House Transparency Slated to Improve
Perhaps my mean grading has contributed to nascent competition between the Republican House and the Democratic administration for the transparency prize. Last Friday, the House Administration Committee adopted standards that “require all House legislative documents be published electronically in an open, searchable format on one centralized website.”
At a September Cato Capitol Hill briefing, I rated Congress on the quality of the data it publishes reflecting its membership, activities, documents, and decisions. Its grades weren’t that good. At a briefing last week, I graded the data about federal budgeting, appropriations, and spending, which is largely an executive branch responsibility. Those grades weren’t very good either.
Able and dogged transparency advocate Daniel Schuman at the Sunlight Foundation has a good write-up up the House’s move to produce good data—he and Sunlight certainly did their part to encourage it—though I’ll quibble with one particular. The adoption of the document—a two-page outline of what should be standardized, and not a standards document itself—was not really “a tremendous step into the 21st Century.” It was an outline of a course to improved transparency. 21st-Century transparency.
What is required to produce that transparency? My recent paper “Publication Practices for Transparent Government” sought to establish guideposts for publication of data that will foster public access to meaningful information about what happens in Washington, D.C. The practices, in ascending order of importance and difficulty, are: authority, availability, machine-discoverability, and machine-readability.
Putting all documents on a single site will enhance authority. People will know where to look, and what source to trust. In our rough grading system, we weighted the simple practice of authoritative publishing at 10% of the total grade.
The second practice, availability, means ensuring that the data is complete, that it remains permanently in the same location, that it is not proprietary itself, and that it is not in a proprietary format. This is likely to be fulfilled by adherence to the Committee’s language and basic good practices. Availability we weighted at 20% of the total grade.
Machine-discoverability is when data is identified and located consistent with a variety of good practices going to the naming and locating of Internet resources. It’s weighted at 30% of the total grade in our system for rating data publication. It is likely that the House will develop good practices, but it will be important to watch and see that it does.
Machine-readability is the most important part of transparency. It means publishing data so that the logical relationships among elements are clear, and so that computers can automatically detect the semantic meaning of the documents and data they examine.
This is where the House Administration Committee’s release is least clear. Documents like bills and committee reports could be published so that each reference to existing law, to federal agencies, bureaus, and programs, to newly authorized spending, and to a variety of other items and entities are automatically discoverable in the document.
You should be able to do a quick search, rather than labor for hours, to see what bills affect the Labor Department. You should be able to see every dollar authorized or appropriated in every bill, nearly instantly. The data should be a foundation for dozens of sites and services that disseminate iformation in different ways to different audiences.
Here’s hoping that the House Administration Committee’s standards drive all the way to machine-readability. It will be a step into the 21st century if the House provides data the Internet can use and that the Internet-connected public very much wants to see.
Coming through with robust machine-readability will handily take the transparency mantle from President Obama, who promised transparency as a campaigner, but who was not produced the vibrant, different government people wanted. As I noted in a write-up last week, the administration has some low-hanging transparency fruit that could bring its grades up decisively. House Republicans are first out of the gate.
“A Closed ‘Super Congress’? Oh, I Don’t Think So.”
That was my inner conversation when I heard that the “Super Congress”* (or “Super Committee”) created by the debt ceiling deal might operate behind closed doors.
Congress is free to create any committee it wants, of course. Congress determines the rules of its proceedings. But ordinary committees and subcommittees are too opaque. A “Super Committee” should lead—not lag—in transparent operations.
In a forthcoming report on government transparency, we’ll be looking at the kinds of things committees should be publishing in computer-useable formats, and in real time or near-real-time: meeting notices, transcripts, written testimonies, live video, original bills, amendments to bills, motions, and votes. There are ways that many of these documents and records can be optimized for transparency, including by flagging agencies, programs, dollar amounts, and so on in the texts of published documents.
That’s why I’m glad to see transparency stalwart the Sunlight Foundation calling for a transparent Super Committee. “Congress pushed through the ‘Debt Ceiling’ bill with almost no transparency,” they say. “Let’s make sure the new ‘Super Congress’ committee created by this bill operates in the open.”
The things they highlight, reflecting priorities of transparency groups across the ideological spectrum, include: live webcasts of all official meetings and hearings; the committee’s report being posted for 72 hours before a final committee vote; disclosure of every meeting held with lobbyists and other powerful interests; Web disclosure of campaign contributions as they are received; and financial disclosures of committee members and staffers.
White House, Unions Reach Deal on Taxing Insurance Coverage
The Washington Post reports that the White House has reached a tentative agreement with labor leaders to tax high-cost health insurance policies.
What did you think of the negotiations? You did watch them on C-SPAN, didn’t you?
At the Sunlight Foundation blog, I’ve joined in some discussion about whether a president could really force process reforms on Congress like requiring negotiations to be televised. (Short answer: It’s possible, not probable.)
