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White House Gets Green by Putting Federal Budget Online
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."
To force anyone visiting it to print it out.
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.
% 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...
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.
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.
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.
If the do the redactions their usual way, then the answers to both your questions will be "yes."
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.