their honesty. The beginning of President Obama’s fourth year in office is roughly the beginning of his campaign for another term.
When I first began tracking President Obama’s Sunlight Before Signing promise, I joked with friends that it was career gold because I could write hundreds of blog posts for the next four years without thinking a new thought. Well, it’s not quite that good. This is post thirty-six in the SBS series.
(Each character in that last sentence was a link to a previous post. You can spend a whole day reviewing them!)
Last Thursday, January 19th, was the end of President Obama’s third year, so it’s time to review how he’s been doing with Sunlight Before Signing. It was the president’s first broken promise, and at the mid-point of the term he had popped just above 50% in his compliance.
How has he done in the ensuing year?
Well … meh.
Sunlight Before Signing: Is President Obama Throwing It Under the Bus?
President Obama went to Puerto Rico two weeks ago. If you missed it, that might be because the trip was so brief—a mere four hours. Observing how the president “SEAL-Team-Sixed” it, Jon Stewart speculated that the president was not motivated by love of the island or a campaign promise to revisit it, but by courting Puerto Rican voters in important electoral states. It could be all of the above, of course.
It all reminded me of the president’s “Sunlight Before Signing” promise to post bills Congress sends him online for five days before signing them.
After the president’s dismal start with the promise at the beginning of his term, I speculated once or twice that he would focus on fulfilling campaign promises like Sunlight Before Signing after the mid-term election, when focus turned back to the presidential election coming up in 2012.
Well, the mid-term is behind us, and thoughts are turning to the next presidential election. Has that renewed the White House’s focus on Sunlight Before Signing?
The Transparency Contest Heats Up
Back in January, I wrote in Politico about the potential for House Republicans to “eclipse” President Obama on transparency. Perhaps the most important element of that piece was the subtle pun on the “government in the sunshine” motif. (Sunshine? Eclipse? Get it?) House Republicans appear to be more ready than ever to move forward on transparency with the announcement by Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) of a working group to update the House’s use of technology.
That could end up as so much window dressing—Twitter accounts for everybody!—or it could result in substantive changes, such as publishing bills and amendments in real time (from committee markups, too) and tagging them with semantic data to make their meaning readily and instantly available to the public. How about publishing the House video feed (committee feeds, too) with real-time tags indicating what bill is being debated and who is speaking? That kind of data will give the public entrée to the House like they’ve never had before.
Meanwhile, President Obama seems to have ducked a meeting at which he was to receive an award for his transparency work. It didn’t strike me as quite fitting for him to get such an award. He’s good on transparency but has not reached the lofty goals he campaigned on. The House Government Reform Committee is having a hearing on the Freedom of Information Act today (9:30 am EST start-time), an area where the administration seems also to have come up short of expectations.
Now, whatever miscue prevented the president from accepting his transparency award is not substance, and the formation of a task force is not substantive change either. But the Republicans appear to have the keener interest in transparency at the moment.
Watch this space for the results of work we’ve been doing to show both Congress and the president how to be more transparent. So the irony is not lost on you the way that sunshine/eclipse pun was, I’ll put it in italics: You can’t see our transparency work quite yet. But soon we’ll set out what House Republicans, Senate Democrats and the Obama administration should be doing to win plaudits on the transparency merits.
Sunlight Before Signing—Graphed and Analyzed
I reported here a couple of weeks ago that at the mid-point of his term President Obama had narrowly exceeded 50% compliance with his Sunlight Before Signing pledge. Now it’s time to do some more analysis of how he has implemented his promise to post bills Congress sends him online for five days before signing them.
In a post late last year, I graphed the president’s improvement over time. His first year in office was dismal, but things got quite a bit better in the second year.
We can now graph the entire first half of the term, which confirms that improvement. (Click graphs for full-size images.) Compliance could easily have been better in December, but the graph shows 100% success in the first twenty days of January, which brings us to the exact mid-point of the term.
Now, 87 of the bills signed into law during the last Congress renamed a post office or other federal facility, and a couple dozen more were purely ceremonial or perfunctory. (Congress has a strange fixation on coins.) These matter quite a bit less than the bills that have a significant effect on government policy, and many passed at the end of the year. This raises the question: Do these ”gimmes” inflate the president’s success rate?
