This Wednesday, the Senate Appropriations Committee will markup legislation that appropriates funding for the electronic government fund. The e-gov fund supports many of the Obama administration's flagship transparency initiatives, including data.gov, the IT spending dashboard, and USASpending.gov, as well as initiatives like data center consolidation. The House Appropriations Committee voted in June to reduce e-gov funding from $34m to $13-16m and to restructure it by rolling it into a broader "Information and Engagement for Citizens" fund.

The House's initially-proposed draconian cuts to the e-gov fund caused significant controversy, prompting Sunlight's #savethedata campaign, a public letter from major organizations and notable individuals, letters from Senator Tom Carper and former federal CIO Vivek Kundra, and statements from Rep. Darrell Issa,  Rep. Jose Serrano, and Sen. Joseph Lieberman.

It is unclear at this time whether the Senate will go along with the House's proposed restructuring of the fund as well as the disproportionate reduction in its funding levels. If the cuts go forward, new federal CIO Steven Van Roekel will make to make difficult decisions about which programs to cut or kill. We'll keep you posted.

In the last few weeks there’s been a whirlwind of news and speculation about what will happen to the federal government’s online transparency efforts. From the first rumble of budget trouble to a frantic search for information on when the sites would go dark, and an extended legislative give-and-take over funding levels, the storm has cleared enough to know what’s left standing.

Although the future of online transparency is uncertain, what we can know for sure is that our collective efforts averted a disaster. A few programs will survive, with the immediate fate of online transparency in the hands of federal CIO Vivek Kundra and a few key legislators.

Congress and the President collectively cut the Electronic Government Fund from $34m in FY2010 to $8m in FY2011. For much of this past year, the e-gov fund kept the lights on with the fumes from last year’s funding combined with a little under $2m from this year’s funding and some fancy financial footwork. Don’t be misled by these (relatively) small numbers: all agencies dramatically reduced their expenditures and held off on new projects while Congress worked out a budget, so the amount already spent represents starvation levels. The famine may continue. Even though Congress is supposed to pass a new budget for 2012 by October 1, which would make new monies available, it’s highly doubtful that this will take place on time. The $6m-or-so may have to last a long time.

There is a glimmer of hope, however. Because of our collective effort to #savethedata -- with nearly 10,000 signatures to our letter to Congress -- instead of these transparency programs going dark (except a very basic version of USASpending.gov) as would have happened at the originally-proposed $2m level, more programs will survive. In addition, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Issa has made a personal pledge to use his reprogramming authority (i.e., the ability to shift funds around) to try and keep many sites alive; congressional leaders such as Sen. Lieberman and Rep. Serrano also have stressed the importance of these programs.

Even so, Vivek Kundra, the federal CIO and e-gov administrator, will now have to make some very difficult decisions about which programs to kill or curtail. Two programs, USASpending.gov and Performance.gov, were created by federal law and will likely have some kind of funding priority.

It’s going to be very hard to squeeze $34m work of programs into less than $8m worth of funding of which 1/4 is already spent. From what I’ve heard, keeping many of these programs supported at basic levels (including maintenance) would cost around $15-20m.

In order to keep these programs going, there are 3 strategies that may be employed. First, Mr. Kundra and OMB will “pass the hat,” which means that they will ask other agencies to help support some of these programs. Given the funding cuts that most agencies have sustained, this will be a difficult ask. Second, other agencies may be asked to take charge of (and funding responsibility for) programs close to their missions. Third, money will be shifted around in an attempt to keep priority programs alive until (hopefully) more money can be found in next year's budget. In light of the visions recently offered by both President Obama and House Republicans, we must ensure that transparency is more than a bipartisan talking point.

If we continue to keep up the pressure, and if transparency leaders continue to emerge from both sides of the aisle, we have a fighting chance to truly open up the government to the American people. The last few weeks show that success is possible.

For more information on the programs at stake, here’s the six major areas covered by the e-gov fund and the amount of money intended to support a year of operations for each category. Please note that this is a partial program list, and the numbers may be a bit off, but it's drawn from the best information available to me.

