Andrea Di MaioI was looking for information about the US stimulus package (American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan) and I finally found it on the blog section of whitehouse.gov. There is post there, inviting to take a look, send thoughts, comments and ideas. I clicked on the link with great expectations and found a page with four further links on the left hand side and a form for comments on the right hand side. To provide a comment you have to provide name and email address, and limit yourself to 500 characters.
Then I looked at the first link. It has a quite obscure title (Text of the Conference Report – Division A). Clicking on it took me to the House web site, and more precisely to a 496 pages long PDF document with the following title: MAKING SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRIATIONS FOR JOB PRESERVATION AND CREATION, INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT, ENERGY EFFICIENCY AND SCIENCE, ASSISTANCE TO THE UNEMPLOYED, AND STATE AND LOCAL FISCAL STABILIZATION, FOR THE FISCAL YEAR ENDING SEPTEMBER 30, 2009, AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES. The title only takes 270 characters…
The second link refers to a Text of the Conference Report – Division B and happens to be a 577 pages long PDF file.
I then moved to the third link, called Joint Explanation Statement – Division A. I clicked on it with some expectation, and found a 136 pages long PDF file.
The fourth document, unsurprisingly called Joint Explanation Statement – Division B, is 285 pages long.
Indeed the information I was looking for about the details of the plan is there, but would I ever be able to browse through over a thousand pages? Would the average American be? And, if so, what could he or she say in less than 500 characters?
I am sure that, after the final approval and President’s signature, the plan will be made available in a much more readable form. And there are other sites, such as the US Senate Committee on Finance, where easier-to-read versions are available.
However it is somewhat ironic that an administration that is making openness and transparency a fundamental attribute of its policy fails to take the extra effort of making such an important plan readable and understandable by many when asking for comments.
Category: web 2.0 in government Tags: ARRA, ARRP. American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Obama, transparency
5 responses so far ↓
1 Eric Knipp February 14, 2009 at 2:19 am
I feel like this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Senators and Congressmen did not get the bill until midnight last night, in its 1100 page glory. Normally bills like this are submitted to them electronically so that aides can review them more easily – not this time. Of course it had to be done this way or the Democrats couldn’t have rammed this through – the public outcry is intense and would only have been more so if we’d had proper time to review it. $8B to build a high speed rail line from LA to Vegas, and a rollback of 1996 welfare reform? Come on.
2 Andrea Di Maio February 14, 2009 at 3:56 am
Thank you Eric. I did not want to sparkle any political discussion, as I am sure there are myriads of blogs where that happens. I just thought it was worthwhile to highlight that not much has changed with respect to other governments that claim they are trasparent by the very fact that they make some official information on the web. Some of Obama’s statements at the very beginning of his presidency suggest that he want to move in the right direction, but takes much more than just a blog pointing to gigantic documents.
3 Eric Knipp February 14, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Andrea, my point is that transparency doesn’t happen by accident. It takes effort to implement. I don’t think you should expect those kinds of efforts from this administration. “changey changey hope hope” was just election-year posturing, transparency included.
4 wrishel February 15, 2009 at 8:55 pm
I think the term “transparency” may be misleading. Some infer that it means information should be both accessible and easy to comprehend. As we know from various adverts, “it is hard to make things easy.” I would add “time-consuming” to “hard.: When various legislative and administrative committees are white-water-rafting through the legislative process, does it make sense to slow the process down for enough time that writers and editors can produce easy-to-comprehend versions? Does it make sense to undergo the inevitable interpretation and introduction of bias that comes with simplification?
With regards to the ARRA I would have been happy if the information has been equitably available to lobbyists and other wonks on all sides of an issue and no time had been inserted to boil it down for Joe the Opiner.
I would have been deliriously happy if the information had been available in machine-readable format rather than PDFs made up of scanned pages of typewritten text.
Instead of shooting for Gov 2.0, we should first target Gov 1.1.
5 Jay Alt March 14, 2009 at 12:27 am
Few legislators read all the details, most of them read the summaries.
Although given the anti-ARRP talking point, some haven’t even read that.
This is for the House version of the bill.
http://appropriations.house.gov/
http://appropriations.house.gov/pdf/PressSummary02-12-09.pdf
Here is an analysis by an economist who advised McCain
http://www.scribd.com/doc/11984879/ARRP-Analysis-and-Overview
etc