Until Sept. 11, 2001, a little-known but indispensible annual report by the Defense Department gave the public a window into whether the tens of billions of taxpayer dollars spent each year led to weapons that work. Then, the reports by the Pentagons director of Operational Test and Evaluation were pulled from the website.
In the case of this specific report, the thinking was, why advertise that our weapons dont work, said Tom Christie, who was director of the test office from July 2001 through January 2005. The office was created by Congress to examine if weapons worked as well and ...
GSA Tracks Contractors Work in Database Off-Limits to Public
Given the half-trillion dollars spent on federal contracting every year, its comforting to know that the U.S. government has a massive database that tracks contractors past performance.
Too bad it cant be tapped by the public. Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), says this is like not allowing a parent to see their childs report card.
The Past Performance Information Retrieval System (PPIRS) is managed by the General Services Administration.
According to the GSA, the database aggregates a vast amount of information from disparate sources into ratings that can be used to quickly distinguish ...
Ten Million CIA Documents Require In-Person Visit
The Central Intelligence Agency maintains more than 10 million pages of declassified, post-World War II documents, covering everything from the birth of the CIA to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The documents are publicly available - assuming one is willing to drive to the National Archives complex in College Park, Maryland, sit at one of four computer terminals in the library, and print dozens, hundreds, or thousands of pages.
Steven Aftergood, who runs the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, argues that the documents, accessible through the CIA Records Search Tool (CREST), should simply be put ...
FDA Lags USDA in Accessible Food Safety Data
Salmonella in peanut butter. E. coli in cookie dough. Tainted Serrano peppers. Fetid Chinese seafood. All these recent problems fell within the domain of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which shares food inspection responsibilities with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The USDA inspects meat, poultry and some egg products while the FDA monitors everything else. Food-safety advocates say the USDA is more forthcoming about its inspection activities and are prodding the FDA to do better.
Almost two years ago, Washington, D.C.-based Food & Water Watch filed a lawsuit against the FDA after it refused to release ...
OSHA Workplace Samples: Millions of Records Out of Reach
An estimated 49,000 Americans die prematurely of work-related exposures to toxic substances every year. Mindful of this sad fact, and having served as director of health standards for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Dr. Adam Finkel filed a Freedom of Information Act request with OSHA in 2005, seeking the results of millions of air and wipe samples taken at workplaces around the country. Finkel planned to analyze the data and eventually post it on the Web in a format that would allow users to learn the types and quantities of compounds to which they or others may have ...
Continue readingThe Data Mine Launched by The Center for Public Integrity and Sunlight Foundation
President Obama's Open Government Initiative urges federal agencies to make high-value data publicly available at www.data.gov. But agencies too often are reluctant to release information, or choose to release it in a hard-to-use format. Today, the Center for Public Integrity, in partnership with the Sunlight Foundation, launches The Data Mine, an online series that will highlight inaccessible or poorly presented information from the federal government. From the CIA to the CDC, well be looking at data that needs to be public, with regular posts on the Center's and Sunlight's websites. Well describe each data set ...
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