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Recovery.gov Not Very Transparent
Bob the Super Hamste writes "CNN is reporting that the page recovery.gov is
not as transparent as it claims to be. The examples pointed out are:
1. The user is greeted by a large pie chart that show the breakdown of money spent by 2 categories, state government distributions and local government distributions.
2. Finding projects involves a complicated search, information on projects is not actually hosted on recovery.gov
3. The format of the information available is of poor quality (the article specifically mentions a PDF document that was created from a scanned sideways copy of roadwork projects from New York state).
Given that this site was meant to make the spending of the new stimulus money more transparent to the citizens of the Unites States of America it seems oddly opaque. CNN does seem to praise the ability for government agencies to be able to exchange HTML based information between systems, which for government I would call a massive accomplishment.
I tried to find information for my state and searched for Minnesota. I got 4 matches, 2 of which were generic ones: one was the Minnesota state certification that is required for a state to receive funds and one that lays out public transportation spending for all states of which Minnesota gets $94,093,115."
That's because IE6 doesn't support alpha in PNG images. It's time to upgrade your browser, dude.
Finding projects involves a complicated search, information on projects is not actually hosted on recovery.gov
Instead of complicated search, just a pie chart showing a few categories. This money was wasted, this money was not wasted, we have no idea what happened to this money but we no longer have it and I could have sworn we had it.
Dual Opteron < $600
I've been trying to find out how the money will be used at the NSF but it is all hearsay. I would apply for a grant if I knew something for sure.
I'm completely and profoundly shocked over this startling revelation.
US taxpayer money has *NEVER* really been tracked/reported fully and honestly. The public *NEEDS* to be aware of where their money goes. It is your money, your house, your car, your environment, YOUR GOVERNMENT and again, money.
Accounting/reporting where the money goes may be expensive - but can we afford not to?
Just please tell us where all this money is going. Be accountable for your actions. Be HONEST! The days of hiding shit are over.
Open Source Government.
...the source of the site is transparent:
http://www.recovery.gov/modules/system/system.module
Hmm they really might want to get that Drupal updated to 6.10!
Considering the alternative was having no website, I'll accept this. Given that it has to be compatible with a wide variety of systems that Americans worldwide will be using to access it, and it had roughly 2 months of dev time, anything better than a "HAHA WE STOLE YOUR TAX DOLLARS" is at the very least appreciated. Even in its current incarnation, its better than trying to find the numbers on your own. Its not super usable, but its better than nothing.
You can rotate PDFs in Adobe Acrobat Reader, right? I thought CNN had a tech segment on their network? Couldnt they just ask the mail boy or someone how to spin the PDF so they could read it instead of have this melt down at their desk?
If you look at the time line you will see that July 15th, 2009 is when "Recipients of Federal funding to begin reporting on their use of funds."
1 Billion
http://www.recovery.gov/?q=content/dhs-recovery-act-aviation-projects-create-3000-jobs
recovery.gov is not as transparent as it claims to be. The examples pointed out are: 1. The user is greeted by a large [pie] chart that show the breakdown of money spent by 2 categories, state government distributions and local government distributions.
That's not an example.
information on projects is not actually hosted on recovery.gov
Did someone promise it would be?
I would call [the information-exchange] a massive accomplishment
Strange title to this story, then.
is spinning up or co-opting something similar to wiki leaks. We can get the text of most the bills passed in PDF and maybe in other forms. It would be difficult but I think challenging them is the best route. Using this site they get a cop-out. Some will claim it is better than nothing but that isn't true, they will hide behind a guise of transparency without giving any. Oh it might be there but there are other routes to get it. Why are we trusting them to do this?
Heck, I would love to see every Congressman's page on Wikipedia updated with all the earmarks for their districts and states and their vote on the bill which funded them. Try it and it won't stick because it will be irrelevant which unfortunately the view too many people take.
The biggest issue other than getting the information in the first place is creating a process to break it out and categorize it properly. Then backing it up with a real search engine. The first and foremost rule must be that it is not under the moderation of a government entity. The amounts of money they are spending is criminal and since we can no longer rely on the press to call them out it becomes the duty of the community to do so.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I work with contracts, and I can tell you that what you're asking for is not easy. A $100,000,000 contract is easily going to take up a wall full of filing cabinets. It's not like you have a spreadsheet and can just get an itemized list of all the line items. Also, if you get too detailed into pricing you start getting into competitive information, and companies don't like it when you release that information (it might even be unlawful to release it). You might think, why can't they pull a list of line items? Well, they might for the original contract, but what happens when they modify the contract? Well, you can't just delete the item, because the government often owes for the portion of work that was completed before the item was deleted. So ... the contractor puts together an estimate of how much they've spent already, the government evaluates it, and gives back just a portion. There are often so many changes that this is a full time job for 1 contract and it gets convoluted very quickly.
