Over the past two decades, online tools and search engines have grown from infant industries into powerful and widespread methods of communication. Now that such resources are available to the general public there has been an increased call for government to use these resources to disclose more of its practices.

Already, policy makers have responded to the changing times with the passage of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 from Senators Barack Obama and Tom Coburn to make information about federal spending more accessible to the public through www.USAspending.gov, and The Office of Management and Budget has established www.Results.gov to display performance data. Meanwhile, private organizations have developed some of their own tools to make searching for information easier. Yet as technology promises to continually progress, the challenge for policy makers is to keep pace with online capabilities.