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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."

8 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. Not very transparent? by Yvan256 · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. Yes they could make it much easier. by rackserverdeals · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

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    Dual Opteron < $600
  3. well at least... by mastergoon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...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!

  4. Check the timeline... by CoolCash · · Score: 5, Informative

    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."

  5. 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
  6. The whole process is not transparent by hansamurai · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

    --
    Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
    1. 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).

  7. Re:a curious attack by larry+bagina · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    Do you even lift?

    These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.