I'm looking forward to the day my health care records will be managed this effectively!!!!
I would rather see the law making process more transparent, just look at the stimulus bill:
source: http://www.downsizedc.org/blog/hiding+the+sausage
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Go read this. Here, let me quote:
Pathetic when Cracked is out there teaching such basic lessons... *sigh*
Metagovernment is an even better idea. In that case, there would be no "we" to do the stealing. Just us chickens.
but I for one welcome our mouse overlords.
What would really be nice is more transparency in the bills that get passed. It seems to me that when legislation to set auto emission standards is over 600 pages long that there is a problem. The United states was founded on a constitution that was 4440 words and now we have a code of federal regulations that is over 75,000 pages (Christopher Lee, The Washington Post, July 8, 2003). I'm just saying it would be nice if the law were a little more succinct so that we could see the details of the laws getting passed.
Are criticisms of a new gov transparency important to get it improved? Yes. Should CNN be a lot more focused that this is a huge step in the right direction? Yes.
I'll confess that I haven't used Drupal. But shouldn't any self-respect web framework in 2009 not put source code under a publicly-accessible directory? I mean --- that's basic. People knew not to do that 15 fucking years ago.
Did you read the TFA?
So it looks like there are already organizations with projects in the works.
... something about public speaking: 10% content, 90% appearance.
And don't compare him to Kennedy. J.F. didn't have shit falling out of his mouth when he spoke.
I've heard a lot of criticisms of the current administration, for all of its flaws, a mere 2 months into its run. The rule of thumb has always been it takes about 3 months for a President to get everyone in place and to get running. Add to that we're in the midst of a near financial meltdown and people are nitpicking about the precision of data covering trillions in expenditures on a federal website about 2 months old? Give it time.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I live in Minnesota. I also happen to have worked on transportation issues for many years. I know a bit about how this all works.
Most of the ARRA transportation money comes through the Surface Transportation Program, which is based on a formula for state and mode allocation. The $94,093,115 for public transportation in Minnesota comes from that formula. The money goes to the state's Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) and DOTs. The MPO for the Twin Cities is a combination of the Metropolitan Council and the Transportation Advisory Board (TAB). The TAB is technically a governing body of the Met Council, due to the fact that the Met Council is not composed of elected officials.
The TAB is currently reviewing the list of projects to receive funding. They're quite limited on the transit side because few big transit projects are ever "shovel ready" the way roads are due to the federal planning process. I could write a book about the enormous advantage skew toward roads over transit in federal policy, but that's for another time. The fact that no transit projects are shovel-ready is a symptom of that.
So the TAB is spending quite a bit of time deciding where road money should go. MN-610 is definitely in. There's a debate over the I-494/US-169 interchange. That started just yesterday. There are many bridges in the Twin Cities metro area that need rehabilitation or replacement.
Greater Minnesota is the other big part of this. I'm less familiar with this side but my assumption is that Mn/DOT is making a determination of how to prioritize funds using its long-term transportation plan.
The point is that this all takes time. recovery.gov cannot show where the money goes until we actually decide where it's going to go.
There's no big conspiracy here. The fact that states have to explicitly report how the money gets used is a huge step forward over the way highway dollars usually get spent. Lots of people (including me) are working hard to ensure the new transportation authorization being written right now adds lots more language about transparency and accountability.
Welcome to the world of the government. This IS transparency.
Do you really think there is some shiny document in a nice ODS spreadsheet format with all the government's accounting?
This just illustrates that often the people running the country know just as much, or even less, than the rest of us.
http://www.recovery.gov/ is running off Apache, so says the ServerSpy addon in Firefox.
Who cares?
We should be smart enough by now not to believe anything they say.
Heck, I would love to see every Congressman's page on Wikipedia updated with all the earmarks for their districts and states and their vote on the bill which funded them.
You mean like this?
Congressional rules already require members to report their earmarks. More such rules are in the works.
And why such hating on earmarks? Earmarks in and of themselves are a good thing because they allow members to bring very local concerns and needs into the federal budgeting process. Sometimes the executive branch doesn't quite understand the local situations on the ground. That's why Congress controls the purse strings.
As long as earmarks are disclosed and go through some kind of vetting process (which they do now), I have no problem with them.
The information is there; you just have to spend several minutes to find it. Of course, it's a massive challenge to bring all this info together -- I'm sure that's why they have only general summaries on the main page and leave the details up to the state pages (since the states have the nitty-gritty details). That's the lazy route, but it requires more work on the part of your visitors. For example, here's my state's highway projects and our local road projects. Apparently they're going to be doing an overlay on 218, which I take whenever I drive to/from Cedar Rapids; fixing the pedestrian bridge on US 1 that was damaged by the flood that I sometimes walk on; doing some repairs at the Melrose and Sunset intersection on the UI campus, which I drive through perhaps once a month; replacing a bridge I drive over fairly regularly in Coralville; and doing some reconstruction up in Cedar Rapids on a road I drive on about once a month. But I had to follow the link to the Iowa site and navigate around in there to get those documents.
