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Your Government Is Getting More Transparent. Why Not Take a Look?

Eileen Norcross

February 22, 2007

Tech Central Station

Every April 15 we pay the IRS, but it's in February when we first see how the government plans to spend it. Excepting analysts and interest groups, few will visit the Office of Management and Budget's website, or follow it through ten months of Congressional debate. But at $2.9 trillion (up by $1 trillion since 2001), we need to take notice.

Taxpayers' total fiscal exposure is now $50 trillion in Social Security and Medicare IOUs and debt. Units of measurement more fittingly used to describe galactic, rather than economic phenomena.

More Americans need to ask: "What are we buying?" Until recently, getting answers meant slogging through dense, obscure documents. Today, the government is making available more meaningful data, and technology is allowing us to share it in powerful ways.

The Transparency Act of 2006 promises a database of federal grants for public scrutiny. Search engines, such as Google, are indexing buried federal info. Plug the Office of Management and Budget's data into IBM's Many Eyes and visualize the federal budget as a Mondrianesque tree diagram. The president's proposed budget is compact and searchable. Check out the Department of Agriculture which spent $93 billion last year: $47 billion on Food Stamps, School Breakfast, Lunch and milk (the details are in the guts and fine-print Appendix). The Food and Nutrition Administration will spend $149 million and employ 1,194 people to administer the programs in 2008.

But pouring over the Appendix is like sightseeing by reading the phone book. It's where you go to pinpoint something. So we need to ask: Does the program work (at least according to OMB)?

Read the PART assessment - the Bush Administration's attempt at performance-based budgeting - for the Food Stamps program. It links budgets to program performance. It's deemed "moderately effective" according to OMB. In 2006, 64% of eligible people were served, and the payment error rate was 5.3%. Are diets improving and hunger being reduced? They are not sure. More studies are underway.

Through PART, we get a glimpse into Executive budget-making. The Major Savings and Reforms section shows what the administration wants to cut and why and you can compare this against a Master List of programs in the federal government - there are about 1000.

The process isn't quite this clear in Congress. If you want to know how much we spend on food safety and whether it is effective, you'll first discover budget categories don't match with real world questions. Is it under National Security, Agriculture, or Health and Well-Being?

After cheating via Google, I find food safety is on the Government Accountability Office's High-Risk List for 2007. It turns out that 15 agencies administer 30 food safety laws, spending $1.7 billion in 2003. The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection program (eggs, poultry and meat) and the Food and Drug Administration (everything else) handle 90 percent of that. The Office of Management and Budget says these two programs are "adequate" and "moderately effective," respectively.

But the GAO isn't so sure. Fragmentation and poor coordination mean that USDA inspects open-faced ham and cheese sandwiches sold in interstate commerce every day. Put a piece of bread on top and that sandwich is in FDA's jurisdiction. They inspect those once every five years.

How do we allot funds to minimize risk? That's what Congressional oversight and authorizing committees are for. But which committees: Agriculture, Homeland Security or Health? Like the budget, Congressional committees aren't based on policy outcomes. The House considered Canadian beef in 2005; the Senate, food safety in 2006. How do they decide how much money goes to Agriculture's poultry inspectors, versus Commerce to safeguard fish stocks? Legislators do the only thing possible absent meaningful information: incrementally increase budgets based on last year's figures.

Does performance information figure into the final budget? Not that I can tell. Which is ironic since Congress requires agencies to produce the data. Agencies write reports, hearings are held but Appropriations remains a black box.

But transparency generates its own momentum. In February, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi launched The Open House Project to put more of Congress' business on the Web. The project hopes to make it easier for citizens to follow bills, debates and Congressional activities. They're looking for your input.

So get used to seeing trillion dollar budgets; but don't tune-out, log on. The internet changes expectations. It reveals, magnifies and links information in new ways. As more Americans blog the budget they will demand Congress link the best of intentions to tangible results.