As Americans watch their lawmakers bicker and pontificate on how to fix the budget, we thought it would be helpful to gather some of the possible services that would slow or stall if the government shuts down. Of course, 'shutdown' isn't a wholly accurate term, as many vital government services will continue to function and the United States will not become an anarchy overnight. As the final and frantic negotiations take place on the Hill, government offices are quietly prepping for the shutdown that would start after midnight this Friday. We will not know the specifics for this shutdown until each agency releases their individual updated plans, which the American Federation of Government Employees union is currently suing OMB to obtain.

The following examples are based on previous shutdowns and many services are up in the air, as many services can be labeled essential. Note these are examples are for federal services, not local or state government operations - though everyone will be hurting during a shutdown. Essentially, the determination still needs to be made over excepted activities and personnel. It looks like most congressional staff will report for work. Paychecks for salaried government employees will likely be delayed, even for those considered essential, and while the pay is not guaranteed, budgets passed following a shutdown traditionally provided backpay, though questions remain if that will happen now.

Members of the military and senior government officials like the President, members of Congress and presidential appointees will continue to be paid. Essential employees who are asked to 'volunteer' their services must fall under three categories (via OPM Furlough 2011 and Committee on House Administration):

• Activities that entail or directly support Members’ performance of their constitutional responsibility
• Activities that entail the safe-guarding of human life
• Activities that entail the protection of property

Here's a rundown of government services that could remain open or be crippled by congressional inaction. The main sources, if not linked, are the OMB Furlough Memos, which update the OMB Memo on November 17, 1981.

Likely to Remain Open:

• President, members of Congress and senior government officials - with most of their staff
• The military - regardless of stationing location
• Justice system including federal courts (at least for 10 days) and correctional facilities
• Firefighters, police and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
• Border, coastal protection and surveillance
• Medical care of inpatients and emergency outpatient care
• Medicare and Medicaid - delayed checks possible
• Air traffic control and Transportation Security Administration (TSA)
• Public utilities
• Emergency and disaster assistance
• Personnel involved in the 'essential elements of the money and banking system' - (so, still pay your taxes, but the refunds will likely be delayed)
• Personnel involved in the 'orderly suspension of agency operations'
• Food inspections and pollution monitoring
• Congressional Research Service
• Federal Reserve (does not rely on appropriations)
• US Postal Service (self-funded)
• Government websites (will remain online but non-essential sites will not updated)

Likely to be Slowed or Closed (CRS Report - 2/8/11):

• Processing of benefits for Veterans and Social Security
• New applications for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security or Veterans benefits
• Closure of national museums and parks (estimated loss of 9 million visitors during the last shutdown)
• Smithsonian Institution and National Zoo (thankfully animal manure management has improved)
• White House will be 'significantly lower staffing levels'
• Patent and Visa processing (Last time 20,000-30,000 applications by foreigners per day and 200,000 U.S. applications for passports were not processed)
• Two-thirds of the State department would be furloughed and diplomatic travel restricted
• New permit applications through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
• Bureau of Indian Affairs completely closed last shutdown (assistance payments and oil royalties delayed)
• National Archives and the Library of Congress (during the last shutdown they even took down the website)
• New federal home loan guarantees or loans/loan guarantees from the Small Business Association
• New energy leases
• Cleanup at Superfund/toxic waste sites (609 sites stopped in the 95-96 shutdown)
• New clinical research and disease hotlines at National Institutes of Health (NIH)
• Unknown amount of government contractors (would unlikely get retroactive pay)
• Food and Drug Administration's new device and drug approvals
• Department of Homeland Security's e-Verify
• As DC is a federal territory, the city will suffer greatly without federal funds, including no libraries, trash pickup, parking enforcement, DMV, non-emergency transportation projects or new permits (full DC shutdown plan)

Experts estimate the looming shutdown could furlough around 800,000 federal employees. The Smithsonian says around 500,000 visitors will be turned away just over the weekend and who knows what will happen to the 23,000 people who already bought IMAX tickets. Like many political beings around the world, we are watching this situation very closely.

Image via flickr user Pak Gwei.

Earlier this year, the White House's Office of Management and Budget requested comments on improving the Paperwork Reduction Act. The law requires agencies that wish to gather information from the public to first run their plans by OMB. In revisiting the law and its implementing regulations, OMB is focused on:

• Reducing current paperwork burdens, especially on small entities;
• Increasing the practical utility of information collected by the Federal Government;
• Ensuring accurate burden estimates; and
• Preventing unintended adverse consequences.