Tough challenge = slow implementation.
"WANTED: Sinking ship seeks rats."
I was hoping that recovery.gov would have had some robust, thorough XML files of the recovery and stimulus budget, with hypertext links to each project's or program's website. These web sites would have used microformats denoting addresses, timelines, statuses, key people, etc. It's just a thought...
The criticisms seem quite valid. At the same time, it's not surprising that all of the existing data wasn't in easily consumed formats, much less the same format.
Give them time...
So you say your government's fucking its citizens up the ass for a buck ?
I say cry me a river. What were you expecting, free ponies?!
One man in a suit cannot change the world, especially when that man is merely a spokesperson for Corporate America.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
PHP doesn't have a sensible way to set the path it uses for library scanning. And if it does, I've yet to see it in widespread use.
If I'm not mistaken all US federal and state web sites are in the domain .gov, here in Australia they are in .gov.au which is further broken into state domains such as vic.gov.au. This makes a global search easy using google's "site:" search modifier, eg: pork site:gov gets around 248K hits - that's a lot of pork!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
A politician makes promises that he doesn't keep. That's so unusual!
I distinctly remember a pie chart on one of those sites showing how the bailout money was going to be spent. The biggest category was something ridiculous like "tax relief", so I used the feedback link to ask why they bothered collecting the money at all if they were just going to use it to relieve taxes. I never got a response, but I'm absolutely sure the graph was there and that I sent the "feedback" on it.
Maybe not
If that's not enough, check out a post that has the intentionally long and obtuse title, A Primer on False Notes, Close Reading, and The Economic Development Administration's (EDA) American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) Program, or, How to Seize the Money in 42 Easy Steps, which explains recent EDA announcements and why some are merely announcements of announcements, as if one is inviting someone to receive an invitation.
These kinds of shenanigans and incompetence aren't unusual, but most people don't notice them most of the time. More occur throughout Grant Writing Confidential, which you can find at the links. The stimulus hoopla just makes these kinds of issues more prominent than they usually are, because who's going to read the Federal Register and use Grants.gov often enough to understand the problems and publicize them? No one, unless you're getting paid to do it.
Low transparency is the norm, not the exception.
The one thing that should be even more important than those, however, is cutting back spending. It's not enough to just have a balanced budget... Soviet Russia balance its budget all day long, but overall spending was so high that they sucked their citizens dry with taxes, rewarded people who didn't work at the same level as those who did, and generally stifled their economy. Your anology about tar is actually good, but it doesn't quite go far enough. Really, it should be: "The government is like tar. If it is cut back, society as a whole would run so much more smoothly."
PS - Does anyone realize that at the start of this decade, we had a two trillion dollar budget, and now it's four trillion? Does a 100% increase in ten years seem warranted? Does anything else in this country, whether it be individual incomes or corporate revenues, grow that fast? Does this seem sustainable? How many jobs have been destroyed by government (think of how many people could have been employed had that two trillion stayed in the private sector, rather than being sucked up by government)? This year alone, in a recession, several departments like "Housing and Urban Development" and the agriculture department got 45% percent budget increases. Does that seem right, when EVERYTHING else in America is scaling back? Is it sustainable?
New York's economy just shrunk by about 4%, while Washington's grew by 3%. Does that seem right? The 165 million spent by AIG on retention bonuses (note: not performance bonuses) was 1/1000 of the amount given them in the bailout. Meanwhile, congress passed the 800 billion stimulus bill, the massive Omnibus bill, and the earmark bill. Is this sustainable? Why are we nitpicking this tiny amount when trillions are being spent and squandered? Especially since both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been giving out bonuses just like this, and they were bailed out even more? Could there be any more hypocrisy on this? Of course, Fannie and Freddie are Chris Dodd and Barney Frank's favorite institutions, institutions they protected from President Bush, who believe it or not fought to reform them earlier in his second term, before anyone even knew this was all coming. What a mess we might have been spared had that actually happened, although we still would have had problems, since Bush was probably the fifth worst president on fiscal responsibility... right behind Lyndon Johnson, FDR, Jimmy Carter, and already the grandaddy of them all, Barack Obama, who's own budget projections show he will add more to the national debt in his first term than all other presidents COMBINDED. By the way, is that sustainable?
I would say, "Absolutely Not!", and that's why it is time for an immediate spending cut. And by the way Mr. President, we really do need an axe, not a scalpel.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Hiring a team of unemployed US Citizen web designers to make the recovery.gov web site more transparent.
Seriously, the US government needs to spend recovery money only on things that create jobs. Everything else is a pork project even if it is called special project or something else like an earmark or bailout.
