One of the first things that President Obama did upon taking office was promise a much more open and transparent administration from what came before. He issued a “directive” to federal agencies to start with the assumption of openness and only back down from it with good reason. And yet, as we’ve seen over and over again, federal agencies have been anything but transparent — and a new study supports that. The AP looked at Freedom of Information Act requests and found that agencies are turning down FOIA requests at a much greater rate than the last administration, and doing so using a “deliberative process” exemption — which Obama specifically told agencies to avoid if possible. Amusingly, the AP notes that the administration still hasn’t responded to its own FOIA request about the gov’t’s new transparency plans.
Along those lines, rather than waiting for the government to just be proactive in being transparent, why not help them along? You may recall last year that Jim Harper set up a system to crowdsource a comprehensive collection of earmark data that was required to be released — but which was released in a variety of different and confusing ways. Now that the feds are finally moving towards standardizing how earmark data is released, Harper along with Jerry Brito are trying to make sure that the standardized format is as useful as possible. They’ve set up EarmarkData.org to try to help create a standardized format that will actually capture and present the data in the most useful way.
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