One year ago, the U.S. government launched Data.gov, a central plank in its Open Government initiative to make it easier for the public to find and use official datasets. The site has grown from an initial 47 databases to more than 272,000, and attracted nearly 100 million hits. It inspired eight American cities – including San Francisco and New York City – eight states, and six other nations to launch similar sites of their own. By most metrics, the project has been a success.
But government transparency advocates say the site has plenty of room for improvement. Gabriela Schneider ...
Free repository offers copies of PACER federal court records
Want to see the federal indictment of a mortgage fraudster? You got it. Need the docket for a U.S. appeals court case? It’s yours. All with the click of a mouse — and your 16-digit credit card number.
For a price, federal court filings have been available via the Internet through Public Access to Electronic Court Records (PACER) system since the early 1990s. But its fee of 8 cents per page is too steep for public documents, critics say.
Steve Schultze, associate director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, says public access to federal courts ...
Farm credit regulator won’t disclose enforcement actions against banks
As Congress negotiates a final version of financial reform, one group of lenders has already won a blanket carve out from increased bank regulation — the more than 90 banks and associations of the Farm Credit System, a government-sponsored enterprise that dates back to 1916. The system, which has $30.8 billion in capital, includes about 90 agricultural credit associations that are cooperatively owned, plus five wholesale lending banks.
Rural farm lenders didn’t cause the subprime crisis, and their business practices are above board, says Ken Auer, president of the Farm Credit Council, an association that represents Farm Credit System ...
Quest for EPA documents reveal deliberate misclassification by agency staff
For the past four years, as executive director of Citizen Action New Mexico, Dave McCoy has been hounding the local and federal government for documents.
McCoy alleges that Sandia National Laboratory’s Mixed Waste Landfill monitoring wells are mismanaged by the New Mexico Environment Department, and that the public water supply is in danger of contamination.
He requested documents from an EPA regional office that assessed the state’s oversight of the landfill and after getting little information, complained to the EPA’s inspector general. The watchdog concluded in an April report that some officials deliberately failed to document management ...
Coast guard database makes oil spill penalties nearly impossible to track
The U.S. government has investigated potentially thousands of BP leaks, spills and other incidents but the information is stored in a Coast Guard database that keeps key details such as investigative findings and penalties out of the public’s reach.
More than 8,000 incident reports about BP’s U.S. spills, emissions, and leaks of oil and chemicals have been filed with the National Response Center during the past decade. They range from minor clumsiness such as a tipped drum of jet fuel to the deadly April 21 explosion on BP’s Gulf of Mexico rig. The center ...
Critics say federal student privacy law misused by colleges
Reports of NCAA football violations, lists of who gets free tickets to big games, and disciplinary records of students found responsible for sexual assault are among the records that U.S. colleges and universities have refused to release, citing a federal student privacy law. Last month, a Wyoming community college even went to court to stop a local newspaper from publishing a leaked internal report about a trip the college president took to Costa Rica.
In these examples and many others, the colleges said their hands were tied because of the need to abide by the Family Educational Rights and ...
USDA pulls plug on some farm subsidy data
Identifying some individuals who receive generous federal crop subsidies without going anywhere near a farm has gotten trickier. The Department of Agriculture, which paid $15.4 billion in 2009 subsidies, is no longer centralizing the data that made it easier to pinpoint individuals who receive farm payments through their affiliation in farming corporations, co-ops and other types of business partnerships.
“Recipients can hide behind ‘paper farms’ and reap thousands of dollars in a taxpayers program without being accountable for it,” said Don Carr, a spokesman for the Environmental Working Group (EWG).
EWG has used USDA information to put together a ...
Most Drug Trial Results Analyzed by FDA Hidden From View
Before a new drug finds its place on pharmacy shelves or a new device lands in the hands of a surgeon, it goes through a long and complex approval process by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
A new drug, for instance, goes through laboratory testing and animal studies before the drugmaker submits an application to FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. If it gets the agency’s green light, then the human clinical trials begin, starting with a small number of participants at initial phases and growing to hundreds if not thousands of participants in the ...
Lobbying data is public but not reliably searchable
The 1995 Lobbying Disclosure Act, requires all lobbyists to file reports with the Clerk of the House of Representatives and Secretary of the Senate and that those two offices “maximize public access” to the documents through “computerized systems.” But the searchable database of every filing by registered federal lobbyists, made available through the Senate’s Office of Public Records, has a major problem: its search engine doesn’t work correctly.
One issue is reliability — searches by a wide array of Center reporters have frequently yielded false negatives or been stymied by system outages. In fact, a registrant search for “American ...
More transparency sought from White House’s OMB in regulation reviews
Under President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, the White House Office of Management and Budget became known as the place where promising new regulations died behind closed doors. So opaque was the OMB review process that a research and advocacy group called OMB Watch materialized in 1983 to “lift the veil of secrecy.”
Ten years later, unhappy with the lack of transparency, President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12866, which sought to “restore the integrity and legitimacy of regulatory review and oversight [and] make the process more accessible and open to the public.”
Seventeen years after that, the question ...
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