1. Improving Innovation, Efficiency and Effectiveness, and Federal IT ($10m)

• Cloud Computing -- supports government efforts to move to the cloud by addressing security, standards, and other issues
• Apps.gov (part of cloud computing) -- helps the government use cloud computing and social media by negotiating gov’t friendly contracts and creating an agency-facing storefront
• FedRamp (part of cloud computing) -- a unified government-wide risk management program that supports agency security services while reducing security burdens upon each individual agency
• Data center consolidation
• Mobile apps -- see http://apps.usa.gov/
• Data.gov innovations platform

2. Citizens Engagement Platform (CEP) Access / Web 2.0 ($5m)

• Apps.gov/now -- builds free agency-friendly engagement tools such as blogs, wikis, etc.
• Citizen Services Delivery Dashboard (not yet public) -- will track agency performance against customer service standards
• Challenge.gov -- puts all innovation prizes and challenges in one place

3. Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act Implementation ($9.5m)

• USASpending.gov -- publishes federal spending on contracts and grants
• Sub-award recipient reporting (part of USASpending.gov) -- shows the sub-recipients for contracts and grants
• IT Dashboard -- reports on $80b in federal government IT funding and tracks performance
• Performance.gov (not yet public) -- tracks how agencies are performing against key metrics

4. Efficient Federal Workforce ($5m)

• Fedspace.gov -- a secure Intranet and collaboration workspace for federal employees across agencies

5. Accessible and Transparent Government Information / Data.gov ($3m)

• Data.gov -- helps the public access to high-value, machine readable databases

6. E-Gov Project Management Best Practices ($1.5m)

• 25 Point Plan to Reform Federal IT -- http://1.usa.gov/ezeKT8
• PaymentAccuracy.gov -- tracks the accuracy of payments made by the U.S. government & identifies high-error programs

Well, here we are.

Details of the budget deal negotiated last week have finally been posted online, and e-government programs are likely to be deeply cut. The bill will come to a vote in the next few days, and will likely become law, since it represents an agreement reached by congressional negotiators and the White House.

What the agreement is, however, we don't actually know.

Only this morning, three days after the deal was reached, are we seeing the full legislation that Congressional leaders and the White House have already agreed to. And we still don't know what else was agreed to -- hearings, scheduling Senate or House votes, etc. Reid, Boehner, and Obama should all be asked what terms of their agreement are that are outside this new bill.

The urgent need to fund the government (funding expires again this Friday at midnight) will again force Congress's hand, and the bill is unlikely to get a full 72 hours online as Speaker Boehner repeatedly pledged throughout last summer. Though no one, at this point, would advocate shutting down the government in order to give a bill three days online. Especially when an agreement has already been reached, the details have been locked in, and the emergency of a shutdown is looming.

This week's rushed and hollow congressional proceedings, as disappointing as they are, are really a natural extension of the budget negotiations train wreck we've been watching for years. The rank and file members of both the House and Senate have handed power to the Speaker and Majority Leader, a situation only made worse by last year's lack of a budget, and the ideologically charged brinksmanship that is characteristic of a budget fight played out during a divided government.

A very small number of political leaders have ended up with startling control over the country's priorities, and the public has been left piecing together what is happening well after it's been decided. The proverbial "table" of viable options ("on the table," "off the table") has somehow ended up in the back room.

Glimpses of the budget negotiations have been visible in the press, but those details tend to be the obvious theater of base appeasement. Boehner denies there's a deal; anonymous Obama staffers paint the President as both tough-as-nails and as a great convener; and Reid accuses Boehner of reneging. In other words, we get whatever they want us to hear.

If we continue to accept this manner of negotiations as standard operating procedure, this is what we're going to get, for the 2012 budget, the debt ceiling, and probably everything else. While it's difficult to force all of any negotiation to be public, we've got to be able to do better than this. Is it really the same President who once promised healthcare negotiations would be on C-SPAN that is now enforcing gag orders and non-disclosure agreements on the most far-reaching of public policies?

