First Amendment Coalition » Recovery.gov

Government accountability: New online information sharing can supplement whistleblowers

donal brown — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 17:22:33 +0000

An open government blogger, Micah Sifry, is optimistic that new information sharing websites will allow citizens affected by government projects and subsequent waste, fraud and inattention to share their complaints and initiate action.

In his book WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency, Sifry cites the website Seeclickfix.com adopted by around 500 cities which allows citizens to post complaints compiled by local governments. Sifry says if just a few citizens step up to report problems, it will make a huge difference in the way governments operate. -db

From NextGov, July 29, 2011, by Joseph Marks.

Full story

Microsoft aggressive in competing with other vendors for open government market

donal brown — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 21:27:11 +0000

Microsoft is using Sharepoint, Bing, SQL, and Azure to command a share of the traffic on open government while Google and Amazon are joining Microsoft in offering to host public data on their cloud services. -DB

Information Week
December 15, 2009
By J. Nicholas Hoover

With the open government movement in full swing and the Obama administration’s Open Government Directive finally in federal agency hands, vendors such as Microsoft are looking to offer up their help.

Earlier this year, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon began offering to host public data on their cloud services, and the competition will likely only heat up. Microsoft has touted the fact that SharePoint is the front-end platform for stimulus-tracking Website Recovery.gov, and clearly has a few other ideas up its sleeves.

For example, Microsoft recently worked with NASA to develop a Website called Be A Martian, part of which could be developed into a crowdsourced discussion platform like Google Moderator, Microsoft federal CTO Susie Adams said in an interview. This feature, which Microsoft and NASA call Town Hall, would allow users to ask questions, vote on them, read responses, earn a reputation, and sort questions by category and statistics like number of votes. The White House earlier this year used Google Moderator to crowdsource questions for a Presidential press conference.

Another Microsoft effort that could be helpful for open government projects is an effort codenamed Dallas. Through Dallas, Microsoft helps customers store strategic data sets on Microsoft’s SQL Azure cloud database platform and then “curates” that data by adding an open API to allow developer access and a front-end search feature to query relational data.

Last month, in a video demonstration at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference, federal CIO Vivek Kundra showed off a mocked-up iPhone application that used Department of Labor data hosted by Dallas which enabled teachers to look for job opportunities.

“The thing we can help most with quickly now is helping people take data sets and quickly put them out there,” Adams said. “Another one of the challenges agencies have is where do I actually put this and what kind of interface do I put on top of it. We can do that for them.” Eventually, Adams said, Dallas could include integration with Bing or with enterprise search features from Microsoft’s FAST acquisition.

Medicare payment data to go onto public Web site

donal brown — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:42:51 +0000

The Center for Medicare is planning to put up information about Medicare payments onto a Web site so that the public can track where the money is going. Some are concerned that this way of ferreting out fraud may also result in invasions of privacy. -DB

NextGov
November 19, 2009
By Aliya Sternstein

The Obama administration plans to launch a Web site in December that the public can use to monitor Medicare payments, but some health care specialists say it will be difficult for the application to expose fraudulent payments and protect privacy at the same time.

The Web site will allow people to view the number of health services performed and payments, organized by state, diagnosis and hospital, according to officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“Controlling wasteful spending in health care is one of the ways of fixing our health care system — at the same time it’s critical that protections be in place to make sure the information provided by this tool doesn’t [reveal details] that can be attached to a person’s name,” said Larry McNeely, a health care reform advocate at U.S. PIRG. The organization works to defend public health, consumers and privacy.

The CMS initiative is part of a governmentwide push to root out waste in federal spending through public Web sites that track the money. Such tools include Recovery.gov, the stimulus monitoring site, and the IT Dashboard, which aims to shed light on investments that are over budget or behind schedule. By recruiting Internet users as volunteer watchdogs, the government is attempting to establish citizen trust and convey a sense of transparency and accountability.

In a related development, CMS late Tuesday night reported the error rate of Medicare claims for inpatient hospital services more than doubled in 2009. The higher rate — now 7.8 percent, or $24.1 billion, compared with 3.6 percent in 2008 — is attributed to a calculation change to reflect a more complete accounting of improper payments, according to officials.

McNeely said it would be useful to view the number of MRIs a hospital orders to determine whether the institution is abusing payments to cover the cost of equipment.

But he noted that diagnosis coding for individual hospitals — even if stripped of patient identifiers — could compromise privacy when the illness indicated is rare. Federal officials should ensure diagnosis descriptions are not too specific or else exclude extremely rare illnesses, McNeely said.

Releasing details on atypical diagnoses is less of a problem at the state level, but state-level data generally is not as revealing as hospital-specific information, other specialists said.

Privacy could be protected if the sample size is large enough and the data is stripped of patient names, addresses, phone numbers and at least the last one or two digits of a 5-digit ZIP code, said John F. Quinn, a senior executive with the health care practice at consulting firm Accenture.

“I am not too concerned about patient privacy as long as a qualified statistician is employed to review and analyze the type of data being gathered and certifying that the selection processes in fact meet the requirements of ensuring patient privacy,” he said.

But that is not a simple feat, Quinn added, echoing concerns about the ability to trace back through claims for a relatively rare diagnosis to reconstruct a patient’s identity. “So it does take some skill” for statisticians and officials to protect information properly, he said.

Another challenge for the government will be the tendency to jump to conclusions about anomalies — relatively expensive surgeries or repeat orders — without all the facts, said Steve Findlay, senior health policy analyst at Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports.

“That outlier hospital might tell you, ‘We see the most complicated cases.’ That’s generally not true. That excuse doesn’t hold water most of the time,” he said. “But you can’t automatically call it fraud. You have to look into it.”

