With President Obama’s public inauguration in just under six weeks, and the start of the new Congress in four, what happens now will set the tone for the next few years. Here are 3 major transparency developments that we’ll be watching to develop by Inauguration Day.

(1) President Obama’s Second Inaugural should return to his themes of making government work for the people, not the special interests, by embracing comprehensive lobbying reform and bringing transparency to dark money’s role in politics.

During the first campaign, candidate Obama said, “I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over.” While some efforts have been made to require better lobbying transparency, the administration has been lax in enforcing its own disclosure rules, largely ignoring important lobbying disclosure bills like the LDEA. While it was much more active with urging the adoption of post-Citizens United transparency requirements for campaigns,  the DISCLOSE Act has failed to pass the Senate and the administration declined to act on its own. Just recently, it stoked outrage by going to corporations to fund inaugural activities.  In his second inaugural, the President should recommit his administration to weakening the undue power special interests have in setting Washington’s agenda by adopting an affirmative agenda for lobbying reform and campaign finance transparency. We have a few suggestions to help them get started.

(2) As the debate over spending, prompted by the fiscal cliff, comes to a head, negotiations over its resolution should be public, and the government should improve disclosure on how it raises and spends money.

President Obama and congressional negotiators are keeping the public largely in the dark about negotiations over the fiscal cliff. We believe our elected officials can do better, and have called on them to “commit to ensuring that any legislation resulting from the negotiations is online for 72 hours prior to consideration in Congress and that any side agreements, including promised votes on future legislation, are also made public.” At the same time, the fight over rebalancing the government’s books may incorporate a discussion over making information about federal spending available to the public. Legislation that would do this, known as the DATA Act, has already passed the House and is pending in the Senate. By Inauguration Day, we hope that our elected officials will have used the fiscal cliff to mark a new era of financial transparency.

(3) The House and Senate should adopt new rules of procedure that strengthen how they make information available to the public.

In the last Congress, the House required all of its hearings to be webcast, set in motion the creation of a new transparency portal, allowed electronic devices on the floor and official electronic documents online, and overall took a huge step towards greater transparency (including a commitment to improved public access to legislative data by the end of the 112th Congress). While the Senate did not alter its rules at the beginning of the last Congress, the impending fight over filibuster reform may mean that the upper chamber will consider revamping many of its procedures. Here are some changes we’d like to see in the House  and Senate to help them open up.

New York Times Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal just blogged about the Obama campaign's recent letter to the FEC, calling for the Crossroads GPS c4 to disclose its donors. Rosenthal's endorsement of transparency severely understates the importance of campaign finance disclosure, dismissing it as a Band-Aid.

Public knowledge of the money flowing into our politics is absolutely fundamental to public accountability in campaigns and elections. Without it, we can't properly enforce our laws, choose who to vote for, maintain confidence in our democratic system, or deter or expose corruption in our democracy. Hardly a band-aid. More like a bomb shelter.

While it is nice change to see Obama associated with campaign finance transparency in any way, since he's been almost entirely absent from that debate this year, it's hard not to see this complaint backfiring. Priorities USA, which the campaign has announced it will cooperate with, is in the name of both a super PAC and a c4. So Obama's complaint against Crossroads applies just as readily to the secrecy machinery set up to support his re-election.

In some ways, the President's involvement with these outside groups raises even bigger questions, since cabinet secretaries and White House officials with real powers under the law are also helping the unlimited fundraising effort. The campaign's assurance that these outside groups donations will be "disclosed as required by law" is laughable, since these are the same laws that Obama spent all of 2010 decrying as insufficient.

Campaign finance transparency is fundamental to accountability in our politics. We need the President to treat it as more than fodder for a fundraising appeal, and for everyone else to remember that secrecy in campaign finance is about something far more important than who wins the next election.

Byron Tau makes a great point in Politico: Obama's reversal on super PACs returns "to a system where corporate donors, unions and other wealthy individuals are able to pay big money for access to policymakers, lawmakers and key administration aides."

The President's announcement not only opened the door to cabinet members and top White House staff headlining fundraisers for unlimited checks, it announced with certainty that they would be doing so:

Senior campaign officials as well as some White House and Cabinet officials will attend and speak at Priorities USA fundraising events. While campaign officials may be appearing at events to amplify our message, these folks won't be soliciting contributions for Priorities USA.

That might take a bit of thought to fully digest. We often assume that the laws structuring the Executive Branch generally protect merit and official work from being polluted by inappropriate political activity. But this announcement changes the stakes significantly.

There's a huge difference between regular fundraisers and super PAC events. Obama announced that White House Officials and Cabinet officials will be appearing at events "to amplify our message." "Amplify our message" means raise money, and at these events, there is literally no limit to the money. Whether or not top officials are soliciting the checks or not is beside the point. Some of the most powerful officials in our government are selling their time to the highest bidder, and, as things stand now, the public isn't even able to know about their meetings.

Cabinet secretaries have, in many ways, far more power than individual Members of Congress. Laws often give them broad, unilateral discretion in carrying out the work of the country, making decisions that affect everyone's business in profound ways. Of course, that fact is not lost on moneyed interests, who are willing to pay dearly to move policies even the slightest bit in any direction.

Unlimited checks are now going to upset that balance. Top administration officials are going to advertise their attendance at super PAC (Priorities USA) events, to bring in as much money for them as possible. The Obama announcement wasn't about getting out a message, it was about raising money. And we shouldn't be naive about why top officials are attending fundraisers either -- their attention is for sale to the highest bidder.

And the public has no way of knowing whether or when top White House officials are attending these fundraisers. If the transportation secretary attends an event that people have given $200,000 each to attend, shouldn't we know that? Especially this administration, that prides itself on openness, should recognize that the public needs to know whether and how its top officials are involved in these unlimited-funds fundraisers.

The White House likes to pride itself on saying they released the visitor logs. But getting into the White House is free. If someone pays a million dollars for access to the Secretary of State, then we really need to know about it.

So what happens next? Will this announcement from the President be accepted as sufficient, especially when his likely rivals aren't even disclosing their bundlers?

If the President is going to let his cabinet be involved in raising huge sums of money from individual contributors, he should at least make that process transparent. The President should lean on Priorities USA, who should disclose top officials' attendance at fundraisers. He should also require White House officials and Cabinet Secretaries to disclose their attendance at fundraisers somewhere as part of their schedule, as the President himself does (see "campaign activity"). The Hatch Act may create some difficulties in finding the right mechanism for this disclosure, but we need a better answer than total secrecy.

Because under the system we have now, the country's most powerful officials have an incentive to precede every official action with a meeting of the most well-heeled donors who are likely to be affected. If cabinet officials attend unlimited fundraisers, every act of their work becomes a potential hook for juicing donors. The very least we can do is make it possible for the public to understand how top officials are involved with these fundraisers.

Without public disclosure of cabinet and White House officials' involvement in unlimited fundraisers, who gets to define acceptable cabinet-level involvement in fundraising? At its best, cabinet officers all get a new distraction to their duties, at its worst, the executive branch itself becomes an extension of the Presidential dark money machine.