The same politicians that decried last year's legislative initiatives as too sweeping, too secretive, or "rammed through" have negotiated a package that amends all of those initiatives, in private. Congress is left as an antiquated afterthought, a bygone conclusion, a formality.

The White House has been just as bad. The Federal Employees' union had to use FOIA and then sue to try to get access to OMB's contingency plans for a shutdown, which were treated as political documents, rather than management documents vital to the operations of a vast bureaucracy. And OMB guidance advised senior staff to repeat that this was all part of "winning the future," -- the most base example of vapid ideology winning out over merit and substance.

And now we're left with the electronic government fund, once at $34 million, now reduced to $8 million. Is that sufficient? Will USASpending, the ITDashboard, or Data.gov continue to function? The real shame here is that we don't even know. Nobody does.

Vivek Kundra, speaking just now in a Senate hearing, said (paraphrased) that they're in the process of reassessing priorities, and it's unclear what will change.

So the signature sites of the Obama transparency initiative have been cut by a deal that the Obama administration agreed to, and they don't even know how those sites will be affected. If Vivek Kundra doesn't know, you can be sure that appropriators don't, and that the "negotiators" striking this deal were utterly unaware of the consequences of their "agreement."

The electronic government fund deserves a public hearing of its merits, as do all public policies.

If nobody demands better from our leaders, this will be the best we're going to get.

Divided government should mean that we get to see the strengths of each branch played off each other, creating accountability. If a few party leaders are allowed to play Congress and make their own decisions, public accountability gets manipulated, and collaboration gets replaced by collusion.

Details emerging last night on the FY 2011 budget agreement indicate that the electronic government fund will be cut to $8m from the $34 million appropriated in FY 2010, a reduction to 1/4 of its previous funding. As I explained previously, some projects facing defunding include the information repository data.gov, the government-spending reporting site USASpending.gov, the recently-launched cloud computing initiative, citizen engagement tools, and online collaboration tools. Altogether, six project areas apparently will be affected by the cuts. By comparison, other programs in the “financial services and government sector,” which includes the e-gov fund,  were cut by a (comparatively slight) 10% from their FY2010 levels.

Last week, House Republicans had proposed a reduction of the electronic government fund by 1/2 to $17m for the duration of the short term continuing budget resolution. This was a change from a House Republican proposal in February and Senate Democratic proposal in March to virtually eliminate the fund, which would have reducing it to $2m.

More than 10 organizations and 6,000 individuals have called upon Congress to “save the data.” Many of these programs have served as a model for similar state programs and efforts by more other countries.

The legislative language for the appropriations bill is expected to be introduced in the House of Representatives no later than tomorrow, and negotiations are continuing as to its contents.

It is unclear which programs will be cut or eliminated. The electronic government fund is a bucket of money spent on federal transparency programs at Federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s discretion, subject to statutory mandate. He will have to make the tough decisions about where to cut; we now know much much is on the chopping block.

Update: here's the bill

Second Update: And here's a video we released this morning as part of the Save the Data campaign.

As of this morning, more than 3,000 citizens have signed an open letter to Congress to save online transparency programs from a drastic budget cut; this is an increase of nearly 1,000 people in the last two days. Our message is catching on and Congress is starting to pay attention.

For example, Federal News Radio’s latest in a series of excellent reports shows that we have the attention of some of the House’s senior appropriators.

Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, chairwoman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government, referring to the House Republicans’ decision to propose a partial restoration of the E-Gov fund as part of a short term continuing resolution, was reported as saying:

I think there is an awful lot that is going to happen between now and when we finally get the government funded for the rest of this year and next year, but certainly there is a recognition that money was needed.

Rep. Jose Serrano, the ranking member of the same subcommittee, reportedly said last week:

The detrimental effect of HR 1 on so many areas of government is clear—and perhaps no more so than on the efforts to ensure the government's IT infrastructure upgrades are proceeding on schedule and on budget....We cannot have a more streamlined, efficient and open government without using the best technology available. Unfortunately the cuts in H.R. 1 to e-government fund will have the unintended consequence of making government less accountable and transparent.

