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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'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."
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.
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 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*
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.
If that were the case, they wouldn't be able to pass a Child Healthcare bill with millions allocated to impotence research... etc...
Also they wouldn't be able to create a reserve of laws that was sufficient to incriminate any citizen at any time.
But how could they hide things in the bills then? That would ruin any hope of fulfilling political agendas without most people noticing!
They implemented drupal on a winders server. By default, drupal comes with htaccess files that protects against this; however, since this is IIS, the htaccess files are no in effect. The windows administrator on the site never set the correct permissions in IIS. So no it has nothing to do with the distribution of the Drupal framework.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
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.
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."
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!
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.
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