But here’s a case where the White House declined to put its own negotiations on television as the president promised.
The House Health Care Bill — Transparent or Not?
The House health care bill is reportedly coming to the floor this weekend, and House Speaker Pelosi committed in September to a 72-hour delay between the time the bill is posted online and a final vote.
Is that 72-hour delay happening? Some say yes. Some say no.
On the “yes” side are some folks at the Sunlight Foundation. John Wonderlich wrote a post last Sunday called “72 Hours is Now.” He hailed the posting of the health care bill well in advance of a vote.
“Public outcry, partisan pressure, and rising expectations are forcing Congress’s hand,” he wrote, ”and it’s now (apparently) taken as a matter of course that this bill is online for a long weekend before its final consideration.”
Paul Blumenthal followed that up mid-week, sounding slightly more cautious notes but hailing the posting of the “final manager’s amendment.” His post restarted the 72-hour clock.
Which brings us to the folks who say no.
On the Weekly Standard blog, John McCormack says that Speaker Pelosi plans to violate the promise to post the health care bill online for 72 hours.
House members are still negotiating important issues in the bill — whether it will provide taxpayer-funding for abortions, for example. Pelosi is pushing for a Saturday House vote, and a number of big changes will be introduced, likely less than 24 hours before the vote takes place (if in fact it does).
Paranormal Legislative Activity?
Here’s an entertaining and timely video from the Sunlight Foundation:
Readthebill.org is where you can learn more about H. Res. 554.
Have a transparent Halloween everybody!
Transparency: Obama’s Waterloo?
“When congressmen scoff at the notion of reading legislation because they aren’t qualified or they aren’t competent to understand it, how can we be confident that those congressman are competent to reengineer the entire health care system?”
So asked a citizen at a town hall meeting where Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA) held forth before a cantankerous crowd.
It’s a fair question. And President Obama offered an answer during his campaign. He promised that he would post bills coming to him from Congress online for five days before signing them. Rather than relying on Congress, the public should have more oversight of it.
(Alas, it’s a promise he has violated thirty-nine forty-one times. He signed two more bills into law last week within a day of receiving them.)
Under President Obama’s “Sunlight Before Signing” pledge or the 72-hour-hold in Congress preferred by the Sunlight Foundation, members of Congress and senators would be more reticent to introduce potentially controversial amendments, and they would be more obliged to know and defend what is in the bills they vote on.
President Obama set the standard—if not the precedent—by which lawmaking practice will be judged. He will have to rise to that standard as the public has more leisure to take the measure of his presidency. Congress will too.
(It’s not the president’s Waterloo, of course. I just put that in the title to attract your attention.)
Broken Promises — to Voters and the New York Times
“[O]nce it is clear that a bill will be coming to the president’s desk, the White House will post the bill online,” White House spokesman Nick Shapiro told New York Times reporter Katherine Seelye for her June 22 story on President Obama’s “Sunlight Before Signing” campaign pledge. “This will give the American people a greater ability to review the bill, often many more than five days before the president signs it into law.”
The story, titled “White House Changes the Terms of a Campaign Pledge About Posting Bills Online,” was about the White House effort to walk back from President Obama’s campaign pledge to post bills he receives for five days before signing them.
When the New York Times published the story, five bills had been presented to the president and were awaiting his signature. Four more were presented to him after the story’s publication. All nine are now law.
And for the life of me, I can’t find where any of them have been posted on Whitehouse.gov. Surely it was clear to the White House that the five bills it had and the four soon to come would reach the president’s desk.
I disagree with arguments for releasing President Obama from his pledge to sign bills only after he has posted them for a full five days after receiving them. It would have the same effects as the 72-hour hold the Sunlight Foundation is seeking from Congress — also a welcome legislative process reform.
And it’s becoming more clear that the five-day promise could be implemented. At this point, only one of 39 bills that the president has signed has been posted for five days in advance. (The DTV Delay Act was actually not held five days after formal presentment, but the White House posted it after the final version had passed Congress.) Twenty-four other bills have been held at the White House five days or more before the President has signed them. They just haven’t been posted.
To repeat, over 60% of the legislation coming out of Congress waits five days for the president’s signature as a matter of course. The only thing preventing implementation of the president’s promise as to these bills is the White House’s inexplicable reluctance to do what it says it will do.
“It’s a Lot Easier to Promise to Change Washington Than It Is to Actually Change It”
The New York Times has an interesting story on President Obama’s continuing failure to follow through on his “Sunlight Before Signing” promise. On the campaign trail, he said he would post bills online for five days before signing them. Two dozen bills now have his signature, and only one has been posted for five days before signing.
The article (and accompanying video) fixes on a couple of reasons why the president might be excused from carrying out the promise. One is the technical difficulty of managing potentially hundreds of thousands of comments. The promise did not include a promise to publish comments, though — much less to read them (though it would be politically astute to appear to do so). In my view, the difficulty of administering a public comment system — which was not part of the promise — does not excuse the failure to post the bills Congress presents to the president for five days before he signs them.
