Today, the White House is issuing a new Executive Order on Open Data -- one that is significantly different from the open data policies that have come before it -- reflecting Sunlight's persistent call for stronger public listings of agency data, and demonstrating a new path forward for governments committing to open data. This Executive Order and the new policies that accompany it cover a lot of ground, building public reporting systems, adding new goals, creating new avenues for public participation, and laying out new principles for openness, much of which can be found in Sunlight's extensive Open Data Policy Guidelines, and the work of our friends and allies. Most importantly, though, the new policies take on one of the most important, trickiest questions that these policies face -- how can we reset the default to openness when there is so much data? How can we take on managing and releasing all the government's data, or as much as possible, without negotiating over every dataset the government has?
Continue readingWhy are efforts to regulate potentially hazardous plastics stalled?
In late 2009, when Lisa Jackson, at the time President Barack Obama's new head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), invoked a long-existing but never-before-used power to to create a list of "chemicals of concern," the administration appeared to be putting chemical companies on notice that it planned to be aggressive about regulating risks from exposure to the industry's product. Jackson's list included eight of the common plasticizers known as "phthalates" that have been shown to cause to reproductive abnormalities in animal studies and that have also been linked to health problems in humans. They are used ...
Continue readingOnly Congressional Pressure Can Drive Real Federal Spending Transparency Reforms
In a speech Wednesday, OMB controller Danny Werfel reportedly declared that improving the completeness and reliability of data on the... View Article
Continue readingFederal Spending Transparency Gets a Hearing, Not a Markup
Improved federal spending transparency was the topic of today’s Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee hearing, which focused on the... View Article
Continue readingOMB’s Commitment to Data Quality: Too Little, Too Late
Last week, OMB Controller Danny Werfel appeared on a panel discussion on potential Recovery Act applications for 2012. In the... View Article
Continue readingOMB Metrics on Contracting Data Should Be Public
This morning Federal News Radio reported on a new memo issued by the Office of Management and Budget regarding the... View Article
Continue readingClearspending for Contracting? Not Until Our Overdue FOIA Request Is Fulfilled
Last fall, we conducted a data quality analysis of the grants data present in USASpending.gov. We called the project [Clearspending](http://sunlightfoundation.com/clearspending).... View Article
Continue readingA reaction to Orszag’s Citigroup move
I think that Harold Pollack, professor at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, sums up a lot of feelings people are having about former Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag's move from government to the offices of Citigroup:
With the exception of the president himself, Orszag was arguably the most important economic policymaker in the entire Obama administration. Orszag’s OMB role, his fingertip familiarity with policy, the budget process, and congressional policymakers made him central to the stimulus and health reform efforts. He was President Obama’s right hand man for much of that work, and more besides. He accumulated the ultimate rolodex of people inside and outside government, within the United States, and perhaps globally, too. Continue reading
Peter Orszag and Obama’s ethics pledge
Peter Orszag, the former star director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during President Barack Obama's first two years, is said to be in talks to join Citigroup. According to the Financial Times, "People familiar with the situation said Mr Orszag, who left the White House team in July, was likely to be offered a position dealing with clients and top government officials rather than running a business." If Orszag were to take such a position it would likely be complicated by an Executive Order signed by President Obama on his first full day in office.
Continue readingOMB struggles to track $800 billion IT spending by government
IT Dashboard attempts to tracks billions of dollars spent by the federal government on information technology, but the website itself has out of date information and inaccurate ratings on the investment risks of some agency projects.
Federal investments for IT improvements have a tendency to run over budget, or in the worst of scenarios, fail to meet any projected goals. While the private sector has seen blinding technological advancement in a relatively short time, federal agencies have struggled to keep up, even with a government-wide IT budget of $79.5 billion for fiscal 2011.
With so much need for technology ...
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