House Appropriators released draft legislation [PDF] on Wednesday that appears to increase funding levels for the Electronic Government Fund, the source of financial support for government financial and data transparency websites, in a hint of things to come at tomorrow's mark-up. The e-gov fund suffered a huge cut from $34m in FY 2010 to $8m in FY 2011, which put many of its programs on life-support and terminated others, and has been the subject of a campaign by transparency advocates (including Sunlight) to restore full funding. The legislation was released 24-hours before a House Appropriations Committee Financial Services Subcommittee mark-up, scheduled for some time on Thursday morning. UPDATE 6/16: the subcommittee approved the legislation without amendment.

In a legislative twist, funding for the Electronic Government Fund appears to have been combined with funding for the Office of Citizen Services, making it difficult to figure out how much money will actually go towards e-gov websites. My best guess is that the legislation would increase the money available for e-gov to $13m from the $8m appropriated in FY 2011, which is still far off from the $34m available in FY 2010.

Where does this guess come from? Well, the draft legislation would appropriate $50m to e-gov and OCS, and last year OCS was cut from $37m to $34m. If we assume that OCS has been returned to a $37m funding level, that leaves $13m for e-gov. (It could be that OCS funding will not be fully restored, so more money would go towards e-gov, but there’s no way to know.) Combining these two funds together may have some logic to it, as the GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Information Technology maintains projects built under both of those funds.

What does this mean in practical terms? Were the House Appropriations Subcommittee’s text to be untouched during mark-up and adopted into law, the e-gov fund would marginally improve, moving from life support to critical condition. Enough money might be available to either make some improvements to its existing transparency programs, or perhaps to add a new program, but not much more than that. Progress on improving transparency websites and access to data would be slow, fitful,  and uneven -- but possible.

A critical test for the funding level comes this Thursday morning, when the House Appropriations Subcommittee will mark-up the text, meaning that it will review, amend, and (likely) vote to approve the legislation. This is the best opportunity in the House for real changes to be made to the bill. Hopefully the e-gov fund will receive a financial boost during this process.

Unfortunately, the hearing will take place in a tiny room in the Capitol, so it is very difficult for members of the public to attend. It won’t be webcast, despite House rules requiring committees to “provide audio and video coverage … in a manner that allows the public to easily listen to and view the proceedings,” so you can’t watch the action online. We’ve run into this problem before. My colleague Melanie will try to attend, but given the space constraints and significant interest in the mark-up, odds are slim that she’ll be able to get into the room.

Assuming the bill is passed out of subcommittee this week, it will go to the full Appropriations Committee next week, which will likely simply endorse the actions of the subcommittee, although there is a slim chance for amendment. After that, it will advance to the floor of the House for a final vote, and then go to the Senate. The whole process will start again, and we have hope that the Senate will fight to fully fund e-gov.

Of course, we’ll be following this each step of the way. And everything could change during mark-up.

Here’s the legislative language from the House Appropriations Subcommittee text:

INFORMATION AND ENGAGEMENT FOR CITIZENS For necessary expenses of the Office of Citizen Services, including services authorized by 5 U.S.C. 3109, and 24 to carry out the E-Government Act of 2002 (Public Law 25 107–347), $50,000,000: Provided, That the revenues and collections deposited into the Federal Citizen Services Fund shall only be available for necessary expenses of Federal Citizen Services activities in the aggregate amount not to exceed $60,000,000: Provided further, That revenues and collections accruing to the Fund during fis-cal year 2012 in excess of such amount shall remain in the Fund and shall not be available for expenditure except as authorized in appropriations Acts.

This morning, Rep. Darrell Issa introduced a major transparency bill that would transform how we track federal spending and identify waste, fraud, and abuse. The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2011 would establish an independent body to track all federal spending on a single website and require the the use of consistent government-wide data standards.

The DATA Act would build upon the successes of USASpending.gov and the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board -- the independent body that reports upon recovery spending -- by creating a board responsible for publishing and monitoring all federal spending, to be known as the Federal Accountability and Spending Transparency Board. The FAST Board would oversee a successor website to USASpending.gov, which currently tracks all federal spending, but contains nearly $1.3 trillion in spending discrepancies that we identified as part of our Clearspending project.

While the creation of the FAST Board will garner the lion’s share of attention, the effort to create government-wide financial data reporting standards should not be overlooked. It will have a tremendous effect on public participation and oversight by empowering the American people to look at the data themselves. Indeed, Sunlight supports legislation, the Public Online Information Act, that promotes the creation of government-wide data standards and sets up an entity with similar responsibilities.