The public, and government officials, likely will need more information than what the site offers to understand the complexity of cases, Findlay said. For example, the aberrant hospital might have only performed a costly procedure five times for especially severe illnesses.

Government watchdog groups have limited expectations for the site.

“Given the level of waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid, the new data could be a useful method for oversight of tax dollars, but I wouldn’t expect miracles,” said Pete Sepp, spokesman for the National Taxpayers Union, a group that advocates for lower taxes and smaller government. “Waste can be a systemic problem, but fraud and abuse are human acts, which can be more difficult to discern by simply searching through a database.”

Feds can’t certify accuracy of stimulus reporting data

donal brown — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:38:09 +0000

An investigation of the government site with reports from stimulus recipients shows that much of the information is not validated and contains numerous errors. -DB

Sunlight Foundation

Commentary

November 18, 2009
By Paul Blumenthal

Recovery.gov is supposed to be a transparency clearing house for information on the federal stimulus spending appropriated in the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed earlier this year. Unfortunately, the reports on spending and jobs saved or created are showing errors across the board.

Clay Johnson at Sunlight Labs looked at the “dirty secret” that is FederalReporting.gov, the site where agencies and stimulus fund recipients file their reports before that data is pulled by Recovery.gov:

Looking into FederalReporting.gov is a lot tougher than Recovery.gov. Not a lot of light has shone upon this website. In terms of costs– the only thing I can find on usaspending.gov is that the EPA has set up a $4,000,000 helpdesk for the operation. It looks like right now there are three ways to send data into FederalReporting– via an Excel Spreadsheet, a Web Form, and via an XML API.

The question on my mind is– what kind of validation is being done on the data before it goes into federalreporting.gov? For instance, how is data getting being accepted by FederalReporting.gov saying that jobs are being created in Arizona’s 15th District when Arizona’s 15th district doesn’t exist? Shouldn’t FederalReporting.gov be validating that? It seems from the documentation that all three methods of submission have a validation process. Is the validation so lax that obviously wrong data can get through?

My initial reaction upon seeing the Arizona 15th District story was that this could have been a state-level agency or contractor reporting that jobs were created in the 15th District of the Arizona Legislature (Arizona elects one state senator and two state representatives from each of their 30 legislative districts). That was until I saw that jobs and spending were being reported from the 86th District and other states were seeing reporting coming from the 99th District and other non-existent legislative boundaries. This problem, which is huge for a project that is relying on transparency for legitimacy, stems from a patchwork reporting structure that, as Clay reported, is not being overseen properly. It looks like some of the state and local agencies and private contractors and subcontractors are simply putting a number into a box where they decided not to figure out the correct answer. Subsequently, the reporting site that they submit to is apparently not checking for errors.

In response to a letter sent by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee ranking member Darrell Issa, Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board chairman Earl Devaney answered questions about the accuracy of Recovery.gov reporting by stating, “Your letter specifically asks if I am able to certify that the number of jobs reported as created/saved on Recovery.gov is accurate and auditable. No, I am not able to make this certification.” The accurate part is obvious from the many examples pointed out by ABC, Sunlight Labs and others, but the auditable seems a bit shocking. Why isn’t the data able to be audited? Is it really that bad? Or is the Recovery board’s staff that over-stretched. While Devaney promises “increasingly higher levels of accuracy in the future,” this problem of accuracy and auditability should have been tackled before issuing press releases claiming the positive effects of stimulus spending.

Open government group finds little influence of campaign money on stimulus contracts

donal brown — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:49:08 +0000

The National Institute on Money in State Politics checked campaign contributions against awards for stimulus contracts and found that only 3.2 percent of contract recipients donated to state political campaigns. -DB

Project on Government Oversight (POGO)
November 5, 2009
By Ingrid Drake

A few months ago, POGO blogged about our concerns that many state and local governments with laws limiting contractors’ campaign contributions (meant to reduce the influence of private interests in the public contracting process) are facing obstacles to enforcing these “pay-to-play” laws on stimulus-funded contracts.

While none of those obstacles have been removed, the nonprofit, nonpartisan National Institute on Money in State Politics just released an analysis that found little influence of campaign contributions on stimulus contracts. By mashing Recovery.gov data with the Institute’s database of state-level political contributions, it found that “only 3.2 percent of the 3,285 recipients of ARRA-related contracts were also donors to state-level political campaigns during the 2008 and 2009 election cycles.”

Sponsor for open government conference criticized for shortfalls in its software’s transparency

donal brown — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:11:26 +0000

The Sunlight Foundation criticized Adobe for only publishing budget summary tables in PDF saying that that format prevents manipulation of data for adequate analysis. Adobe said it would keep PDF since in some cases it expedited access to information but wanted to present information in other useful formats as well if the government would support those efforts. -DB

NextGov

November 4, 2009

By Aliya Sternstein

Adobe on Wednesday hosted a free open government conference aimed at promoting online transparency, amid protests by bloggers who question the transparency benefits of the software company’s products.

The well-attended conference showcased pioneers in federal new media, including Lisa Schlosser, director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Information Collection, and personalities who rely on government data to do their jobs, such as keynote speaker and ABC News political analyst Cokie Roberts.

Adobe officials said they organized the event to further dialogue President Obama began on Jan. 21, when he issued a memo instructing federal agencies to institutionalize transparency, collaboration and public participation. But many open government advocates argue that the government should release data using alternatives to Adobe’s PDF file format, which they say prevents them from manipulating the information. And such activists argue that Adobe’s proprietary Flash, a video viewing tool, does not allow them to replicate or change the displayed graphics.

