Roll Call reports that House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer believes Rep. Norm Dicks will replace the late John Murtha as chair of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. Dicks numbers the now-defunct PMA Group as his second-largest career donor; David Heath, then of the Seattle Times, reported on Dicks' relationship to the firm that closed its doors in the midst of a federal investigation (ongoing) into its campaign contributions to members of Congress who provided earmarks for its clients. In his 2009 report, Heath wrote:
In the past two years, Dicks pushed for nine earmarks worth $20 million for PMA clients. Those ...Continue reading
White House visitor logs are short on descriptions
The White House released their most recent visitor logs yesterday but except for public events or group tours, it sheds little light on why the President or White House officials met with particular individuals. Though the logs include a column for descriptions of the meetings, for most entries it was left blank.
For instance, about three-quarters of the meetings held by the President include no details about what was discussed or why the meeting was called. The only way to find out is by perusing the names of the visitors and trying to infer, from the identity of the visitor ...
My dog ate my stimulus: Best of Recovery recipients’ excuses
The Obama administration has made an unprecedented effort to use technology to publicly chronicle the flow of massive amounts of stimulus money, but government is slow to adapt, and not all of those who do business with it are so tech-savvy.
Inaccuracies in Recovery.gov data, from too-high job creation numbers to dollar amounts for awards given as "999999999" (probably as a placeholder) to reams of blank fields, make it difficult to assess how well or poorly the stimulus is doing. Many of those problems can be laid at the feet of those providing the information: the recipients of grants ...
Obama asks Congress for real earmark disclosure
Right now, three years after Congress began trying to make earmarks transparent, I still have to look in three different places if I want to know how much money Rep. James Moran, D-Va., secured for particular beneficiaries in the Defense appropriations act. I have to read a sideways-posted PDF looking for Moran's requests (like the $1 million for the Ground Combat System Knowledge Center and Technical Inspection Data Capture), and match that project name to one of two enormous PDF files (the bigger is 75 MB) containing earmark disclosure letters from members of Congress (right-side up, but not searchable ...
Continue readingOGD: Commerce repackages old data and offers broken links
To comply with the Open Government Directive, the Commerce Department released four high value datasets that require considerable technical sophistication on the part of users--and patience. Some of the files are so large and cumbersome they're very difficult to open and use; others require a great deal of explanation--and you can currently only find those explanations by digging through the agency's site. Still other entries feature broken links or only contain a fraction of the information described on Data.gov. The Commerce Department says they're working on all of these problems, so hopefully we'll see an ...
Continue readingMust Read: NYT Series on Radiation Poisoning
A fascinating series on new radiation treatments for cancer patients by New York Times reporter Walt Bogdanich caught my eye for two reasons.
First, because he bases his reporting--showing that there have been hundreds of people injured, some fatally, by these new technologies, even as so many are also saved--in part by wresting accident report and other records from federal, state, and city government sources. In other words, via government data.
And second, because the week before his first story appeared, my mother underwent such treatment for a benign brain tumor, a meningioma, that was growing back nearly 15 years ...
OGD: USAID’s missing data
One of USAID's high value data sets on U.S. economic and military assistance aka the Greenbook cannot be accessed on data.gov/ogd. Unfortunately, the source of the broken link is coming from the USAID website.
Continue readingOGD: Defense releases what it already releases
To comply with the Open Government Directive, the Defense Department designated three high-value datasets last week, among them a listing of those requesting more transparency from the Pentagon. DoD released details on the 4,000 Freedom of Information requests it has received as well as datasets with information on service members gender and race, U.S. state, and marriage statistics.
Interestingly, the three datasets that Defense said were its high value releases, fulfilling a requirement of the first stage of the directive, were not marked as agency-reported high-value dataset (with an asterisk) on Data.gov. This seems like a small ...
OGD: Department of the Interior
Two of the other data sets released Friday, probably the ones most useful to the public, the volunteer opportunities and the recreation data sets are already available online here and here in a better and usable format compared to the XML downloads on data.gov.
Continue readingSurveying the first fruits of the open government directive
We're still surveying those high value data sets released as part of the open government directive--there are hundreds of files to sift through, which is obviously a good thing. But while we don't have a final analysis done, a few trends are becoming apparent.
The high value data sets consist, overwhelmingly, of information that's already been released elsewhere. In many cases, at least in the raw data catalog, the information is provided as, well, raw data. For example, the Dept. of Transportation released its Uniform Tire Quality Grading System, which provides various ratings on the durability ...
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