In an unusually strongly worded letter, today Demand Progress and twelve civic organizations warned President Obama that his legacy on transparency issues is in danger. After identifying serious failings on the part of the administration — including its efforts to undermine FOIA legislation, federal spending transparency legislation, and the stalling of its ethics agenda — the organizations issued this warning: […]
The most powerful federal agency is one no one outside of Washington has heard of. It controls how agencies request money from Congress and spend it, oversees virtually all major rulemakings, controls multi-agency processes, sets federal information policy, and more. In some respects, it’s the tail that wags the White House dog. The agency is […]
How to make sense of the President’s spending proposal. Today is the day the White House sends the President’s budget to Congress. The proposal — dead on arrival — is an unintelligible mishmash of happy talk, legislative language, and columns of data. Buried in the pablum is something useful: explanations of what the government does. Imagine, if you can, a plain language […]
President Obama intends to raise at least $800 million from private donors — with hopes for $1 billion — for his presidential library, which will include a library, museum, office space, activity space, and probably a gift shop, too. It will be twice as costly as the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, with fundraising efforts almost entirely untouched by […]
Starting in 2011 and every two years afterward, the White House has drawn up an open government national action plan that is intended to contain specific, measurable open government commitments. The planning process is an outgrowth of the administration’s open government initiative, which kicked off in 2009 when agencies were first required to create open government plans, but […]
Last week, the Obama administration announced a new approach for FOIA: responses to requests will be published online immediately. This six month pilot program washes away agency practices of publishing FOIA responses online only after three requests for the same documents. While a seemingly trivial distinction, it has the real world effect of forcing agencies to publish responses online immediately, bypassing […]
In recent years there has been a lot of talk about opengov at the state, local and international levels, but when it comes to the federal government people just shake their heads and mutter. That is unfortunate, because a lot is happening at the federal level. Here are five areas where the federal government is […]
Debate is swirling in Washington about the sunset of the USA PATRIOT Act’s section 215, which the administration has twisted to support mass surveillance, but the focus of the conversation reinforces the narrative of national security hardliners. The question should not be whether to reauthorize section 215, which even its author says was never intended to allow mass surveillance. […]
Agencies should set up a process to proactively disclose information that is of interest to the public on an ongoing basis. To help prioritize, agencies should look at requests made through the Freedom of Information Act, via other request-based systems (i.e., specialized forms for a particular dataset or document), and information regularly disclosed by public […]
Disclosures about the National Security Administration’s (NSA) surveillance programs have prompted a discussion on whether the person who released that information, Edward Snowden, could properly be deemed a whistleblower. The word whistleblower is important because it frames how we think of him and what should become of him. By definition, whistleblowers are people who “expose wrongdoing within […]
The Department of Justice is withholding from online publication 39% (or 201) of its 509 Office of Legal Counsel opinions promulgated between 1998 and 2012, according to a Sunlight Foundation analysis. This apparently conflicts with agency guidance on releasing opinions to the public as well as best practices recommended by former Justice Department officials.