Technology-focused open government advocates prefer to parse data with technologies like the XML format, which allows them to extract and compare the data with outside information, such as campaign donations. Critics also characterized as misleading the slogan “Adobe Opens Up Washington.” The tagline was part of a downtown marketing campaign that coincided with the event.

The Sunlight Foundation, an open government group, contemplated picketing the event. “We thought about it. We kicked it around for a while, but then we thought it would be mildly unproductive, said Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs. The labs division is a team of Web developers that build applications to foster accountability in government.

He instigated a lengthy thread of comments on the Sunlight Labs blog and other online forums with the catchphrase, “Adobe is bad for open government.”

Johnson in an interview said the problem with Adobe formats surfaces when people exchange government data, not government documents.

“It is fine to publish a Dear Colleague letter in a PDF. It shows historical accuracy,” by authenticating the document, Johnson said. “What I don’t like is [budget] summary tables [in PDF].”

Government officials often save and publish documents in PDF because it is readily available on government computers and deployable with a few clicks of the mouse. “The concern here is that PDF is sort of a shortcut for the government to publish data on the Web … And the government says our job is done. When in fact it isn’t done,” Johnson said.

He declined an invitation to speak at the Adobe event because of other commitments and said he was exhausted from participating in many other panels this year. But Johnson said it’s important for government, citizens and businesses to debate format availability.

“It sure would be bad if government depended on a publishing format — Flash in particular — that required government to buy one piece of software in order to publish it,” he said.

Adobe officials said they were careful to ensure the event was “nonproduct-centric,” but instead a catalyst for the transition to open government, which is “ultimately supporting a public servant who is helping people in need and helping people at risk.”

Rob Pinkerton, director of government solutions for Adobe, responded to complaints about product flexibility by pointing to a case in London where government officials expedited services for people on the verge of homelessness with Adobe platforms. The London borough of Southwark was able to slash the time it took to complete requests for housing benefits from 36 days to less than 24 hours by capturing data and automating the process.

“There is this false choice between open government for machines and open government for people. We shouldn’t look at it as a choice. We want to do both,” Pinkerton said. “The fact that we’re presenting data in PDF is not a bad thing. It’s that we’re not presenting it in [parseable] formats as well.”

Johnson agreed that part of the responsibility for ensuring data is usable rests with the government.

Commercial interests aside, the conference delivered on its intent to educate and stoke conversation about the practicality of online transparency. Roberts, during her speech, commended Sunlight for pressing Congress to post legislation online for 72 hours prior to consideration.

A Sunlight Foundation representative even attended and asked Roberts about the benefits and consequences of transparency to civil society. Roberts reiterated what she had said during her presentation, which is transparency can combat misinformation but also carries unintended consequences. For example, Flu.gov has clarified for the public that the H1N1 vaccine shot does not contain a live virus.

Sometimes officials are less candid if they know their words will be published. “Monday you had online live-streaming of the president’s meeting with his economic advisers. As a result of that, I suspect nothing happened,” Roberts said. She added that citizens should view such episodes with a grain of salt.

She also praised Recovery.gov, the official stimulus spending-tracker, which “has turned out to be a gold mine for us journalists,” and the IT Dashboard, a Web site that monitors the progress of IT contracts.

“Yes, sunlight is by and large a really good thing, but it does make it harder to get things done,” Roberts said. “It is harder to get a bill passed when you can’t cut a deal.”

Not all transparency experts talk trash about Recovery.gov

donal brown — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:39:54 +0000

Some online transparency scholars working outside of Washington, D.C. are encouraged by features of the official Web site of Recovery.gov that tracks stimulus spending saying that they are impressed with the site’s ease of use. The site made its first post of stimulus data on October 15. -DB

NextGov
October 21, 2009
By Aliya Sternstein

Some online transparency scholars who work outside Washington say they are pleased with the newly released accountability features on Recovery.gov, a reaction that is in contrast to complaints aired by many open government activists about the site’s usability.

Recovery.gov, the official Web site tracking the $787 billion designed to stimulate the economy, imported on Oct. 15 the first-ever reports from aid recipients into interactive maps and downloadable spreadsheets. Many Washington-area government transparency activists criticized the way the data has been presented, saying the descriptions and project labels are not in plain English and the site’s search capabilities are limited.

Some academics outside Washington, however, who are less familiar with the site but are well-versed in the use of the Web in public policy, said they are impressed with the site’s tools.

“Things like the basic headers are pretty intelligible, [such as] ‘jobs awarded.’ That’s pretty straightforward,” said David Rand, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He coordinates a weekly seminar on emerging research about cooperation online and in the physical world.

The published reports are from firms that received federal stimulus contracts between Feb. 17 and Sept. 30 — and include the money the companies have spent, summaries of their projects, and the number of jobs the contracts have created or saved. Results of grants, loans and nonfederal contracts, which represent the bulk of the Recovery funds, will post on Oct. 30.

Rand had not heard the data was available until Nextgov contacted him. He immediately saw the possibilities of the data that the independent board overseeing the stimulus program had hoped the public would understand. “It would be cool to do a mashup where you could look at the unemployment and the funding to see how well those things track each other,” Rand said. A mashup is a visual display of data derived by combining statistics from various information sources.

“To have a full appreciation of what’s going on, I would have to spend more time [on the site], but it seems like a pretty awesome resource,” he added. “I had no idea that this was out there. And it seems like it totally should be and it makes me happy.”

When the board posted the reports on Oct. 15, traffic on the site jumped 52 percent from its daily average of 19,000 visitors to 28,895 visitors, according to the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which oversees stimulus spending. Users logged on from 137 countries and territories. Most visitors were from California, followed by New York and then the District of Columbia.

The site’s most popular features included the home page, the financial opportunities section and Where Is the Money Going? — an interactive map that displays the locations and details of stimulus-funded projects. Users can zoom in on locales by moving their mouse or typing in a ZIP code.