The White House is at least partially in agreement with this new transparency effort. This morning’s Washington Post reported that President Obama will sign an executive order today that will put Vice President Biden in charge of an 11-member oversight board -- very similar to the RAT Board -- to address federal agency waste and fraud. We won’t know until the EO is released whether the president will seek to modernize agency reporting methods by improving data standards as well. UPDATE: here's the EO.

Our executive director Ellen Miller will be testifying tomorrow on federal financial transparency before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which Rep. Issa chairs. While we are still looking at the details of the DATA Act he introduced today, its broad outlines make a lot of sense. Agencies need to be motivated to fix their reporting systems and follow common reporting methods. And there's new funding to support this particular government transparency effort, an ongoing issue that I wrote about here as part of the #savethedata campaign. There’s a lot more to come.

Here’s the legislation.

The DATA Act

This Thursday will be a important test of the House of Representative's commitment to fund key transparency programs like USASpending.gov, Data.gov, the IT Dashboard. That morning, a very influential subcommittee will debate and vote upon how much money should be made available to the Electronic Government Fund, which pays for these programs and others. In anticipation of the vote, the Sunlight Foundation and many other organizations and notable individuals are releasing a letter today that calls for the restoration of full funding to these transparency programs.

Although the e-gov fund was appropriated $34m in FY 2009 and 2010, it was cut to $8m after months of wrangling over the FY 2011 budget. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has explained that at that funding level, "no project will go unaffected." It will likely mean the end of improvements to websites like USASpending.gov and Data.gov, worsening data quality, the release of fewer datasets, and the end of several programs.

A number of prominent members of Congress, including Reps. Darrell Issa and Jose Serrano and Sens. Joe Lieberman and Tom Carper, have spoken out in favor of the programs made possible by the e-gov fund. This year's dramatically diminished funding level has precipitously weakened these programs; if it continues, they will slip into a coma.

We will keep an eye on the House Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government hearing scheduled for this Thursday and let you know what happens. In the meantime, our joint letter is below.

House E-Gov Fund Sign-On letter

“No project will go unaffected,” said federal CIO Vivek Kundra in a letter on the e-gov funding cuts sent to Senator Carper released earlier today. Referring to the effects of reducing the e-government fund from $34m in FY2010 to $8m in FY2011, Kundra added that “while we believe that we can make progress on several important initiatives, several projects will experience a sharp decline given the limited amount of funding.”

For the first time, Mr. Kundra explained in broad strokes the consequences of the dramatic funding decrease.

"We will maintain important initiatives such as USAspending.gov, the IT Dashboard, Data.gov and Perfomance.gov at their current levels of operation. As a result of the reduced funding, there will be no enhancements or other development to address needs for improvement."

Data quality may suffer.

"While we will continue to work with agencies to improve the quality of data on the IT Dashboard and USASpending, we will not be able to fund development efforts to improve data accuracy through automation and streamlining, nor will funds be available to increase transparency. For example, we have postponed plans for IT Dashboard enhancements that would have allowed better integration with agency systems for investment monitoring."

New data will be harder to come by.

"Limited funding will increase delays in getting new datasets posted to Data.gov, and will limit our ability to stand up new communities of interest on that platform. Further, the reduced level of appropriations will impact the ongoing implementation of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA). For example, there will be a marked reduction in technical support provided to the contractor and grantee communities who enter data on Federal spending into the FFATA portal."

And two programs, FedSpace and the Citizen Services Dashboard, are being terminated.

Appropriators are in the process of considering the appropriate funding amount for the e-gov fund for FY2012. On the House side, they are expected to mark-up legislation near the middle of next month.

Senator Carper, who asked Kundra for more information about the e-gov cuts a little more than a month ago, said today in a press release that he appreciated Kundra's response, adding that "these websites are an important resource and a critical part of the effort to make the government more open and transparent, while at the same time, cutting wasteful and duplicative spending throughout federal agencies."

We will keep you updated.

Carper E-Gov Fund Letter Kundra

Calling the cuts to the e-gov fund potentially "penny-wise and pound-foolish," Delaware Senator Tom Carper wrote yesterday to federal CIO Vivek Kundra about the effects of the cuts and how the administration intends to cope.

I remain concerned with how the new lower funding level for the E-Gov Fund might not only impede the progress made thus far to make government open and transparent, but also harm efforts to cut wasteful and duplicative spending in the federal government.