One of the unintended adverse consequences of the PRA arises in the Internet context, with what the government deems "surveys." Government websites may not use surveys, even when compliance is strictly voluntary, without first receiving approval from OMB in a process that is lengthy and laborious.

Agencies interpret the term "survey" broadly, banning or restricting tools that would allow users to publicly rank or assess the usefulness of information. This restricts online rating systems like those commonly used by blogs, retailers, and so on. For example, imagine YouTube without its five-star rating system, or Slashdot without the ability to vote for stories.

We address the survey issue in a comment we submitted to OMB late last year.

The approval process for a survey can take half a year or more and requires multiple periods for public comment. The law intentionally creates disincentives for surveying the public.

The authors of the Paperwork Reduction Act never considered the ways that the Internet would allow citizens to directly communicate with one another on government websites through the use of voluntary surveys. Nor did they imagine that surveys could be as quick and easy as clicking yes or no. The law was intended to make the government more efficient and reduce the burden on citizens. 15 years into the Internet age, it's time to take another look.

As our colleagues at OMB Watch blogged about yesterday, the Coalition for an Accountable Recovery, of which Sunlight is a member, released more analysis (PDF) they've conducted of the Office of Management and Budget’s recent guidance (PDF) on how Recovery Act recipients should report how they used the funds. CAR’s analysis in a nutshell: “While this guidance is a step in the right direction, there is still much room for improvement.”

So far, OMB has provided guidance only for recipients of grants and loans. OMB Watch says that separate guidance for federal contractors is coming soon. OMB has started to flesh out the details of the reporting process, which up until this point have largely been vague and unformed, OMB Watch reports.

CAR lists the good and the bad about OMB’s guidance. First the good:

(T)he guidance provides a useful framework for reporting to a central data collection service, called FederalReporting.gov. The design of the system is scalable to ultimately have all recipients of Recovery Act funds, including multi-tier sub-recipients, report directly. The guidance also creates a distinction between sub-recipients and vendors, which will prove useful. At the same time, OMB allows prime recipients to delegate direct reporting to sub-recipients - except for jobs data - which will likely cause confusion. There is also significant ambiguity about penalties for reporting non-compliance.

And the bad:

(There is) a lack of multi-tier reporting, job quality data, and performance data information; that jobs information is still being reported as undefined full-time equivalents (FTEs); that it is not clear if the information will be publically accessible with easy to use machine-readable tools; and that OMB requires the use of DUNS numbers and poorly considered identifiers for sub-recipients.

CAP’s full analysis is here (PDF).

“A mixed review”…That’s the verdict the Coalition for an Accountable Recovery (CAR) has given the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) final guidance for reporting data on use of funds under the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the Recovery Act. Sunlight's own review is far less mixed. (CAR’s press release can be accessed here (PDF).)

Speaking for the coalition, Gary Bass, OMB Watch’s director and CAR’s co-chair, applauded the significant transparency steps OMB has taken in certain key respects. However, much data from the recipients of Recovery Act funds will not be collected or disclosed according the the new guidelines. “If the Recovery Act is to fulfill President Obama’s promise about taxpayers being able to go online and see how every dime is spent, then we need sub-recipients’ and sub-sub recipients’ data online, too,” Gary said. “This not only includes how the money was spent but also who benefited.” CAR believes its essential to collect data on race, class, gender, disability and other measures of equity in order to properly assess the success of the Recovery Act.

Also absent from the new instruction is  a requirement to make raw data public. By not including raw data at Recovery.gov, transparency  is dramatically reduced. Sunlight has argued strongly for raw data in machine readable formats as the starting point for Recovery.gov. This is a significant failure by the Administration to live up to its promise for full and complete disclosure. Significant failure.

CAR was formed to promote accountability for both federal government agencies doling out the trillions of dollars, for the states and for the companies that benefit from recovery funds. The best way to assure taxpayers that the funds are being used responsibly is to provide full transparency on stimulus spending and to make the details of the stimulus available in online, in real time.

The direction Reovery.gov is heading is not good enough.

Some executive branch agencies are beginning to post lobbyist communications as required by the March 20th White House memorandum on the distribution of Recovery Act funds. So far, only eight out of the twenty-eight agencies listed as receiving recovery funds maintain a list of lobbyist contacts online. Some of the disclosures are far superior to others. While seeing these meetings posted online is encouraging overall, there are a few areas that could use improvement, most notably on structure, presentation, and centralization.

