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White House Gets Green by Putting Federal Budget Online

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the won't-someone-think-of-the-trees dept.

coondoggie writes "Looking to save $1 million, 20 tons of paper, or close to 500 trees, the White House said today President Bush's 2009 Federal Budget will for the first time be posted online. The E-Budget will be available for downloading at the Office of Management and Budget Web site on Feb. 4. Typically the White House has paper-bombed congress and anyone else who wanted to read the budget with a tome which can reach 3,000 pages and weighed multiple pounds each."

15 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. The page uses browser exploits by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    To force anyone visiting it to print it out.

    1. Re:The page uses browser exploits by nospam007 · · Score: 4, Funny

      The only way the White House is going to get green with the current president is if they call the painters with lots of green paint.

    2. Re:The page uses browser exploits by timeOday · · Score: 4, Insightful
      In addition to economic benefits, this 'peace' idea has some other nice side-effects, like tens of thousands of people not being slaughtered.

      Doing the math, it appears the Big Dig was about 1/70th the price of the Iraq war. (Oh, and did I mention tens of thousands of people not being slaughtered?)

  2. The Journey of a Thousand Miles by dsginter · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Now, all we need to figure out is how to let the constituency modify it.

    This is an exercise that is left to the reader.

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    More
  3. cash money by User+956 · · Score: 5, Funny

    White House Gets Green by Putting Federal Budget Online

    Really? I thought they got green by taking it out of your paycheck?

    --
    The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
  4. Net Savings: $0 by r_jensen11 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Why? Because everyone's going to have their assistants print the budget off for them.

    1. Re:Net Savings: $0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      % grep -i bridge fiscal_budget.txt | grep Alaska

      All joking aside, the ability to index and search the budget should make it more accessible for inspection. Theoretically, you could apply filters to the budget and print out many categorized versions that would make it easier to see just how much money is being spent on various things.

      Now if they'd only release this information as a importable relational schema...

    2. Re:Net Savings: $0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Do you have any idea how much harder it is to hide Pork in a searchable document with revision history then a 20 pound stack of paper? Like this would really take off.

  5. Useful? Maybe not as much as you think... by Ambiguous+Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    You mean it will actually be searchable in an efficient, reasonable manner? Or will it just be one giant black rectangle playing the part of a 3000-page redaction?

    -G

    --
    Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
    1. Re:Useful? Maybe not as much as you think... by yali · · Score: 5, Funny

      If the do the redactions their usual way, then the answers to both your questions will be "yes."

  6. Wrong! by jdigriz · · Score: 4, Informative

    I downloaded the 2008 budget just yesterday from here, http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy08/browse.html Ooh, maybe they mean this is the first time the *2009* budget is available just like it is a first every year each time it's posted.

  7. revision history - accountability by h2_plus_O · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Also consider that electronic copies opens up the door to source control and therefore auditable revision history. Ever wonder who added that earmark in the dark of night, after committee, just hours before a floor vote so none of the voters could review it?

    Serious. My team can't check in code without leaving a revision history, why should congressional staffers be able to modify legislation without leaving an auditable (revertable) trail? This would do wonders for our transparency and accountability problems in congress.

    --
    If there's one thing I won't stand for, it's intolerance.
  8. Re:quick, somebody stick that on a wiki somewhere by HappyDrgn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Sure it does, individual sections could use the "dispute" feature on wiki software like the way wikipedia.org uses it. Individuals could comment directly on questions that arise. This could help organize grass roots efforts to push for specific changes.

  9. Re:Paperless is good by User+956 · · Score: 5, Funny

    3000 pages??? Just printing the budget puts a nice dent in the budget, huh?

    Seriously. You know that trillion dollar deficit? Two words: Ink Cartridges.

    --
    The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
  10. The big advantage is accessibility by jesterzog · · Score: 5, Informative

    The headline of the article implies that this is intended to be some kind of environmental decision, but nothing in the article appears to back it up. In fact, the guy quoted is primarily going on about the much-improved accessibility of the budget. It'll now actually be possible for people to get it (rather than forking out an impossible $200 just to read it), and being in an electronic form, it's much easier to search through and index, not to mention only reading or printing the bits you happen to be interested in.

    At the moment I'm working at a government department (non-US) where we've been publishing information online for a while now,. People love it, both inside the organisation and those in the general public (journalists, opposition politicians, economists, and whoever else may have an interest). This is largely to do with the Official Information Act which, in New Zealand, basically states that government departments have to make available whatever information people ask for, unless there's a good reason not to. Over time it's resulted in most government entities publishing large amounts of information even when it's not requested, on the assumption that someone may ask for it sooner or later.

    The annual budget is probably one of the most important blocks of information and it's also one of the hardest, because it tends to be full of massive amounts of tables and figures from all over the place and from all kinds of different sources and people who often like to do things in very different ways. Even in a small country it's a big logistical exercise. Recently redeveloping the website to make things more accessible was a 2 to 3 year job, simply because of the amount of historical data that had to be gone through and re-formatted with more accessible markup, with people either using scripts or just manually trawling through it. I guess the nice thing about it now, though, is that there are systems in place to make sure that new data gets marked up usefully in the first place.

    Budgets are huge things to manage, as much because of the massive amounts of organisation that have to go into collecting the information and compiling it all together in a way that can be printed at all. Hopefully getting it out as a PDF would be the first step for the White House towards getting it more accessible.