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Thinktank Aims To Crowdsource Government Earmark Analysis
Al writes "The Sunlight Foundation, based in Washington, DC, hopes to raise an army of web volunteers to analyze all the earmarks in government bills. The group's new Sunlight Labs transparency corps invites users to join an effort to analyze the information collaboratively. Users are presented with PDFs released by hundreds of different offices and asked to enter the pertinent information like the date and dollar amount of a request, name of the requester, description of the project, and so on. These then become part of a searchable database. The project's launch roughly coincided with the launch earlier this month of the government's new IT Dashboard. But this tool is somewhat limited — users can find the primary recipients of IT project funding, but not subcontractors; it's not easy to discern the origins of contracts or their geographic distribution, and it's almost impossible to see how they are connected to elected officials."
contrary to popular opinion, the big difference between lobbyists and ordinary voters isn't money (although money matters), it is access to information on a timely basis. Putting information online will have a huge impact on the legislative process.
I was thinking that this would already be part of the government system -- to index who makes each earmark or revision to a bill -- to add at least some semblence of accountability to the legislating process. Then I thought "Why doesn't the government already have a searchable website like this? Shouldn't they be accountable to make one?" then I realized the website probably would have been contracted out for $8 million to some governor's grandson's company... So Go Volunteers!
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
"These then become part of a searchable database."
There should be a law that agencies enter this information themselves.
On the surface, this does sound like a good project, one that does bring a bit more transparency to our government as a whole.
However, if there is a groundswell against earmarks, I wonder how it's going to affect projects which at first glance don't look worthwhile. I think it would disproportionately affect science and the arts as they're often seen as luxuries rather than necessities.
Recruiting volunteers is nice, but who owns the data at the end of the day?
Can I download a full offline copy of database? (Without having to sign an NDA, make payments, or resort to a custom rolled screen scraper?)
Can I reuse the data on my own private or public projects?
If not, then best of luck with your project 'fellas, lemme know how it works out.
If you put up free porn -- only requiring people to enter this information to advance to the next screen of free porn -- this database would be completed in 24 hours or less.
Or, if not porn, then lottery tickets.
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Earmarks account for only 1% to 2% of the budget. What is really needed is a wiki that encompasses the whole federal budget (all $2.9 trillion of it). Then the crowd would really have a chance of finding waste in the budget and of making some really progress in bringing spending into line with revenues.
Actually, it *was* started under the Bush office. From the Sunlight Foundation website. The Sunlight Foundation was co-founded in 2006 by Washington, DC businessman and lawyer Michael Klein and longtime Washington public interest advocate Ellen Miller with the non-partisan mission of using the revolutionary power of the Internet to make information about Congress and the federal government more meaningfully accessible to citizens.
At least they're going this far. Imagine this happening under the Bush office. Nope, I didn't think you could.
P.S. I am *not* an Obama fanboi.
Um... the Bush Office didn't write bills. That job falls solely under the Congressional branch of the US government. The "Bush Office" falls under the Executive Branch, just like every other president.
People give the president too much credit/blame. All the president does is sign the bills. Congress writes them and sends them to the Prez. The Prez can either sign or veto.
Please refer to the following educational video for future reference. :-)
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
One problem is how one defines "earmark" and "pork". The "reasonableness" if a given request is often subjective and depends on one's personal politics. For example, is the F-22 an "earmark"? Sure, some senators probably want it because of local jobs in existing F-22 plants, but others feel we need a large, aggressive military to protect us from [insert boogyman of the week]. Lists of numbers cannot really tell you what's behind a senator's decision. But at least hopefully an easy-to-get-to database will make it easier to find and highlight suspicious patterns.
Table-ized A.I.
"Senator, have you read this bill?"
I'm all for exposure to the public of this type of data, but, can we trust them not to filter the data to forward their own political agenda. I think not. Like every group in Washington, they will filter out the sins of the people whose views they support while exposing the sins of those whose views they oppose.
Also, can we trust that the "Crowd" they attract to sift out this data will not be partisan in what they record. Again, I think not.
I've been watching this crap play out for half a century and studied the games that went on for the half century before that and it is always the same old crap. The design of our system of government perpetuates it.
I work at the Sunlight Foundation (though not on this project), and I feel I can safely say that we completely agree with you that the government *should* be issuing this data in a more easily usable format.
To be fair, though, it's not always as easy as all that: when you introduce such an infrastructure you need to make sure there are staff resources to handle the data entry, training available to help them do it, and somebody checking the overall data quality. My project's been looking at a lot of grant data, and we've consistently found that the central grant data directory -- a data set called FAADS -- is of lower quality than the reports issued on each program's website in excel, PDF, HTML tables or who knows what else. It doesn't make a lot of sense to people like you and me, but centralized systems really do introduce an added layer of difficulty for the data entry people. Just keeping track of the endless requirements imposed by legislation can be pretty daunting.
...none of which is to say that this shouldn't happen. It should! But it does explain why "publish earmarks" and "publish earmarks in a central location, in a machine-readable format" are two different things, and why the latter is more difficult to successfully ask for. We'll get there, though.