He asked Mr. Kundra provide two key pieces of information:

I hope you can provide greater information about what specific efforts paid for by the E-Gov Fund will be affected by these cuts. In addition, I hope that you can provide information about how your office intends to maximize the funding available or use other available agency funding to pay for some of these initiatives and how our subcommittee can help.

The letter follows-up on Senator Carper's question at a recent hearing about the effects of the cuts. The Senator's continued involvement on this crucial issue provides hope to supporters of government openness and transparency. Sen. Carper is the chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs subcommittee responsible for overseeing federal financial management, government information, federal services, and international security.

Letter From Senator Carper to Vivek Kundra about the E-Gov Fund

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

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.

Broadcastr "is a social media platform for location-based stories. It enables the recording, indexing, listening, and sharing of audio content. Just like in human memory, every story is bound to a place."  Broadcastr simplifies the process of recording your story, allowing you to easily peg it to a location on the map and discovering other shared stories.  Currently the service is in beta, but they were quick to send me an invitation when I signed up.

A brief look at the platform shows stories from all over the world, from the rescue response to the tsunami in Japan to a story about George Moscones's time as mayor in San Francisco. The site adds the context of location and the emotion of human events heard through voice, which isn't always reflected though the written word, lending greater meaning to a story or a movement.

So how does it work? It's simple actually. Either click the 'record' button in the upper left corner or the 'Add a Story' button in the upper right corner. You will then see a screen that will allow you to record your voice through the microphone in your computer in Step 1, add general information about your story in Step 2...

...and pin it to a location on the map in Step 3:

After you've pinned the recording, this is what it will look like on the map -

Using the 'More' and 'Edit' links, you review and change your meta descriptions if necessary.  If you were to do a search for opengov or savethedata, this is what the results would like like on the map -

This platform, even with its weaknesses and quirks, has the potential to add interesting, dynamic context to the stories we share online. Do you have an opengov or savethedata story you want to share? Record it and pin it Broadcastr and we'll highlight the best stories.

Data.gov, USASpending.gov, and other Obama tech innovations face virtual extinction if the FY 2011 budget bill passed by the House of Representatives in February or considered by the Senate in March becomes law. The funding source for these e-government initiatives is the Electronic Government Fund, a $34 million bucket of money that would be drained to $2 million for the remainder of this fiscal year. The House and Senate’s inability to agree on long-term budget legislation has kept these initiatives alive at FY 2010 levels.

Some projects facing defunding include the recently-launched cloud computing initiative, the information repository data.gov, the government-spending reporting site USASpending.gov, citizen engagement tools, and online collaboration tools. Altogether, six project areas apparently will be affected by the cuts. Vivek Kundra, the Federal CIO who is responsible for allocating the Electronic Government Fund, will have to make some very difficult choices.

Although the Electronic Government fund was never allocated the kinds of money envisioned by the authors of the E-Government Act of 2002, starting in FY 2010 the fund was beefed up to $34 million by the incoming Obama administration and Democratically-controlled Congress. Funding levels for the past decade hovered around $2-3 million.

The funding necessary to keep these programs in place is illuminated by the IT Dashboard, one of the spending-tracking initiatives under Vivek Kundra's leadership. According to the Dashboard, over the last few years data.gov has cost $8.3 million; the cloud computing initiative has cost $1.4 million; and USASpending.gov has cost $13.3 million -- the legislation creating USASpending.gov was co-sponsored by Senator Coburn and then-Senator Obama.

The returns from these e-government initiatives in terms of transparency are priceless. They will help the government operate more effectively and efficiently, thereby saving taxpayer money and aiding oversight. Although we have significant issues with some of these program’s data quality, and we are concerned that the government may be paying too much for the technology, there should be no doubt that we need the transparency they enable. For example, fully realized transparency would allow us to track every expense and truly understand how money -- like that in the electronic government fund -- flows to federal programs. Government spending and performance data must be available online, in real time, and in machine readable formats.

Ultimately, it’s unlikely that either budget bill will be enacted into law in their current forms. But there is reason for alarm. Each house has considered providing only $2 million for the Electronic Government Fund, although the six continuing resolution have so far sustained current funding levels on a pro-rated basis. Looking ahead, the Administration called for $34 million in its budget request for FY 2012. The unsettled financial climate means that we can expect this funding fight to continue.

An open and accountable government is a prerequisite for democracy, and keeping these programs alive costs a mere pittance when compared to the value of bringing the federal government into the sunlight.