A second excuse is that posting bills online would be ineffectual. Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation is quoted saying, “There isn’t anybody in this town who doesn’t know that commenting after a bill has been passed is meaningless.”
I have done my level-best to illustrate how a five-day hold at the White House would have good effects on reducing earmarks, parochial amendments, and other shenanigans — such as congressional approval of bonuses to AIG executives.
Miller’s preferred approach — placing a similar hold on bills before they leave Congress — would have a similar effect — but nothing dramatically more open. Just as under a presidential hold, members of Congress and Senators would be more reticent to introduce potentially controversial amendments. Just as under a presidential hold, they would carefully avoid a blossoming of debate about their pet projects at the end of the legislative process. A congressional hold would change the upstream behavior of the politicians — just like a presidential hold would.
A presidential hold and a congressional hold are both good ideas, and they are not mutually exclusive. The presidential hold has a key advantage: The president has already promised it — to the cheers of American voters.
The New York Times story reports a small step toward meeting the actual terms of President Obama’s pledge:
“In order to continue providing the American people more transparency in government, once it is clear that a bill will be coming to the president’s desk, the White House will post the bill online,” said Nick Shapiro, a White House spokesman. “This will give the American people a greater ability to review the bill, often many more than five days before the president signs it into law.”
If this means posting links to bills on the Thomas legislative system from Whitehouse.gov, this is something the White House has done sporadically, and it would increase transparency by a small margin if it were regularized. The administration should establish a uniform URL where bills are posted so that every American can easily find every bill the president signs. But, in terms of fulfilling President Obama’s promise, “posting a link from WhiteHouse.gov to THOMAS of a conference report that is expected to pass doesn’t cut it.”
I think this is grudging progress toward implementation of President Obama’s “Sunlight Before Signing” promise. In the video, the author of the Times article has the best line illustrating why the White House deserves modest congratulations for taking this step: “It’s a lot easier to promise to change Washington than it is to actually change it.”
Transparency: Good News / Bad News
Last week was an interesting week for transparency, with some good news and some bad news.
On the “good” side of the ledger, the administration rolled out “Data.gov,” a growing set of data feeds provided by U.S. government agencies. These will permit the public to do direct oversight of the kind I discussed at our “Just Give Us the Data!” policy forum back in December.
My metric of whether Data.gov is a success will be when independent users and Web sites use government data to produce new and interesting information and applications. The Sunlight Foundation has a contest underway to promote just that. Get ready for really interesting, cool, direct public oversight of the government.
Also under the White House’s new “Open Government Initiative,” an Open Government Dialogue “brainstorming session” began last week. The public can submit ideas for making the government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. This is important stuff, an outgrowth of President Obama’s open government directive, issued on his first full day in office.
That directive called for the Office of Management and Budget to require specific actions of agencies “within 120 days,” which meant the final product was due last week. And that missed deadline is where we start to slide into the “bad” on the transparency ledger.
Last week, President Obama gave an important speech on national security (which I blogged about here and here). But you couldn’t find the speech in the “Speeches” section of the Whitehouse.gov Web site. It’s buried elsewhere. That’s “basic Web site malpractice,” I told NextGov.com. And I cautioned my friends in the transparency community not to forget Government 1.0 for all the whiz-bang Gov 2.0 projects flashing before our eyes. Whitehouse.gov should be a useful, informative resource for average Americans.
The current top proposal on the “brainstorming” site referred to above is to require a 72-hour mandatory public review period on major spending bills. This is reminiscent of President Obama’s promise to hold bills five days before signing them. But, as Stephen Dinan reports in the Washington Times, the president signed several more bills last week without holding them the requisite time.
The White House protests that they posted links to bills on the Thomas Web site at the Whitehouse.gov blog. But that does not give the public meaningful review of the bills in their final form, as they have come to the president from Congress. “Posting a link from WhiteHouse.gov to THOMAS of a conference report that is expected to pass doesn’t cut it,” says John Wonderlich at Sunlight.
President Obama signed nine new laws since we last reviewed his record on the “Sunlight Before Signing” promise. Alas, it’s been a case study in pulling defeat from the jaws of victory.
Five of the bills were held by the White House more than five days before the president signed them, but they weren’t posted! Simply posting them on Whitehouse.gov in final form would have satisfied “Sunlight Before Signing.”
President Obama’s average drops to .043, and that’s crediting him one win for the DTV Delay Act, which was posted at Whitehouse.gov in its final form for five days after Congress passed it, but before presentment, which is the logical time to start the five-day clock.
Here is the latest tally of bills passed by Congress, including the date presented, date signed, whether they’ve been posted or linked to at Whitehouse.gov, and whether they’ve been posted for the full five days after presentment. (Corrections welcome – there is no uniform way that the White House is posting bills or links, so I may have missed something.)
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