If you are going to follow FDR's New Deal, may I remind you that there was a Public Work Project that hired US citizens to do things like repair roads, build parks and buildings, you know things to do that not only help the nation rebuild our broken infrastructure but also create jobs so that unemployed people can be hired and paid paychecks to spend and stimulate the economy.
If recovery money spent does not create jobs, then it might as well be sucked into a black hole. If you thought Bush was bad, what will you think of Obama when the unemployment rate hits 10%, 15%, 20%, and only the big corporations are being bailed out and they are not hiring anyone but downsizing. To be honest Congress and the Senate have a lot to do with this, as well as legacy leftovers from the Bush administration and the US citizens as well are to blame.
Unless recovery.gov was not meant to be transparent so we cannot see where the money is going, and it is going to big companies that lobbied the federal government for it. What about the small business bailouts and recovery checks for the US citizens losing their homes, cars, and jobs?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
With the defeat of the GOP Fuhrer, John McCain, and his side-butt, Sahra-out-of-Alaska, the GOP Supreme Fuhrer Rush Lumber-Butt, proclaimed to the GOP Racist faithfull, i.e., Evangilical Christans, to "Fail" Obama.
This means that the GOP Racists faithfull, particular the GOP Racist Governors, to take all measures to 1) prolong the recession, 2) turn the recession into a depression, and 3) extact payback on the hords who voted for Obama in the general election.
In order to fullfil Order 3), GOP Racist Governors are turning away the recovery money that Congress agreed to share with their States constitutents.
The GOP Racist Governors insist that they are turning back the money because of "strings attached." These statements of the GOP Racist Governors are lies.
The GOP Racist Governers are playing with fire.
I'd prefer to see funds for infrastructure improvements allocated to the states for general categories of projects rather than the current situation which allows debates over the merits of individual projects to bog down congressional debate (and media coverage of congressional debate).
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
Yeah, earmarks aren't bad, and here's an example:
I live in PA. Texas is bigger than PA.
If we divided the money up "fairly", Texas would get more highway money than PA. It's bigger. Its got twice the peeple. Wrong.
So, my reps have to legislate interstates into existence (I99), taking an "unfair share" of highway money.
PA has trucks with nine foot snow blowers that would make any Texan shit their pants driving in the mountains, and those don't even come close to keeping roads navigable sometimes. Because of this, my state takes an unfair share of highway money, thanks to earmarks.
From my point of view, immigration isn't a problem. Texas, however, takes more of my taxbuck to keep illegal immigration in check than PA does. They need their earmarks to fight that.
If it wasn't for local reps fighting for earmarks in federal budgets, el estado mexicano de Tejas construiría la carretera en PA because my state wouldn't be able to afford it with American labor on its "fair share" of highway money!
First, we have an article praising M$ and now we have this.
Bottom line is that ANYTHING Jesus does is perfect. PERFECT I say! /. has become an agent for the smear.
This article is clearly a smear campaign and
the obama administration is attempting to be transparent. this is hard. it involves complicated financial arrangements. such that is very easy to poke holes in how complicated arrangements are attempted to be communicated in simple ways. its frankly impossible without finding someone somewhere who complains. the only way to be accurate, is to regurgitate all the fine detail, which if course, would also be criticized as being too complicated
in other words, you can't win
meanwhile, BEFORE the obama administration, there was not any attempt to be transparent at all. so the obama administration, rather than being lauded for trying to do something hard and asked for by the public, is portrayed in negative ways by partisan hacks because it falls short of the ideal
hey, rather than kick them because you hold them to high standards, why don't you congratulate them and thank them for making such dramatic progress over all previous administrations?
as time gtoes on, if obvious and straightforward progress is not met, then jump all over their case. meanwhile, what is it, march 2009? two months time?
thank you obbama administration, and good job. ignore the usual unsatisfiable cranks
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The problem with your argument is this: Why does the federal government have the money at all? If the money is for local projects, the federal government should simply tax less so that states can choose to tax more if they really do want these projects.
All that's happening is the federal government is taking money from the states then giving it back to them. Why would we want to do it this way instead of the state just getting money it needs directly?
Also, a redistribution of state wealth is probably happening as well.
It's precisely that redistribution that we want to happen. We're one country, so we have a responsibility to each contribute something to make our society whole. The poster just above you gave a good example about PA and highway maintenance.
Many times the earmarks involve federal policy. Any transportation earmark almost certainly has to go through USDOT for planning, etc.
We can and certainly should have a debate on whether individual earmarks are appropriate. But there is real value to debating these things at the federal level.
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-03-07/
Eclipse PDE and Me
wow, who would of thunk it? Very soon, people are going to wake up to the fact that obama is just another politician. Sad thing is that they will go back to sleep and sleep walk voting for him again.
Bush swung the country right, Obama is taking us left. We someone who will take us down the middle.