“For people who want to understand their own community and see how many jobs were created and [for the government] to have that kind of candor . . . it’s a great start,” said John Henry Clippinger, co-director of the Law Lab at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The law lab experiments with Web-based platforms and freely available software to develop tools that can enhance governance, entrepreneurship and human cooperation.

Clippinger doubted that the average citizen will visit the site, but said Recovery.gov will feed Web applications on outside sites and generate press stories that will trickle down to the public. “In time, what happens is that [Recovery.gov] becomes a reliable source that does provide accountability,” he said.

Stephen Schultze, associate director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University and who describes himself as “an informal end user,” said he keyed in his ZIP code and obtained clear explanations of local projects. “No doubt there are some descriptions that are more opaque, but on a gut level I felt like I had a better understanding of the use of stimulus funds in my area,” he said.

Stimulus fund recipients post spending records online

donal brown — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:38:23 +0000

Those awarded stimulus fund contracts are complying with government requirements to post the details of their expenditures online, so far submitting 112,000 reports to the data collection Web site. -DB

NextGov
October 14, 2009
By Aliya Sternstein

Stimulus fund recipients appear to be complying with requirements to report their spending activities online.

As of Wednesday recipients had submitted 112,000 spending reports to the federal government’s data collection Web site, according to the board monitoring stimulus spending. In August, the Office of Management and Budget anticipated that about 150,000 entities receiving grants, contracts and loans under the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would use the FederalReporting.gov site during the first round of reporting. But some users submitted multiple reports because they received more than one contract award and some state governments filed information on behalf of some recipients, meaning the number of reports does not match the number of users.

The number of users is expected to grow as more awards are disbursed under programs still in the planning stages, such as renewable energy initiatives. Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, said in an interview that as many as 1 million users might file by the end of the recovery effort.

The first wave of report information will be published Thursday on Recovery.gov, the public stimulus-tracking site, followed by a bigger batch of data on Oct. 30.

Thursday’s release will cover close to 9,000 recipients awarded contracts directly through the federal government, according to the board. Grants and loan data from states, nonprofits, universities and companies will appear on Oct. 30.

“The recovery board built FederalReporting.gov to receive the recipient reports and Recovery.gov to post them for public viewing in a remarkable time frame of only a few months,” Devaney said in a statement. “I’m very pleased to say that the collection of this data went very smoothly.”

For all its glaring faults, a reviewer finds promise in New Recovery.gov

donal brown — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 21:22:12 +0000

A Sun Light Labs member examines New Recovery.gov, the government site that tracks stimulus spending, to find a lot needing improvement but a lot to be commended including contracts and grants in the same venue. -DB

Sun Light Labs
Review
September 29, 2009
By Tom Lee

Recovery.gov relaunched yesterday, and we’ve spent some time playing around with the site since then. The verdict? Well, it’s hard to say — the site’s a bit broken. There are 404s all over the place, most gallingly on the data download page. Parts of the site seem like they work, but don’t: the select boxes on the front page that provide filters for the map don’t actually affect its behavior in any way. It’s hard to see these glaring bugs alongside the totally-unnecessary link to Facebook and not groan (am I supposed to play Scrabble with Chairman Devaney?).

That ESRI map is clearly the centerpiece of the site, and it’s nice enough, though I confess I’m still figuring out how to use it. It also makes the odd decision of plotting contracts by the recipient’s location, not the location of the project itself. For instance, I found a contract plotted in Lovell, WY. But the work was performed across the state in Cheyenne, on Warren Air Force Base — it’s just that the contractor is based in Lovell. There’s a case to be made for each type of view, but the vagaries of corporate organization would’ve led me to make a different choice. At the very least, being able to switch would be nice.

The most important thing to note is that there’s less new stuff here than it might seem. At the moment the site just aggregates information from USASpending.gov, FedBizOpps.gov, Grants.gov, fpds-ng.com, and recovery-specific agency reports that were already available on the old Recovery.gov. Recipient reporting — and with it subrecipient data, job creation information and other good stuff — won’t be arriving until mid or (more likely) late October. The current site should therefore be thought of as an attempt to filter existing information and make it comprehensible to a general audience, not as something wholly new.

So does it succeed in this effort? To some extent I think it does, bugs notwithstanding. Having contracts and grants on the same map is a step forward. The record detail pages may be disappointing to some, but I’ve worked directly with the same underlying data and can say with confidence that the Recovery.gov team has done a decent job of making the best of a bad situation. This glossary could be displayed a lot more prominently, but it’s a useful and welcome document.

Still, I’ve been looking at FAADS and FPDS data for months as part of my work on Subsidyscope, so all of this sort of makes sense to me. I’m not sure that a new visitor to the site is going to understand why some dollar amounts are negative, or what the difference is between an obligation and a contract with exercised options. Some of this complexity is unavoidable — the bookkeeping systems of the largest government on earth are inevitably going to be complicated! But I have to believe that more effort could’ve been done to make the information understandable. And given the lack of genuinely new information, I would’ve liked to see the new Recovery.gov make more headway on this front. It’s no longer enough to shove data at the public, then call it a job well done when the audience walks away in a state of complacent confusion.

Which brings us back to limiting the criteria by which we judge the site. Is it a perfect tool for tracking recovery dollars? No, not really. But the limits of the legacy systems it was built upon made that goal unrealistic from the start — Recovery.gov was never going to solve the data quality problems of USASpending, for instance. But it is a step toward making those systems comprehensible, and perhaps setting the stage for improving them — or it can be, at least. So kudos for that.

