Important government transparency programs would receive a small boost if the President's proposed budget for FY 2013 were enacted. The Electronic Government Fund, which supports Data.gov, the IT Spending Dashboard, and USASpending.gov, among other programs, would increase by $4.2 million in FY 2013, from $12.4 million in FY 2013 2012 to $16.665 million in FY 2013. This is still far less than the $34 million appropriated in FY 2009 and FY 2010, but would make an appreciable difference in supporting or expanding transparency initiatives.

The last few years have been turbulent for this important source of transparency funds, with appropriators essentially zeroing out the fund, then placing its programs on life support, and then finally restoring a small but significant funding level.

Of course, the President's budget proposals have been disregarded in the past, especially with respect to this fund, so we'll have to keep a close eye on appropriators. Hopefully last year's deal will avoid the kind of crisis that necessitated the #savethedata campaign.

The Congressional Justification, a document that explains how the funds will be used that is submitted by GSA to Congress (but apparently is not on the White House website) is available below.

GSA Justification for the Electronic Government Fund for FY 2013

Open government may have won a round, with some of the money that was cut in the previous Congress year's budget*  for the Electronic Government Fund being restored by the 2012 Appropriations Bill (PDF) released this morning. The E-Gov Fund supports programs like Data.Gov, USASpending.gov, the IT Spending Dashboard, mobile apps, and much more. At first glance, the bill does three things:

First, it sets E-Gov funding at $12.4 million. While in FY 2009 and FY 2010 Congress provided $34 million each year to support government transparency programs, in 2011 the amount was cut to $8 million. For FY 2012, the House had proposed a partial-funding restoration to around $16 million, but the Senate had proposed further cuts, reducing the appropriation to somewhere between $5-7 million. It appears that the two chambers have split the difference, arriving at $12.4 million.

Second, it preserves the E-Gov Fund as an independent funding source. The E-Gov Fund has always existed as a stand-alone entity, but this year, the Senate (and later the House) proposed combining it with the Federal Citizen Services Fund. Doing so would raise important legal questions, but also increase the likelihood that one program would leach funds out of the other. By keeping the funds separate, the bill would help ensure that E-Gov funds are used for their statutory purposes outlined in the Electronic Government Act of 2002: " to improve the methods by which Government information, including information on the Internet, is organized, preserved, and made accessible to the public."

Third, it provides for an important measure of transparency. Because some funds spent by GSA are not controlled by statute or the GSA Administrator -- a concern sometimes raised that E-Gov Fund spending is left to the administration's discretion -- a broad provision in the bill may have been inserted to address that issue. Sec. 528 imposes a reporting requirement on GSA to "describe each program, project, or activity that is funded by appropriations to GSA but is not under the control or direction, in statute or in practice, of the Administrator of General Services." (It is unclear whether this requirement has existed in appropriations from previous years.)

Of course, this is not a done deal. The bill we're looking at appears to be the negotiated agreement between the House and the Senate, although I've seen a report indicating that negotiations may still be ongoing. Even if it is not finalized, Senator Carper and Representative Issa deserve a lot of credit for fighting for these important transparency programs, as do our coalition partners (like OMB Watch) and thousands of people around the U.S. who have called on congress to #savethedata. While $12.4 million is far less than was available just a few years ago, it should be enough to keep these key programs alive and allow for a slow but steady rate of innovation.

• Updated to reflect that the money was cut by the current Congress, but for the previous fiscal year.

The amount of money available for flagship transparency programs and how they will be funded is again the subject of controversy, with the White House rightly opposing Senate plans to cut funding and merge the initiatives with unrelated programs. The Statement of Administration Policy was issued last Thursday in response to appropriations bill HR 2354, the likely legislative vehicle through which the Senate will consider funding for Data.gov, USASpending.gov, the IT Dashboard, and other important transparency programs.