So I cast around for some way to adjust the graph to reflect the ”importance” of legislation. This might show us that the trivial bills get tanned and rested in sunlight, while the important ones are hustled through in the dark of night—fat and pale.
I thought of two potential proxies for importance: the attention Congress paid bills on their way through, and the number of pages in bills.
Sunlight Before Signing at Mid-Term—Above 50%!
During his campaign for the presidency, then-Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said he would post the bills Congress sent him online for five days before signing them. It was a basic transparency promise that would help prevent rushed legislation containing parochial amendments, unexamined earmarks, and errors. This and other promises brought hails of applause.
It was his first broken promise. President Obama signed the “Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009” into law the day after it reached him.
I’ve tracked the promise on this blog, and in my November post noted President Obama’s improvement in 2010 over what can only be characterized as a lousy start. In the first year of his term, 2009, the president received 124 bills from Congress and signed a dismal 6 of them—only 4.8%.
On January 20, we reached the mid-point of President Obama’s term, and his mid-term Sunlight Before Signing stats can be announced. With a strong showing on the flurry of bills passed at the end of the 111th Congress, the president’s Sunlight Before Signing percentage has inched just above 50%.
Of 381 bills that should have been posted on Whitehouse.gov after President Obama received them, 192 were actually posted. That’s 50.393% if you like going beyond the decimal.
Here’s a summary table, showing year-by-year the bills presented, the one emergency bill not subject to posting, and bills properly posted. After the jump, you can see bill-by-bill how the president did with Sunlight Before Signing.
| Number of Bills | Emergency Bills | Bills Posted Five Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2009 | 124 | 0 | 6 |
| 2010 | 258 | 1 | 186 |
| Overall | 382 | 1 | 192 |
Sunlight Before Signing Updated—With a Graph!
As a campaigner, President Obama promised that bills sent him by Congress would be posted online for five days before he would sign them. It’s a simple, measurable transparency promise that we have followed on this blog.
With attention beginning to turn to the 2012 presidential election (believe it or not!), President Obama’s fealty to campaign promises will become a focus. So here’s an update on his Sunlight Before Signing promise.
First, a brief summary table. Congress has presented President Obama 283 bills, 124 in 2009 and 159 in 2010. He posted six online for the requisite number of days in 2009, and 103 in 2010. (One emergency bill did not require posting. It’s non-posting is consistent with the president’s promise so we treat it as “compliant” in summary materials.)
| Number of Bills | Emergency Bills | Bills Posted Five Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2009 | 124 | 0 | 6 |
| 2010 | 159 | 1 | 103 |
| Overall | 283 | 1 | 109 |
The graph below illustrates well that the administration has improved on the, frankly, lousy start it got with Sunlight Before Signing. In the month of May, every bill was posted on Whitehouse.gov for five days before the president signed it.
There remains a residuum of bills that don’t seem to get Sunlight Before Signing, and those may be the ones where political expedience takes precedence over the president’s campaign promise to his voters. But the White House is clearly positioned to fulfill this promise completely in the second half of the president’s term.
The chart below (that is, after the break) exhibits the same data—Sunlight Before Signing compliance by month—with percentages of non-compliance and compliance. After that, you’ll find a table of every bill the president has signed and its treatment in terms of sunlight.
There will be a short spate of bills during the lame duck session. The next report in late December will capture the entire first half of the president’s term, setting the stage for reporting on the White House’s 100% success rate in 2011 and 2012.
Full compliance will give the press and public a way to know exactly what hits the president’s desk, and an opportunity to make a habit of reviewing Congress’ work before bills become laws.
Sunlight Before Signing—Pre-Posting Is Not OK
A regular, established practice of posting bills online when they’re sent him by Congress would fulfill President Obama’s Sunlight Before Signing promise, made to roars of applause on the campaign trail. It would allow Americans easy access to the most important part of what Congress and the president do.
But posting bills before Congress passes them, getting a jump on the five days of public review the president promised, seriously undercuts the value of Sunlight Before Signing.
This morning, Whitehouse.gov is displaying on its pending legislation page a link to “H.R. 1586 – To impose an additional tax on bonuses received from certain TARP recipients.” This bill has not been passed by both houses of Congress nor presented to the president.