We’ll certainly be keeping an eye on Recovery.gov as the October data release draws closer. Have any of you had a chance to check out the site? What do you think?
Copyright 2009 Sun Light Labs

Obama administration making headway in transparency efforts

donal brown — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 21:02:36 +0000

While its efforts have been criticized, the Obama administration has launched promising initiatives to bring accountability and transparency to government and continues to work on improvements. -DB

OMB Watch
Commentary
August 18, 2009

At the close of President Obama’s first 200 days in office, the administration has demonstrated a willingness to experiment with new technologies and their potential role in making government more participatory and accountable. New e-government tools have been deployed to keep track of government spending, gather public input on policymaking, and convey the status of government projects. These tools may hold the potential to give Main Street the same voice in government traditionally reserved for K Street.

Participation

The largest e-government project launched thus far has been the effort to collect input on the pending Open Government Directive. On May 21, the administration began a three-phase process to generate ideas, discuss issues, and draft policy proposals related to the directive. The effort combined an online smorgasbord of wikis, electronic voting, and blogs with a traditional input process. Over 1,000 ideas were submitted to the first phase of the project. This effort wrapped up on July 6, just over one month after it was initially launched.

Two other web-based public discussions followed the path laid out by the Open Government Directive process. The new efforts addressed declassification and the executive branch’s use of Internet cookies on its websites.

The Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB) began operation in 2006 to create more transparency and greater access to declassified documents. In July 2009, PIDB utilized a blog to solicit public input on potential revisions to Executive Order 12958 and received over 150 comments. This was followed quickly in early August by the Office of Management and Budget’s use of a blog to discuss its cookie policy for federal websites; the goal of the discussion was to determine how to protect privacy of site visitors while utilizing “user- friendly, dynamic, and citizen-centric websites.”

These efforts have been met with some criticism and doubt. The administration struggled to keep many of the discussions on track as some participants attempted to hijack the Open Government Directive dialogue, demanding the release of U.F.O. records, the president’s birth certificate, and the legalization of marijuana. As online experiments for engaging the public have progressed, the administration has employed different moderating tools to keep discussions focused on the policy debates at hand.

Some interested groups have begun a dialogue to assess the administration’s handling of these discussions and to identify ways in which the tools used can be improved. The League of Women Voters, AmericaSpeaks, OMB Watch, and several other groups put together a survey for those who participated in the Open Government Directive process. These groups hope to present recommendations for improvement to the administration.

Additionally, while the government has attempted to engage the public online, none of the initiatives involved have been completed; thus, the weight and influence of the public’s voice in the policymaking process remains to be seen.

Accountability

The administration has also recognized the potential of e-government tools to improve accountability.

To this end, the administration has developed several new interactive websites, including an “IT Dashboard.” The dashboard, launched in late June, is part of the redesigned USAspending.gov and tracks complicated and costly procurements of government IT services. The system allows users to examine every federal IT project by agency and shows whether each project is on schedule and on budget, along with a link to a detailed list of performance metrics for the project.

Furthermore, the dashboard demonstrated its usefulness in improving accountability within a month of being launched. In late July, officials with the Veterans Affairs Department (VA) were able to pinpoint more than 45 failing IT projects in the process of compiling data for the dashboard system. These programs were either significantly behind schedule or over budget. As a result, the VA promptly suspended the programs to assess them for possible cancellation, thereby saving taxpayers money.

Other new federal websites include Recovery.gov, which will soon be redesigned. Since the site’s launch in April, the government has continued to add new features to Recovery.gov. Included in these updates is a recipient mapping feature that incorporates data from USAspending.gov to create visualizations of Recovery Act projects throughout the country. The mapping system addressed early criticism that data from the two sites were not linked.

These initiatives hold promise for a new era of e-government that enables a more participatory and accountable federal system. However, they also demonstrate the relative inexperience the government has in deploying new technologies for these purposes. While tools exist to accomplish these goals, the administration is still in the beginning phases of shaping them in such a way that maximizes their utility.

Open government group pushes for release of Defense contractor ratings

donal brown — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 21:05:01 +0000

Hopeful that President Barack Obama’s early commitment to transparency is genuine, the FOIA Group, Inc. is asking the Defense Department to allow public access to a Defense Department database that rates contractors. -DB

NextGov
August 14, 2009
By Aliya Sternstein

The Obama administration, committed to becoming the most transparent in history, upheld a Bush-era practice of denying taxpayers access to a Defense Department database that tracks contractor performance. An appeal to a recent Freedom of Information Act request is pending, but industry groups say they are confident Defense will respect their position to continue to bar public access to the ratings.

Since 2007, the FOIA Group Inc., which consults with major companies, law firms and nonprofits, has unsuccessfully challenged Defense to disclose the aggregate scores each contractor receives from federal agency from program managers, contracting officer’s representatives, engineers and other agency officials who work with the companies. The ratings are based on, among other things, the quality of the product or service, timeliness, cost control and business relations. The ratings are stored in a database called the Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System.

The database serves as a kind of Consumer Reports for agency contracting officials who are evaluating competitive bids for government work. Contracting officers and other federal managers use the system to help make contract award decisions, and to improve government-contractor relations. Only federal officials can enter the password-protected database. Contractors are able to see their data to ensure accuracy and provide feedback to the government.

“Just like a report card for your kid in school, as a taxpayer, you should be able to know how poorly or how well these contractors,” which often receive contract awards that exceed several hundred million dollars, are working, said Jeff Stachewicz, founder of FOIA Group and a former staffer for the Army Command Counsel who served on Defense’s FOIA task force. “If a contractor is doing poorly the public has a right to know, the contracting community has the right to know.”

The FOIA Group is not asking the administration to disclose cost performance reports, financial solvency assessments, comments or other proprietary information that is in the database.