Thus far in the Senate, only the Senate Appropriations Committee has voted on funding levels for the E-Gov Fund, which provides funding for these transparency programs, and it did so in a process that was essentially closed to all other members of the Senate and to the public.

The Committee voted to combine the E-Gov Fund with the Federal Citizen Services Fund despite the funds having different purposes and raising questions about whether the combined fund would still be subject to the Electronic Government Act of 2002.

It also voted to deal the E-Gov Fund yet another funding hit. For both FY 2009 and FY 2010, the E-Gov fund was appropriated $34 million. Congressional wrangling for FY 2011 reduced E-Gov to $8 million, but with the promise that much of the funding would be restored. For FY 2012, the House Appropriations Committee  came through with a partial restoration, recommending overall E-Gov funding levels be set at approximately $16 million. Senate Appropriators, however, cut the E-Gov fund even further, down to a little more than $7 million.  Some programs already have been terminated, with many more on life support.

In response, today the Sunlight Foundation and OMB Watch released a letter to Senators calling on Congress to fully support the E-Gov Fund at $34 million, and to keep its money separate from the Federal Citizen Services Fund. The letter is below. More Sunlight reporting on our efforts to #savethedata is available here.

Take a few moments and call your Senator.

Letter to Senate on E-Gov Fund 2011-11-16

Major open government initiatives, namely Data.gov, Performance.gov, and USAspending.gov, are likely to remain top priorities for the E-Government fund, according to David McClure, as quoted in Federal Computer Week.

“These types of programs, I think, have permanence,” said David McClure, associate administrator at the General Services Administration’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies.

The E-Gov Fund supports such projects, which "could potentially lead to benefits including cost savings and efficiency, customer service transparency, and governmentwide collaboration and information sharing," according to a recent Government Accountability report [PDF]. Daniel discussed the report recommendations last week.

The fund has faced serious budget cuts from both the House and the Senate. The House initially proposed cutting the fund from the $34 million allocated in FY2010 to $2 million in FY2011, prompting activism efforts including Sunlight's Save the Data campaign. Congressional gridlock kept the fund operating at FY2010 levels. The House then voted in June to reduce the fund to $13 million for FY2012 and restructure it into a broader "Information and Engagement for Citizens" fund. A few weeks ago the Senate voted to decrease the fund by an additional $11 million below House levels.

While it is unclear at what level funding will ultimately be set, it is evident that it is likely to be much less than it was before. Open government initiatives will be facing tough competition for funding, as former Federal CIO Vivek Kundra outlined in a letter to Sen. Tom Carper.

We are glad to see GSA speaking out in support of maintaining funding for such projects.

The Government Accountability Office concluded that major projects funded through the E-Gov Fund "could potentially lead to benefits including cost savings and efficiency, customer service transparency, and governmentwide collaboration and information sharing." The report [PDF], released last Friday, focused on four of the sixteen projects supported by E-Gov in FY 2010, two of which were subsequently eliminated because of budget cuts in FY 2011. The E-Gov Fund supports projects that expand the government's abilities to carry out its activities electronically.

The report generally recommended that some programs incorporate additional performance metrics, a recommendation that GSA, which administers the E-Gov Fund, endorsed. It also noted that the two eliminated programs, the Citizen Services Dashboard and FedSpace, had respectively taken  "significant steps" and made "progress" towards meeting their goals; the Dashboard had a pilot up and running with four agencies and FedSpace had released a beta version that had 500 users. A list of programs funded by E-Gov is available below (as identified in the report). Funding declined precipitously from $34 million in FY 2009 and 2010 to $8 million in 2011, resulting in the termination of these programs and the suspension of development in many others.

While this funding cut was widely considered to be short-term, recent developments suggest the cuts may persist, freezing programs at current levels and preventing any improvements or new initiatives. While the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee endorsed restoring funding up to $15.8 million earlier this year, the Senate Appropriations Committee recently approved a further cut to $7.4 million. In addition, the E-Gov Fund was combined with another fund, raising the risk that its unique role in fostering a specific type of governmentwide technological innovation could evaporate.