H.R. 1586 is a “shell bill” that Congress has been batting back and forth, and it has covered various subject matters in its busy life. It indeed started out as a bill to tax the bonuses of executives in TARP-subsidized firms. When it passed the House, though, it had become the “Aviation Safety and Investment Act of 2010.” And this week it was amended in the Senate to contain a potpourri of spending and revenue programs. (WashingtonWatch.com cost estimate: $125 per U.S. family.)
Lets say a high schooler has been assigned by her teacher to monitor the bills President Obama receives from Congress. From the White House’s pending legislation page, she clicks on a link to find a bewildering hodgepodge of bill versions on the Thomas page for the bill. (Click on the image at right to see a screen capture.)
And none of the bill versions has passed Congress! Thomas, the Library of Congress’ legislative tracking service, tells visitors that the last bill listed is most recent. But the current version of the bill is item four of six, referred to as the “XXXXXXAct ofXXXX.” Thanks to Whitehouse.gov, our high schooler is misled into believing that President Obama will soon sign a tax on bonuses given to TARP-slurping executives when in fact a variety of other policies may soon pass.
The promise to post bills online for five days was a simple, common-sense transparency rule. It’s flabbergasting to find that it can’t be carried out in a simple, methodical way to give life to the idea that the people are entitled to oversee the government.
You get a bill from Congress, you post it. You wait five days, you sign it. Promise fulfilled! It’s not rocket science. Pre-posting is not OK.
Sunlight Before Signing—Simplified!
When I first began tracking the results of President Obama’s Sunlight Before Signing promise to post bills coming from Congress online for five days before signing them, I quickly noticed that the White House was holding many bills for five days in the natural course of business, but not posting them, denying itself easy successes.
Followers of this blog and that issue may recall seeing columns in my Sunlight Before Signing tables titled “Five Days?” That was to say, “Hey, White House! These are easy wins for you!”
Well, as I reported in my last update, the White House has now made a practice of posting all bills on a special section of the Whitehouse.gov web site. And they are posting all the bills they receive.
We no longer need to highlight those five-day bills, so we’ve simplified the chart!
As you’ll see below, we’ve got the date the bill was presented to the president, the date he signed it into law, and a “Yes” or “No” simply to indicate whether there was Sunlight Before Signing compliance or not.
| Number of Bills | Emergency Bills | Bills Posted Five Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 213 | ||
| 2009 | |||
| 2010 |
And the results are? . . . getting better—but painfully slowly.
President Obama has signed 213 bills into law now. One was an emergency bill, not subject to the Sunlight Before Signing promise. Out of the 212 remaining bills, he’s carried out his Sunlight Before Signing promise on 54 occasions—just over a quarter of the time.
In 2009, the administration was 6 for 124 — a dismal .049 average. So far in 2010, he’s 48 for 88, giving bills the promised sunlight just over half the time.
That’s a pretty far cry from carrying out his clear promise to put all bills online five days before signing them. But we’re seeing improvement. I’ve long guessed that we’ll see full implementation after the next election when people’s attention turns to the credibility of the president on the 2012 campaign trail.
With that, the full Sunlight Before Signing chart…
Sunlight Before Signing . . . Clouded
I wrote the other day that it was poor implementation of President Obama’s Sunlight Before Signing promise to post bills for public review before Congress has sent them to the president. (The ideal time to start the Sunlight Before Signing five-day clock is “presentment,” the formal step when Congress sends a bill to the president.)
Today, three bills that have not been presented to the president are posted on Whitehouse.gov as if they are ready for him to sign. (One of them, S. 1508, has been cleared for the president, but not presented. The other two haven’t seen final votes in Congress.)
(Update: Later this morning, a fourth bill was added. H.R. 5502 has been passed by the House and Senate and cleared for the White House, but not presented, according to the Thomas legislative reporting system. It may be that the bill has been presented, but the fact is not yet reported on Thomas. Similarly, H.R. 4173 did have its final vote in Congress yesterday—it was my error to say otherwise—but its presentment is not indicated on Thomas. Based on that, I presume it has not been presented, but I cannot be sure. These facts—ahem—“cloud” this critique of Whitehouse.gov practice.)
They have the notation “In Progress” next to them rather than the date on which they were posted. What that means is lost on me, and I’m a lawyer with years of experience on Capitol Hill and more than a decade in public policy. Where does this leave Joe and Jane Six-Pack?
Transparency is about making public policy accessible to ordinary people so they can oversee their government. This doesn’t help.