The agencies posting lobbyist contacts are as follows: Army Corps of Engineers (ACE), Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), Department of Energy (DOE), Department of Transportation (DOT), Federal Communication Commission (FCC), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Small Business Administration (SBA).

Of these agencies the most commendable are the FCC and DOE. The FCC provides, perhaps, the best example as the lobbyist contact page uses an easy to read chart that collects not just lobbyist contacts, but the docket number for the proceeding on which the FCC was contacted, the summary of the lobbyist contact, and links to any filing or presentation submitted along with a lobbyist contact. This goes above and beyond the requirements outlined in the March 20th memorandum. DOE contains many links to lobbyist communications and e-mails related to recovery act programs. These disclosures are well catalogued, but not as well as the FCC's lobbyist communications.

One of the biggest downside's to this disclosure effort is self-evident: there is no centralized disclosure location. (In many ways, these are near identical problems when compared to House earmark disclosures.) To find all of these I had to search all 28 agency recovery sites for any listing of lobbyist communication. Recovery.gov should host a page that either collects all of these disclosed communications or provide links to the agency site pages providing links to the communications.

Another problem is the lack of a common name to describe the communications. For the eight agencies already posting communications I found some variation in naming. "Communications with Registered Lobbyists," "Lobbyist Communication," "Communications with Interested Parties," and "Registered Lobbyist Communications" are some of the variations that I've encountered. A useful way to simplify disclosure would be require one name for all agencies to use to describe these communications.

And the greatest problem that we encounter in this type of disclosure is the lack of standardization. Some disclosures are e-mails, others comply with the form proscribed by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in a recent memo, others are a combination of submitted projects, e-mails, and letters, and some are vague and undescriptive (example). This is a larger problem across government, where important information is disclosed in .pdf files or .xls spreadsheets. While it's great that the information is out there, it is useless to the people who can add depth to it. If there was standardized disclosure in a standardized format, it would be a lot easier for programmers to create a useful database that uses all of this new information, providing context and content.

Here's a full list of agencies and their lobbyist communications pages (or lack thereof). Hopefully we can update this as more agencies begin posting their communications:

And a description of the origin of these communications:

On March 20, the White House issued memorandum setting guidelines for discussions by agency officials with registered lobbyists about funds coming from the America Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). The memorandum states that agency officials cannot meet with registered lobbyists about a specific program or specific funds, but can accept written communication that must be posted online. Agency officials can, however, meet with registered lobbyists if discussing general policy related to the recovery, with the official then recording the meeting to be posted online. The various agencies must then place all of these communications onto one page on their sites, most likely on their individual Recovery sections of their sites.

Here’s an example of what you can learn when you dig into federal recordsl...USA Today reports that the federal government, as part of the stimulus package, will be sending over $300 million to 61 housing agencies that auditors have been repeatedly cited for mishandling government aid. A review of the summaries the agencies are required to file with OMB revealed that the delinquent housing agencies were receiving stimulus funds. The stimulus package includes $4 billion to create jobs while fixing up rundown public housing. This constitutes a major increase over the $2.5 billion the federal government usually spends annually maintaining public housing.

Here’s the full list of the questionable housing agencies receiving stimulus funds.

The report says that federal authorities have promised to keep a close eye on how the agencies spend the money. Like me, I imagine you would normally find this statement not all that reassuring.

This may be a case where more transparency not only exposes misconduct, but should prevent it from occurring in the first place. If the public is watchdogging the federal watchdogs, they should be more motivated to monitor the receiving agencies. Sound complicated? Just think 'transparency as the best disinfectant.'

On his second day in office, President Barack Obama issued a sweeping memorandum on transparency in government, setting out an ambitious to-do list for the newly created position of Chief Technology Officer (CTO). This person was to be responsible initially -- along with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Administrator of General Services Administration -- to come up with a concrete list of recommendations to implement the principles set out in the memorandum, namely, that government should be transparent, participatory, and collaborative, and to do it within 120 days.

We're now at day 21 and counting , and the Obama Administration has yet to appoint that CTO -- a position he promised to create during his campaign.

So I'm worried: the clock is ticking to prepare that critically important memo. And besides the ticking clock there have been several examples of the White House  falling down on its promises to be transparent, particularly complying with its promise to post all legislation online for 5 days before consideration. (The history of posting bills online to allow for public comment has been either non-existent or spotty to date.) Getting that CTO "online" seems more and more important every day. To walk the walk, Obama needs the CTO.

So what's going on? Inquiring minds want to know.