In the following video, David McClure, the GSA Citizens Services Associate Administrator, briefly discussed the cuts to E-Gov when he testified before the House on September 21, 2011. He notes that "when anyone gets less money than requested, something's got to give."

After the huge fight over the House's support for Electronic Government Fund, which pays for many important transparency programs like Data.Gov and USASpending.Gov, we had high hopes that the Senate would restore funding to prior levels. Our hopes have been dashed.

In a vote yesterday on legislation that has only come to light today, the Senate Appropriations Committee dropped E-Gov funding by an additional $11m below the House's levels -- and the House is already $15-20m below the FY 2010 funding level. The Senate merged the E-Gov Fund with the Federal Citizen Services Fund, and appropriated $39m for newly combined fund. The House had appropriated $50m.

By comparison, just two years ago (in FY 2010), the two funds received a total of $71m, with $34m for e-gov and $37m for the Federal Citizen Service Fund. (Last year the e-gov fund was shockingly cut to $8m, far out of line from the previous two years funding and partly the result of a strange budget cycle; the Federal Citizen Service Fund was appropriated $34m.)

What does this mean? It's difficult to know how funds will be allocated between E-Gov and FCS programs, but we have some idea based on this letter from (former) federal CIO Vivek Kundra to Senator Tom Carper. Many programs will be terminated. Data quality will suffer. No fixes or improvements to current programs are likely.

That's too bad. The public's ability to see how the federal government spends money on USASpending.gov, for example, can help root out waste, fraud, and abuse, while promoting smart decisions in these tough economic times. Sharing government information on Data.gov can spur new businesses and more efficient government, if only agencies are appropriately encouraged and helped to make use of it. Senator Carper called earlier proposals to cut the E-Gov Fund "penny wise and pound foolish." He's right.

It's also embarrassing. The President is about to give a speech before the United Nations on Tuesday about our new open government commitments, and this paltry funding level sends the wrong message. We risk abandoning our role as a leading advocate for open government.

Theoretically, the next opportunity to fix these funding levels is when the bill goes to the floor of the Senate. It's unclear whether any amendments can be offered, and if so, what their likelihood of success would be. With the major differences between the House and Senate versions of the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill, what's most likely is that Congress will pass a Continuing Resolution to keep the government open while dickering over these differences.

Under a CR, the General Services Administration, which administers these funds, will have to assume that the lower number -- $39m -- is the amount of funding allowed for the year. Programs will come to a screeching halt while Congress tries to agree upon a full year appropriations bill. (This start-again-stop-again approach also wastes tons of money.) With the upcoming election, each day will make agreement harder and harder. It is too bad that the Senate is willing to sacrifice a lot of transparency for such a small amount of money. Especially when small investments in transparency yield huge dividends.

On June 22, federal spending transparency legislation was unanimously approved by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Introduced by Rep. Issa on June 13, the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (or DATA Act) of 2011 constitutes a major effort to improve government openness and transparency. (Senator Warner introduced companion legislation in the Senate.)

At its heart, the DATA Act does two things. First, it would create an independent board responsible for publishing and monitoring all federal spending, modeled after the Recovery Board. Second, it would create and require government agencies to adhere to consistent government-wide financial data reporting standards.

Like most complex legislation, the devil is in the details, and the DATA Act was substantially improved by an amendment offered by Rep. Issa (in the form of a chairman's mark), and by votes during the committee's business meeting. Our colleagues at the Project on Government Oversight have the details on the amendments adopted at the mark-up. We were particularly pleased to see the inclusion of notice-and-comment rulemaking and a study on how to include tax expenditures as part of the financial reporting.

The Sunlight Foundation, joined by a number of organizations, sent a letter to Rep. Issa prior to the mark-up that expressed "our support for efforts to improve federal financial transparency." The DATA Act represents a significant investment of time and effort, and Rep. Issa and his colleagues deserve praise for taking this issue seriously.