Overall, the news remains good. The White House has created an institutional practice of posting bills online for five days before the president signs them, as he promised he would do. Perhaps it’s because we’re coming so close to full implementation of an important transparency promise that it’s disappointing to see this odd detour into posting bills that are not ready for the president’s signature.
Sunlight Before Signing: ‘Expected’ Is not ‘Pending’
Early this month, I reported on President Obama’s recent moves to implement Sunlight Before Signing and improvements in his Sunlight Before Signing average. The news is good, though we’ll pause here to highlight a small quibble with White House practice.
The essence of the president’s promise to post bills online for five days was to give the public a chance to review the legislation coming to him from Congress for a decent interval before he signs it. If Whitehouse.gov consistently posts all bills Congress passes, as promised, the public will develop a consistent practice of taking a last look before it becomes law.
One day, the national crowdsourcing effort may turn up an error or a late-coming provision that causes the president to send a bill back to Congress for retouching. Its influence overall will be to discourage members of Congress from slipping last-minute, parochial amendments into bills that they know will become law just hours later.
A White House practice of posting bills before they come down Pennsylvania Avenue would frustrate development of the habit of public review. If bills are posted prematurely, ordinary Americans who do not follow the day-to-day of the legislative process will see their time wasted when they review the early version of a bill only to find that it is later amended by Congress. People will shy away from participating in public review of bills coming to the president.
This is currently the risk with H.R. 4173, the Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010, Congress’ plan to revamp financial services regulation in the United States. It was posted on Whitehouse.gov June 30th, the day that the House-Senate compromise on the bill passed the House, and it is the only bill on the “Pending Legislation” page at this writing. But the Senate did not agree to the conference report at that time, and the bill may see changes before it passes, or it may fail to pass altogether.
We credited the White House with a Sunlight Before Signing “win” when it posted the DTV Delay Act for five days after final passage, even though it wasn’t five days after presentment—the formal step in which Congress passes a bill to the president. This is because a bill will be unchanged after final passage. The public can review it confident that it is in its final form.
This is not the case with the financial services regulation revamp. The bill should not be getting sunlight on the White House’s web site while it still sits in Congress. A bill that the White House expects to receive is not “pending” in a sense consistent with President Obama’s Sunlight Before Signing pledge to voters and the public.
Obama Administration Moves to Implement Sunlight Before Signing
I have written here once or twice before—well, 26 times, but who‘s counting?—about “Sunlight Before Signing“—President Obama’s campaign promise to post bills he receives from Congress online for five days before signing them.
It was his first broken campaign promise, but a presidential term lasts four years, and a pledge like this is redeemable. So I have been delighted to see moves over the past few weeks to implement President Obama’s simple, but important transparency promise.
First, Whitehouse.gov began posting all legislation that comes to the president’s desk from Congress. An early decision to exclude “insignificant” legislation such as bills to rename post offices needlessly drove down the White House’s Sunlight Before Signing average.
Why would the public want to know about such things? Perhaps because the numerous post office renamings passed this year stand in contrast to the budget resolutions not passed this year. Foremost, all bills should be included in Sunlight Before Signing because that was the president’s promise.
More importantly, though, the White House’s web site recently added a section covering something fairly central to the president’s role: legislation! In Whitehouse.gov’s “Briefing Room,” there is now a legislation section, in which you can find lists of pending legislation (the stuff getting its five days of public review), signed legislation, and vetoed legislation.
(The signed legislation section is a bit of a jumble. It’s in no apparent order, it does not include public law numbers, it has different “signed” dates for some bills than the Thomas system has, and it even lists a few bills that have not been signed into law.)
Crucially, each of these pages has RSS feeds that make it easy for the public to stay informed about what bills have reached the president’s desk to get their five-day review. Voters and bloggers can easily get a quick sense of what Congress and the president are doing. Think of the social studies teacher who might use the bills Congress sends to the president in any given week for a class assignment.
Each time a bill reaches the president, it will pop up in RSS feeds nationwide. A habit of civic awareness can take root thanks to these RSS feeds, and the administration deserves credit for implementing them, even if it has done so tardily.
Thanks to these changes, the Obama administration’s Sunlight Before Signing average is on the rise. When we last reviewed things, just under 10% of bills had received the Sunlight Before Signing treatment, even though many were held for five days at the White House as a matter of course.
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