"Transparency" has become one of the big buzzwords both on Capitol Hill and the federal government. Recently, some good government groups sat down to assess the state of transparency in the two-month old Obama Administration.
The discussion took place last Monday at the American University's Washington College of Law during its Freedom of Information Day Celebration, co-sponsored by the Coalition on Government Secrecy.
Gary Bass, who heads up the group "OMB Watch", says with so much money headed out the door to states and localities, transparency becomes more important than ever, and harder to accomplish.
The fact that the Recovery.gov (website) is getting such traffic tells us that people want to watch where their money is going. But right now, the system doesn't give us the details it needs. Significant portions of the recovery act are being distributed by states and localities. And, as we all know, the further and further money goes from Washington, it gets harder and harder for the transparency to occur.
Greg Leroy is executive director of Good Jobs First, a centralized web portal designed to pull together state and local data on the stimulus, particularly job creation.
The current guidance from OMB (the Office of Management and Budget) basically allows money to disappear after it changes hands twice. So, if it were to go from the Commerce Department, to a state agency program, it would disappear, and there would be no further reporting in the issue. If it were to go to a state agency, and then a contractor, then the Recovery Act transparency would end. You wouldn't see anything at the sub-contractor level, and we know that subcontractors tend to employ the largest number of people.
Leroy went on to outline a detailed memo explaining his group's preferred data structure for financial reporting for the recovery.gov database. While he wants everyone down to the contractor level to report monthly on the outcome of spending stimulus money, he does not want states and localities handling the reporting function. Rather, he says individual localities and companies should be required to file directly with one entity here in Washington, with that information then displayed on recovery.gov.
In recent weeks, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the Obama Administration have come in for criticism of the situation surrounding the bonuses handed out by firms like AIG which have taken government bailouts.
But Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, says that if not for the good government groups and one conservative think-tank, the previous administration might have quietly gotten away with blocked an important part of transparency in the TARP. She says it took place last December, around a meeting at OMB Watch.
The Heritage Foundation said "Have you seen what (former Treasury Secretary) Paulson just put out? This bailout has a provision that says none of the provisions in this bailout will be subject to review, either administrative or otherwise."
Brian went on to say that 77 "good government groups" leaped into action after hearing the Heritage Foundation report. Within 24 hours, they wrote a joint letter, and petitioned Congress to make changes in the economic recovery effort, including the creation of "SIGTARP", a special inspector general for the banking recovery plan, and a Congressional oversight panel.
Brian also gives Congress a lot of the credit for demanding accountability for the economic recovery program. She talks about an instance where Geithner, was recently called on the carpet by a Senator from Washington State.
(Senator) Maria Cantwell was asking why we had to bail out AIG,and where the money went. And repeatedly, his reply was, "That was a decision made by your government." And that was just not good enough! POGO's Brian also told the AU FOI conference that with so much money heading for states and localities, it is more important than ever that citizens become the "boots on the ground" for the stimulus program. Their vehicle for doing that: the Recovery, Accountability Transparency Board's recovery.gov website still being developed by director Earl Devaney.------
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American University - Collaboration on Government Secrecy (Washington College of Law)
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