The group filed three FOIA requests for the ratings during the Bush administration, and all were denied. In April, Defense denied a request that the FOIA Group filed in December 2008, and the group immediately appealed. The appeal reached the department’s Office of the Undersecretary this summer for final review, and a decision is expected within 30 days, Stachewicz said.

“With the new breadth of openness from the Obama doctrine, these scores are under serious consideration for release,” he said.

In a statement responding to a request for comment from Nextgov, Pentagon officials said, “The Department of Defense attempts to be as transparent as possible. But while FOIA is a disclosure statute, it does allow for the withholding of certain types of information contained in agency records. FOIA requests for CPARS have been consistently denied in the past, but FOIA gives requesters specific legal rights and provides administrative and judicial remedies when access to records or portions of records is denied. The requestor will be notified when staffing on this request is completed.”

Stachewicz said if Defense denies this appeal, he would challenge the decision in court.

“Every contractor wants to get their competitors’ performance scores, but they don’t want to give up their own [scores],” Stachewicz said. The group’s efforts to overturn the policy “ruffled a few feathers with our own clients. But we don’t worry about that.”

Trade groups that represent contractors argue the Obama administration can better accomplish transparency and accountability by putting the performance records in the hands of contracting decision-makers, as is the current practice.

Granting contractors access to their own records also allows companies to correct factual errors or to dispute evaluations with officials’ superiors, said Alan Chvotkin, executive vice president and counsel of the Professional Services Council, a trade group for government contractors. “It’s helpful for me as a vendor, because it’s my information. It’s information about me,” he said. “I ought to be able to see the information that the contracting officer writes about me. It’s my credit report if you will. But you don’t publish your report cards in the Washington Post.”

Chvotkin said he believes the administration will decide not to disclose the scores, pointing to its careful redactions in a recent online publication of a contract proposal to overhaul the Recovery.gov Web site.

“I think they recognize that legitimate proprietary information and source selection information should be broadly available in the government and you can protect the taxpayers’ interests [that way] … without disclosing that kind of information,” he said.

Contractors say the scores would be meaningless without also disclosing the context from the supplementary confidential information. The aggregate ratings do not reflect the relative significance of individual projects, said Trey Hodgkins, vice president for national security and procurement policy at Tech America, an industry association.

For example, a company can earn low scores on insignificant projects and receive a high score of five out of five points on a more important project, such as the Recovery.gov redesign. But the aggregate low score would not reflect the more important Recovery.gov work, industry observers said.

Groups abound to monitor recovery spending

donal brown — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 16:25:48 +0000

Besides the government agencies formed to audit recovery spending, there has been a number of other groups set up to help the public track the money and conduct oversight. -DB

The Presidential Transition
A Weblog of the IBM Center for the Business of Government
Commentary
August 12, 2009
By John Kamensky

The Recovery Act created a huge oversight mechanism and provided more than $350 million for audits and investigations to ensure the $787 billion in the Act would not be wasted. For example, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board released a checklist for how to look for waste, fraud and abuse in Recovery Act grants (e.g., “Was the award announced on FBO? Yes/No”). Government Executive’s Elizabeth Newell reports that the Board has created an outreach program to agencies to help them.

But what is really interesting is the number of other groups that are engaged in tracking and money and conducting oversight as well.

The most well-known is a private company, Oniva (no, not the calcium supplement), which created its own version of Recovery.gov, the federal government’s website to track the funds being spent. Their website is: http://www.recovery.org. This site is compiled by dozens of analysts who comb local news media for notices about public spending linked to Recovery Act funds (collecting their info from the bottom up). It reports 24,463 active projects, spending $77.48 Billion. In contrast, the federal site (http://www.recovery.gov) depends on reports from federal agencies, grantees, and contractors (collecting from the top down). It reports $73.14 Billion as “paid out” as of July 31st.

Another, OMB Watch, is sponsoring a “Coalition for an Accountable Recovery” (CAR) that advocates for greater transparency in Recovery Act spending.

In addition, the advocacy group, “States for a Transparent and Accountable Recovery” (STAR) looks at similar issues from a state-local perspective.

Last week, another advocacy group, “GoodJobsFirst” released a report assessing how transparent the states were being on their Recovery Act websites.

Senator Tom Coburn has been conducting his own investigations of how Recovery Act monies are being used, but they’ve been seen as partisan (or at least incomplete). His report seems to have gotten more publicity, at least . . ..

And advocacy groups aren’t only looking at the Recovery Act! There’s a group, Bailout Watch, that is tracking the use of the $700 Billion in bailout monies under programs like TARP. It has a page called “SubsidyScope.com” that tracks what financial institutions are receiving under the various federal bailout programs.

Are there other websites out there that you know of that are tracking the money (and/or its impact?)

. . . here’s a late addition. Pro Publica has created a “Stimulus Progress Bar” that’s worth looking at!

Report finds states lag in providing tracking of stimulus spending

donal brown — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:23:32 +0000

A Washington research firm representing 35 public interest groups has found deficiencies in the Web performances of states as they track stimulus spending. Only four states were found to provide employment data when job creation is one of the chief goals of the recovery plan. -DB

NextGov
July 29, 2009
By Aliya Sternstein

A study released on Wednesday criticizes most state Web sites that track stimulus spending, specifically finding fault with their coverage of job creation, contract awards and geographic location of projects.
Good Jobs First, a Washington research center that co-chairs the Coalition for An Accountable Recovery, issued the report as part of its effort to hold President Obama accountable for enacting what he called “a plan that will be implemented with an unprecedented level of transparency and accountability.” The nonprofit coalition consists of nearly 35 public interest groups.

The average score for general Web site performance was 28.2 on a scale of 0 to 100. The study evaluated the sites’ disclosures on planned spending totals in broad categories, geographic distribution of that spending statewide, and specific contracts intended to create jobs.

