There's a new government across the pond with Tory leader David Cameron as Prime Minister. Worth noting is that our friend Tom Steinberg (mySociety) signed on as an adviser to the Tories last year. Tom is a brilliant open government innovator and some of his ideas can be seen in the "Technology Manifesto" presented by the Tories a few months ago. One of the items in the manifesto is very similar to both the Open Government Initiative begun by President Barack Obama and the yet-to-be-enacted Public Online Information Act (POIA):

Legislating to enshrine the freedom of government data and create a powerful new ‘Right to Government Data’, enabling the public to request – and receive – government datasets. This will radically increase the amount of government data released – and will provide a multi-billion pound boost to the UK economy. President Obama’s administration has already implemented a ‘Right to Data’ policy.

Legislating this "Right to Data" is vital for those who support an open government. That's why we support the passage into law of the POIA bill that has been introduced in both chambers of Congress here in the United States. Another proposal offered in the manifesto is also excellent:

Publishing online every item of central government and Quango^[1] spending over £25,000 – including every contract in full. This will create new jobs by opening up government procurement to more SMEs. We will also publish online every item of local government spending over £500 – including every contract in full. In addition, detailed information on the salaries of senior civil servants and local council officials will be published online.

The Tories have also promised to use open source software "as much as possible." Another proposal is to allow the public to comment on all legislation before it is debated. This includes the ability to rewrite and reject parts of the legislation.

Hague will say: "A public reading stage for new legislation will throw open the doors of parliament and enable the public to play a role in the legislative process." The party leadership believes its plan is an example of the "post-bureaucratic age" – a phrase first used by supporters of Bill Clinton, suggesting that in the age of the internet voters can exercise a greater influence on figures in authority.

I'm not sure how much the public input will be taken into consideration once a bill reaches the debating stage in Parliament or whether there is any binding nature to the revisions made by the public. While I'm supportive of providing time and space for people to give their input on legislation there are numerous problems with requiring that input to be adopted in the legislation. In general, there ought to be more input from the broader public in the legislative process. Depending on how this policy is structured it could be a very useful tool or an obstacle in the legislative process.

All of the other proposals are outstanding just as they are. Hopefully the new government follows through on their promises.

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¹ Quango is an acronym for a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization. For more information, click here.

What would happen here in the States if congressmen were revealed to have used their office allowances (Member's Representational Allowance) on XXX-rated tapes, digging a moat around their McMansion, or paying down a mortgage that had already been paid off? It wouldn't be too different from how the British are reacting right now. Members of Parliament (MPs) have been discovered using their personal allowances on the above mentioned items and more (in Britain, however, they do not have McMansions, they actually have castles) and the people are wicked angry. The scandal has already claimed the Speaker of the House of Commons and almost a dozen MPs, who have promised not to run for office again.

The Wikipedia page on the MP expense scandal provides a fairly detailed primer to introduce yourself to the peculiar purchasing peccadillos of Members of Parliament. In short, this all began when an intrepid indepedent journalist filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the expense account information. Parliament refused and filed numerous appeals, losing each time. Eventually, Parliament stated that they would release the expense information to the full public in July of 2009, but they would redact certain information -- that information turned out to be the juiciest stuff. Before that month could come (we are still in May), the Daily Telegraph obtained a full, unredacted list of MP expenses and began running stories exposing the various outrages that MPs expensed on the government dime. And it has all tumbled out of control from there.

In some ways, we've seen similar scandals here in the United States. In the early 1990s, there were two concurrent scandals related to the House Bank and the House Post Office. The House banking scandal involved lawmakers -- practically every single one of them -- kiting checks and going months with huge overdrafts on their accounts. The House Post Office scandal saw lawmakers purchasing stamps with their Member's Representational Allowance (MRA) and then trading them back to the Post Office for cash. The House banking scandal led to the conviction of four former lawmakers and a short scolding of 22 lawmakers by the House Ethics Committee. The House Post Office scandal led to the conviction of Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, one of the last of the congressional bulls, for laundering money through stamps, hiring "ghost" employees, and using MRA funds for personal uses.

Rostenkowski may be the most famous of House lawmakers to be taken down, like the MP expense scandal, by misuse of office funds, but he is certainly not the only one. In the 1970s, Rep. Wayne Hays, chairman of the House Adminsitration Committee, was felled after it was revealed that he kept his mistress, Elizabeth Ray, on his congressional payroll as a secretary despite, in her own words, that, "I can't type, I can't file, I can't even answer the phone!" During the Hays scandal coverage, a similar situation was uncovered with Rep. John Young .

Whether it is the MP scandal, Rostenkowski, or Hays, it is obvious the one thing that abets these kinds of abuses is a serious lack of transparency. Had all of these expense funds and allowances been accessible to the public any person would reason that they could not easily get away with abuse or misuse of the funds. Preempting actions by making the item of potential abuse transparent prevents the actions from being made.

Despite this obvious case for transparency in office funds, congressional "Statements of Expenditures" (how the MRA is spent by each individual office) are still no where to be found on the Internet. They are printed up in a series of books (really, a lot of books) and never placed near a computer, scanner, or anything that would allow you to see them, save a trip to the basement of the Longworth House Office Building.

Last year, Sunlight's Lisa Rosenberg endorsed the idea of online disclosure for the "Statements of Expenditures" writing, "[W]e would like to see the “Statements of Expenditures” required by law to be made public by the House and Senate to be put online by each of the legislative bodies. ... Failing to make disbursement reports available online gives them an air of secrecy that is largely unwarranted given the uncontroversial content of the reports."