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."

Comments

Not very transparent?

[Yvan256]

That's because IE6 doesn't support alpha in PNG images. It's time to upgrade your browser, dude.

Yes they could make it much easier.

[rackserverdeals]

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.

Re:Yes they could make it much easier.

[Mab_Mass]

3D pie charts that show only 2 numbers are the devil's work.

What this tells me more than anything else is that although they want to be transparent, the people who put this together know almost nothing about presentation of data.

Please, everybody, read Tufte. Even if you don't agree with everything that he says, think about his points.

Then, for the love of God, never, ever, create a 3D pie chart again.

I'm shocked.

[MindlessAutomata]

I'm completely and profoundly shocked over this startling revelation.

The Fleecing of America

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

well at least...

[mastergoon]

...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!

Re:well at least...

[larry bagina]

Nah, Barack Obama's teleprompter didn't tell him how to set up the permissions.

Better than nothing

[scubamage]

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.

Re:Better than nothing

[CannonballHead]

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)

Re:Better than nothing

[Doc Ruby]

Obama's CIO didn't "step down because of corruption in his home team". He stepped aside for a few days after someone in his "home team" was suddenly and without warning arrested for charges that had nothing to do with the CIO. An arrest that was somehow timed to happen days after the CIO started, though the investigation was going on for months.

The CIO has no evidence against him, nothing indicating he ever did anything related to the arrest (which itself is not proof of that other guy's guilt). All he did was delay his start as CIO for a few days so that could all become clear. And now he's back, because it had nothing to do with him. Except perhaps he spent some time helping the investigation find its way around his old office, since he'd just been running it.

I understand you're not American. But if you're following the rest of our thrashing as closely as you evidently followed the "America's CIO's rocky start" story, you should look closer before you jump to conclusions. Because you were pretty wrong on that one, and the other one is much more important, and much more complex.

Check the timeline...

[CoolCash]

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."

Re:Check the timeline...

[tsm_sf]

Here's a bit more of the timeline from the site... I seem to remember reading that there's no standard format defined for this data, so expect to see a bunch of garbage initially. If you want an easily manipulated database you might have to *shudder* get involved.

July 15, 2009
Recipients of Federal funding to begin reporting on their use of funds

May 20, 2009
Federal Agencies to begin reporting their competitive grants and contracts

May 15, 2009
Detailed agency financial reports to become available

May 03, 2009
Federal Agencies to make Performance Plans publicly available
Federal Agencies to begin reporting on their allocations for entitlement programs

March 03, 2009
Federal Agencies to begin reporting use of funds

February 19, 2009
Federal Agencies to begin reporting their formula block grant awards

a curious attack

[jamie]

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.

Re:a curious attack

[larry bagina]

as funny as a guy who works at slashdot pointing out how shitty the slashdot stories are?

Re:Uh... you know that..

[ksheff]

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 whole process is not transparent

[hansamurai]

I would rather see the law making process more transparent, just look at the stimulus bill:

• Obama promised not to sign bills that hadn't been posted online for the public to read for at least five days BEFORE the final vote was cast.
• Speaker Nancy Pelosi, promised that the final version of the scam stimulus bill would be posted online for at least 48 hours before the vote.
• The 1,073 page scam bill, with an extra 421 page Explanatory Statement, was delivered, still unfinished, at midnight Thursday.
• The House passed the bill 14 hours and 24 minutes later.
• The Senate did likewise 3 hours and 5 minutes after the House.

source: http://www.downsizedc.org/blog/hiding+the+sausage

Re:The whole process is not transparent

[CannonballHead]

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).

Re:The whole process is not transparent

[Gogo0]

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.

Ahh, Cracked's Nirvana fallacy at work.

[Abcd1234]

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*

Re:What the fuck?

[BountyX]

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.