“The paramount objective of the Recovery Act is to address mounting unemployment through job creation and retention,” the report stated. “Yet only four states—Colorado, Maryland, Washington and West Virginia—currently provide any employment data for individual projects on their main [Recovery Act] site.”

The administration has called on all 50 states and the District of Columbia to create individual stimulus-tracking sites that supplement the official federal site, Recovery.gov. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board is responsible for the quality of Recovery.gov, but not the state sites.

The authors acknowledged that the overall responsibility for reporting transparency rests primarily with the RAT board, which maintains Recovery.gov, but said, “at the very least, the state sites should mirror the information provided by the federal sites.”

The findings also noted that states failed to use widely available Web tools, such as geographic information systems software. California-based ESRI, a major provider of GIS modeling and mapping technology, has customers in every state that already are using its software, according the report.

“It may be that they are not aware of” the GIS capacity the state already has, said Philip Mattera, the center’s research director and the principal author of the study.

Among the handful of exceptional states that scored 50 or higher were Maryland, which scored 80, and West Virginia, which earned a 60. Meanwhile, Illinois and Utah failed to score any points for their sites.

“There is a role for the states that complements what the board is doing at the federal level, and we think most of the states could be doing a better job in that regard,” Mattera said.

“We’re not blaming the federal level about any shortcomings at the state level,” he added. “The states have a role in providing more detail on individual projects than a site that’s providing [data] on the whole country.”

Only a few states, such as Maryland and California, juxtaposed the geographic disbursement of funds with patterns of economic distress, such as county unemployment rates or foreclosure levels, the report noted.

The study also looked at the states’ reporting of highway projects, in particular, since those contracts are expected to kick-start the economy. Those scores, 37.8 on average, were higher than the overall scores. Many states displayed information on transportation projects outside of their main recovery sites, on a separate page, or on their transportation department’s Web site.

Alabama, the District of Columbia, Kentucky and Vermont scored very low on both their overall sites and their highway reporting, dispensing few specifics on how they are spending stimulus funds.

Most states—42—did a relatively good job of providing data on the broad categories of spending, which included energy, housing and transportation. Breakdowns by county were less common on sites, with only 18 states providing such location-based information. Oregon, Tennessee and Washington displayed data by counties using interactive maps.

New recovery transparency czar promises nonpartisan stance

donal brown — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:02:18 +0000

Head of the new stimulus oversight board says there will be times that information posted on Recovery.gov will embarrass bodies receiving stimulous money but promises to conduct thorough monitoring of spending to prevent waste and fraud. -DB

National Journal
July 16, 2009
By John Maggs

After 10 years as inspector general of the Interior Department, Earl Devaney is on leave to head up the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, an oversight panel set up to put details of the $787 billion economic stimulus spending online by Oct. 10 and otherwise prevent waste, fraud and abuse of the money. His mild manner belies a zeal for rooting out abuses of the public’s trust, and he believes the retooled Recovery.gov will profoundly raise the bar for accountability throughout government.

Devaney recently sat down with National Journal Group reporters. Edited excerpts follow. Visit the archives page for more Insider Interviews.

NJ: Tell us about how you came into this job and what it is.

Devaney: We’ve been in business since mid-February. The president asked me to come over and chat with him, and the next thing I knew I was sitting in this position. It takes about a month and half to find office space and phones and computers and all that, so in mid-April, we got started.

We have two missions. One is more intuitive than the other. The first is to prevent waste fraud and abuse, which is sort of an IG’s mandate. The board consists of myself as the chair and 12 inspectors general. The other mission is sort of less intuitive, and it is quite a mystery to me why Congress would think the building of the government’s largest Web site ever would be something that 12 IGs could do. I think at the end of the day, they said to themselves, what group of people would be more guaranteed of getting the data up—good, bad or ugly, whatever it is—up on this Web site.

So, right now, we have a Web site up and running. We don’t envision what is up there now, which we call 1.0, is what the act envisions. Nor is it something that I’m particularly proud of. But it is up, and it is showing the money flowing out of the government. What has to happen between now and October 10 is we have to have 2.0 up and running. And 2.0, I’m going to suggest to you, is going to be a very attractive Web site, it will have among its features, mapping capacity, which will allow users to drill down into their neighborhood, punch in a ZIP code, if you will, and see where the money is being spent. That is the point when it will be fully operational. We are in the development stage.
NJ: When you say it will be the largest Web site ever, do you have some measurement of how large it will be?

Devaney: Well, certainly the largest Web site designed to show spending. And we’re guessing as to how many recipients there might be out there. It ranges probably between 200,000 and 400,000. And we’re asking each to talk about 44 pieces of data. Do the math, and you can see that this is a fairly robust data set.

NJ: Is there no way to prevent false reporting?

Devaney: Yeah, you could get false reporting. I think the most likely scenario is you’re going to get willful non-reporting, sort of like, “We’ll take this money but we don’t want to spend a half hour on a computer.” I think that agencies that encounter that will have to deal with it. But basically, we are talking about OMB [Office of Management and Budget] guidance, as opposed to a law that says you must report.
NJ: How many investigators are you going to have?

Devaney: It is about 40. I’ve entered this thing with a clear decision that I don’t want to be out doing audits and investigations. I want to be in a coordinating role, and be directing resources to targeted areas—programs that are at risk. When we get hotline calls, we’re going to be referring this out to the 28 IGs.

NJ: When is this going to start?

Devaney: October 11. When we put that information up, we’ll start getting flooded with calls. We’re trying to stay out of [politics], and we should stay out. IGs have no place in the political discussion of whether the recovery is good, bad or indifferent. Our job is to create a Web site that is historically transparent and at the same time user-friendly.

