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Recovery.gov Not Very Transparent

Posted by timothy on from the why-do-you-despise-progress? dept.

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."

7 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. Better than nothing by scubamage · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Better than nothing by CannonballHead · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Unfortunately, it seems that now government officials need to have "experience" (i.e., they need to be properly trained in political corruption by former political experience). Normal people just wouldn't be able to do the job well, apparently. Stupid normal people.

      Which is, I presume, why we get such smart legislation as banning talking on cell phones (without hands-free stuff) but NOT banning text messaging, etc. That one just happened to be recent in my mind. (it's a CA law)

  2. a curious attack by jamie · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:Uh... you know that.. by ksheff · · Score: 5, Insightful
    They certainly could have. Other sites have pointed out that publishing PDFs containing scanned versions of the hardcopy of the legislation is more about giving the appearance of being "open" while frustrating those who want to do text searches on the legislation. Those who want to do that have to take the extra step of running the images through an OCR process, which may introduce errors. The legislation had to be typed in somewhere, so they should be publishing the text version instead of scanned images.

    None of this really surprises me.

    --
    the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
  4. Ahh, Cracked's Nirvana fallacy at work. by Abcd1234 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Go read this. Here, let me quote:

    The Nirvana Fallacy is when you dismiss anything in the real world because you compare it to an unrealistic, perfect alternative, by which it pales in comparison. It wouldn't be a problem, except it keeps us from getting anything done.

    Pathetic when Cracked is out there teaching such basic lessons... *sigh*

  5. Re:The whole process is not transparent by CannonballHead · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The time they had? I think they had more time than they wanted you to think. When a politician says "we need to pass this bill now! we need to spend money now!" and when the bill is so long that most of the people that voted on it didn't even read it ...

    I really don't see how waiting 48 hours (two days) would have killed the economy. Oh my goodness, we had to wait 48 more hours before waiting several more months before getting stimulus money.

    If it wasn't bad enough that it's just spending more money than we actually have to somehow fix the problem of spending more money than we should be, on top of that it's been railroaded through Congress on the basis of a presumed crisis. I'm not saying there aren't people struggling or that the economy didn't "crash" but this is not the worst thing since the Great Depression (at least not yet, but the people saying that aren't forecasting with doubt, they're saying it IS ...) - of course, it was superficially inflated to begin with. What I am saying is that top democrats/leading democrats appear to have taken this "crisis" as an opportunity to push their agenda and "sell" it to the public using fear (including ridiculous numbers by Pelosi, who twice referred to "500 million jobs" being lost every month, etc).

  6. Re:The whole process is not transparent by Gogo0 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    youre comparing a hobo's shit with a beautiful princess's shit. theyre both shit, and it doesnt matter which one dumped first.
    i wish people would stop using the last administration's fuckups to excuse the current administration's fuckups.