Transparency Advocates Agree: White House Has Been "Useless"

Thursday, September 9, 2010 10:46 AM

Ellen Miller, Executive Director of the Sunlight Foundation, offered a scathing rebuke of the federal transparency effort this week at the Gov 2.0 Summit, calling sites such as Recovery.gov “almost useless.”  Miller honed in on the fact that the government has spent a lot of money retooling websites that taxpayers still can’t use effectively. This was the case when the Obama administration announced an $18 million overhaul of Recovery.gov, and taxpayers were left footing the bill for a shiny new portal that is still no better at tracking “stimulus” spending. We have been questioning the amount of spending on these sites for a long time, as the expenses have never seemed to garner any results.

Sunlight, not hopeful the government will reverse its say-one-thing-do-another approach to transparency, has launched its own project to track spending after finding over $1.3 trillion in faulty reporting of government spending on USAspending.gov and other sources. Their site, Clear Spending, offers a stunning view into the opacity of government finances. Visitors can see, for instance, that $14 billion has gone unreported for Department of Agriculture spending, while 2.3 billion in spending has been incompletely reported. This is certainly fodder for a debate on how the government can even claim to be transparent when the information taxpayers deserve to see isn’t properly tracked within agencies and departments themselves.

We are glad to see others ignore the shiny bells and whistles that the Obama administration has used to distract from true accountability. While there has been some preliminary progress on the federal transparency front, there needs to be more thorough and swift implementation of government transparency. We offered several suggestions for improvements to USAspending.gov back in 2008 and with Sunlight Foundation renewing the focus on the lack of disclosure on government spending, we hope those proposals are taken seriously.

Tags: Transparency Federal | Comments (0)