But first and foremost, I want them to come back. This is the first time that the American people are going to be able to see how their money is being spent. It is one thing to hear that a bill is passed—it is a lot of money, you may be mad, you may be happy, but you’re going to forget about it in a week. This money is all tagged—it is all going to be up on the Web site, every reporter in America is going to be looking at it every morning, millions of citizens are going to be looking at it. And I’ve seen a political interest in this money from the administration through the governors and the mayors all making sure this money is looked at carefully. I actually think you’d be kind of a dumb crook if you came around and tried to steal this money. It is too visible.

My feeling is that this cow is out of the barn and running down the street, that no politician is going to stand up and run down the street and say, “Let’s do it the old non-transparent way.” Whatever we are doing, I believe, will become the prototype for the way the government shows the American people how it spends their money. Once the American people get a taste of this transparency, I don’t think they are going to want to go back. I see it migrating government-wide. I don’t see how, you pass a sizable chunk of money, not every piece of money, but certainly the next chunk of money, people are going to say, “Well, why didn’t you do it transparently?”

NJ: Isn’t transparency sometimes dangerous to those in power?

Devaney: I think politicians have got their heads around the good sides of transparency. What they haven’t got their minds around is the downside of transparency. Come October 11, there are going to be things up on that Web site that embarrass people, clearly. I don’t think it is one party or the other. Everyone is going to be embarrassed to some extent.

NJ: What about the potential that this flood of data will be used by opponents of the president, or the stimulus plan?

Devaney: I thought about that two months ago. It is kind of a scary thing to think about. We could start, I don’t want to say a revolution, but we could start a big kerfuffle in this town in October. If you think the political environment right now is ablaze, I’m assuming that people will see a lot of good things when they see this [as well as bad things]. I think that it is going to take a while for the American psyche to understand that this has been going on forever. What they are going to see in October, those that have worked in government long enough—I know the way this spending looks, because I’ve seen the underbelly, but I don’t think the American people have seen it yet. It is a sausage factory.

NJ: Can you talk about trends you are going to see? Any sense of that yet?

Devaney: What is a risky program? Well, I’m not going to tell you the names of risky programs, but I will tell you in general that it is not necessarily the program that gets the most money. What really sends our risk flags up are new programs. Programs where there is a ton of money going into a new program where the infrastructure is not in place, where the controls of money are not in place, where they are sort of beginning from scratch. And when you dump money into that—weatherization, for instance, or broadband.

NJ: How much interaction have you had with the president or the vice president?

Devaney: Well, I spent a very uncomfortable evening in the first lady’s box. Did you know those seats were built in 1853, and they are about half the size of these here? Only uncomfortable in the sense that it was stuffy, hot and cramped.

NJ: You work pretty closely with Joe Biden, don’t you?

Devaney: Well, here is the deal. If you were to ask me who I speak to in the administration, it is Vice President Biden. He is in charge of the recovery. So, I meet with the vice president once a week. It is alone, it is in his office, it is for an hour. But our relationship is very much like the relationship I’ve always had with [department] secretaries that I’ve worked for. I consider myself independent. I’ve told him that. Certainly the board of 13 IGs is an independent entity; we don’t work for the administration. He understands that. Like every secretary I’ve worked for, I’ve told them a couple things: that I’m here to tell them what they need to know, not necessarily what they want to know, and the second premise, is I will make them mad. Somewhere along the line I will make you mad, I want to tell you that up front. That was noted, and he hasn’t gotten mad.

NJ: Does the vice president really have operational supervision of this recovery?

Devaney: Oh absolutely, I think so. He has his own separate Cabinet meetings on recovery where he talks to them, he is on the phone a lot with governors and mayors, and there is a nice, bright line between myself and somebody he has hired, somebody named Ed DeSeve who is a former OMB person that was deputy during the Clinton administration. [DeSeve] was brought in to do the political thing, where he sits on the other side of this line, he calls the governors and mayors, and says, “Do you really want to do that? Is that a good way to use the money?” I was very clear that I don’t make those calls. If somebody does something dumb, that is not in our ballpark.

NJ: What is your role, if Biden wants to know what you are doing? Are you required to tell him who you are investigating?

Devaney: Once again, that hasn’t happened yet. I revert back to the way I handled it with a [Cabinet] secretary. I would never want a secretary to wake up and read about it in the National Journal before I had a conversation with the secretary. So I would apply that principle. I probably would not talk about any criminal investigation that hadn’t been announced by the Justice Department; that is just off limits. I might have a discussion in general that nationwide we have blank percent of cases that have gone criminal, but no specifics. General briefings about status and trends and things that are happening, probably. But I don’t know that he would want to know specifics.

NJ: But in order to prevent waste, fraud and abuse, don’t you have to tell decision makers about potential problems?

Devaney: If we were to discern a fraud trend, I would interact with Ed DeSeve, and say, look, you need to speak to the agencies about this kind of spending, because it is resulting in waste or potential fraud. My expectation was that they would do that. They have been very aggressive about not wanting this money spent for unworthy or silly projects.

NJ: What is the punishment if they don’t comply?

Devaney: A little unclear. If they falsely report, there are some possibilities there, but if they don’t report, then they probably haven’t committed a crime, they have probably committed some regulatory [infraction]. I think the ultimate punishment is they get asked for their money back.

NJ: Is it better that the punishment is vague? It does not sound like a very strong incentive to comply.

Devaney: Well I’m a law enforcement guy, so hanging would be good, but I don’t think we’re going to have that. I’ve been involved in other regulatory regimes, like oil and gas, where it is pretty much voluntary that they tell how much oil they pump, and I know the downsides of that activity, but that is the way it is.