Will the Administration Make a Run at Transparency?

Last fall, I reported that the Obama administration lagged the House of Representatives on transparency. The conclusion was driven by a study of the quality of data publication regarding key elements of budgeting, appropriating, spending, and the legislative process. (Along with monitoring progress in these area, we've been producing data to show that it can be done, to produce a cadre of users, and to simply deliver government transparency at a less plodding pace.)

There are signs that the administration may make a run at improving its transparency record. Buried deep in the FY 2014 budget justification for the Treasury Department's Bureau of the Fiscal Service, it says that funds will support "government-wide data standardization efforts to increase accuracy and transparency of Federal financial reporting." That means the public may get better access to where the money goes -- outlays -- in formats that permit computer-aided oversight.

In parallel, a Performance.gov effort called the Federal Program Inventory says that, in May of 2014, it will publish a Unique Federal Program Inventory number (pg. 4-5) for each federal program, along with agency IDs and bureau IDs. This may be the machine-readable federal government organization chart whose non-existence I have lamented for some time.

If this sounds jargon-y, you're normal. Think of federal spending as happening on a remote jungle island, where all the inhabitants speak their own language. On Federal Spending Island, no visitor from the U.S. mainland can understand where things are there, or who is saying what to whom.

True machine-readable data will turn Federal Spending Island into a place where English is spoken, or at least a some kind of Federal Spending-English dialect that makes the movement of our tax dollars easier to track.