In that letter, we also expressed serious concern about a legislative provision that would cause the reporting regime to sunset after seven years. While many improvements have been made to the bill, this is a serious problem. All the efforts to create federal spending transparency should not evaporate after seven years.

We would also caution that there should be continuity for already required data reporting requirements. For that reason, some of the reporting requirements under FFATA, which created USASpending.gov, should be retained. (Our colleagues at OMB Watch, while taking a dimmer view of the legislation, have forcefully made that point.)

We recommend that another look will be taken at the composition of the new board. We believe that additional members, including perhaps representatives from GAO and the general public, should sit on the Board to ensure that it meets the needs of the public and congressional overseers. We also believe there should be a public advisory committee that can help advise the Board on how it should proceed.

It's worth noting suggestions for additional reporting items identified by Beth Noveck and Jim Hendler. They identify five items, which I've summarized:

1. Corporate persons be required to identify both the beneficial owner and any parent-subsidiary corporate relationships.
2. Entities be mandated to use consistent legal entity identifiers.
3. A process be mandated that would lead toward a single, universal, entity identifier for naming firms with the requirement that additional data fields be open and interoperable.
4. Data be machine-readable, automatically obtainable, and available through federated sites like data.gov.
5. Explicitly grant the power to create pilot projects and iterate.

Many of these ideas have been addressed in one way or another by the legislation. For example, the Board would have the power to require "such additional information reasonably related to the receipt and use of Federal funds," which could encompass identification of beneficial ownership as well as parent-subsidiary relationships. It also has the power to "designate common data elements ... for information required to be reported by recipients or agencies." However, the legislation could be altered to make these points more explicit and concrete.

There is still a long path ahead before the DATA Act could become law. We hope that the concerns that we raised above are addressed so that we can support the legislation without reservation.

The Electronic Government Fund would likely receive around $13m for FY2012 if Congress agrees with today's 27-21 vote by the House Appropriations Committee to adopt the Financial Services and General Government appropriation bill. The legislation now advances to the full House. It's increasingly likely that e-gov fund will increase from the $8m appropriated in FY 2011, a modest move in the right direction, albeit a far cry from the $34m appropriated in both FY 2009 and 2010. The full committee effectively ratified the subcommittee's vote last week on funding.

This appropriations bill makes a substantial change to the e-gov fund by replacing it with a new fund, the "Information and Engagement for Citizens" fund, that combines e-gov with the pre-existing "Federal Citizen Services Fund." According to the report accompanying the legislation, this new fund's purpose is "to provide electronic or other methods of providing access and understanding of Federal information, benefits, and services to citizens, businesses, other governments, and the media."

All in all, $50,000,000 will be appropriated to the new fund. It appears that the Information and Engagement for Citizens fund can be topped off to $60,000,000 through additional revenues and collections -- i.e. reimbursements from federal agencies, users fees for publications ordered by the public, payments from private entities for services rendered, and gifts from the public.

How will this break out? 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.

The legislative report also includes a report-back provision, where OMB is expected to submit to the appropriations committee "a detailed expenditure plan prior to obligation of funds under this account. The plan should describe the projects selected, and the budget, timeline, objectives and expected benefits and savings realized for each project."

We hope that the plan will be reported publicly, so that we can see how these funds will be expended.

The House Appropriations Committee will markup the Financial Services Appropriation Bill, which sets funding levels for the Electronic Government Fund, this Thursday at 9:30 in 2359 Rayburn. This follows on last week's subcommittee vote to partially restore e-gov funding to around $13m for FY 2012 from $8m in FY 2011, which is far less than the $34m appropriated in FY 2010 and 2009. Unlike that hearing, this one is expected to be webcast.

Assuming the legislation passes the House Appropriations Committee, which it is likely to do, it will go to the House floor for a vote, and then to the Senate. It's likely that the Senate will not adopt the legislation in its current form.