Similarly, yesterday’s Federal News Radio report described GSA Administrator Martha Johnson as remarking that the “e-government fund is critical in keeping these open government tools helping citizens understand how the government works”.

We need to keep up the pressure. Follow the link to help save the data.

Public Letter: Save Online Transparency Programs (updated 4/2/2011)

Online transparency programs will enjoy a reprieve from the chopping block if the short term budget resolution posted late last night by House Republicans were to become law. The latest proposal appears to continue funding the sites at the same level at half the level as last year instead of cutting them to virtually nothing as was originally proposed. In short: our response is working. But we're not out the woods yet.

Under the short term resolution, the Electronic Government Fund, which pays for USASpending.gov, Data.gov, the IT Dashboard, and other tech transparency programs, would be funded at $17m for the remainder of the time the continuing resolution is in effect, i.e., until April 15 the year, which is the equivalent of the $34m annual appropriation it received last year. (I am reading the budget resolution quickly, so I believe the money is for the remainder of the year. But these things are tricky.) The Sunlight Foundation, joined by a coalition of organization and more than 2,000 citizens, have called for these transparency programs to be saved.

This short term continuing resolution would keep the government’s lights on through April 15 and fund the Department of Defense to the end of the year, but contains a number of provisions that many political leaders will be reluctant or unwilling to accept.

If today’s negotiations between House Republicans, Senate leaders, and the President reach an agreement, we will see a second bill introduced in the House before midnight tonight that would fund the government through the end of the year. (Three days must elapse between when a bill is made publicly available and when the House can vote on it under the 72-hour-rule, and the government is scheduled to shut down at midnight on Friday.) We’ll have to keep a close look to see if that long-term agreement would also restore funding to Electronic Government Fund programs.

If today’s negotiations over a long-term solution do not reach an agreement today, the short term resolution still faces political obstacles in the Senate and a possible veto by the president. As part of the negotiations over its provisions, we could see the resolution modified by the Senate and sent back to the House; a failure of both houses to agree would lead to a government shutdown.

All that is clear is that your speaking out is making a difference. Please keep calling and emailing and blogging and writing. Together we can save the data.

• Updated: On the question of whether the E-gov fund was reinstated, as I suspected above, I was reading the legislative language too quickly. The short term continuing resolution would make a pro-rated $17m available to the E-Gov fund for the week between April 8 and 15th -- i.e. around  $886 thousand -- and then would expire. How much money will be available for the remainder of the year, even if the CR passes, is very much open. It's also worth noting that the short term CR would fund the E-Gov at half the level of last year.

This morning Sunlight is sending an open letter to Congress on behalf of 13 organizations and more than 2,000 signatories that calls on legislators to save online transparency programs from budget cuts. With thousands of tweets and phone calls, we’re keeping up the pressure, but more is needed if we are to prevent these programs from going dark. If you haven’t already, follow the link to sign our open letter or be put in contact with your representative.

The cost of defunding USASpending.gov, Data.gov, the IT Dashboard, and other programs is high. These e-government initiatives help the government operate more effectively and efficiently, saving taxpayer money and helping public oversight. They increase economic opportunities for small business. They also increase citizen knowledge of and involvement in the democratic process. An open and accountable government is a prerequisite for democracy

We’ve been receiving a lot of media coverage in the last few days -- NPR’s Marketplace, Le Monde, the Huffington Post, Politico, The Washington Examiner, The Dallas Morning News, and many others -- but it’s not enough.

Congress will debate a budget bill that could enact these cuts in the next few days, unless they punt for a week while behind-the-scenes negotiations finish playing out (or the negotiations collapse and the government shuts down.) In any scenario, now is the time to make Congress hear your voice, before it is too late. Keep up the pressure.

Save Online Transparency Programs