They are often treated as interchangeable, but the first is about revealing the deliberations, management, and results of government, and the second is general availability of data that the government has produced, covering any subject matter.
More importantly, the transparency community has failed to articulate what it wants. The quality of government data publication by these measures is low. We are not waiting for the government to produce good data. At the Cato Institute, we have begun producing data ourselves, starting with legislation that we are marking up with enhanced, more revealing XML code. Our efforts are hampered by the unavailability of fundamental building blocks of transparency, such as unique identifiers for all the organizational units of the federal government.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today. In my role there, I study the unique problems in adapting law and policy to the information age, issues such as privacy, intellectual property, telecommunications, cybersecurity, counterterrorism, and government transparency.
For more than four years, I have been researching, writing on, and promoting government transparency at Cato. For more than a dozen years, I have labored to provide transparency directly through a Web site I run called.
But the many actors and interests in the American public will be best served by looking at the federal government through many lenses—more and different lenses than any of us can anticipate or predict. Thus, I recommend that you focus your transparency efforts not on Web sites or other projects that interpret government data for the public. Delivering good data to the public is no simple task, but the barriers are institutional and not technical.
President Obama deserves credit for lighting a fire under the government transparency movement in his first campaign and in the first half of his first term. To roars of approval in , he sought the presidency making various promises that cluster around more open, accessible government. In retrospect, the prediction of unparalleled transparency was incautiously optimistic. My own case illustrates. That agreement has held. It is true that the Obama administration has not shone as brightly on transparency as the president promised it would.
According to the open government memorandum:. Without more restraint than that, public choice economics predicts that the agencies will choose the data feeds with the greatest likelihood of increasing their discretionary budgets or the least likelihood of shrinking them. In a grading of the data sets, I found that most failed to expose the deliberations, management, and results of the agencies. Instead, they provided data about the things they did or oversaw.
The agencies, and the transparency project, were diverting from open government to open government data. Data about these things are what will make for a more open, more transparent government. Everything else, while entirely welcome, is just open government data. Deliberations, management, and results are complex processes, so it is important to be aware of another, more technical level on which the transparency project got bogged down.
The transparency community did not meet public demand for, and political offer of, government transparency with a clear articulation of what produces it. Believing this to be the problem, I embarked in on a mission to learn what data publication practices will produce government transparency. I summarized them briefly as follows:. The first, authoritative sourcing, means producing data as near to its origination as possible—and promptly—so that the public uniformly comes to rely on the best sources of data.
The second, availability, is another set of practices that ensure consistency and confidence in data. Following these data practices does not produce instant transparency.
Users of data throughout the society would have to learn to rely on governmental data sources. Transparency, I wrote,. American society will take some time to make use of more transparent data once better practices are in place. There are already thriving communities of researchers, journalists, and software developers using unofficial repositories of government data. If they can do good work with incomplete and imperfect data, they will do even better work with rich, complete data issued promptly by authoritative sources.
Our efforts have not ceased with describing how the government can publish data to foster transparency. Starting in January , the Cato Institute began working with a wide variety of groups and advisers to "model" governmental processes as data and then to prescribe how this data should be published. Our November report, "Grading the Government's Data Publication Practices" 14 part of which is attached to my testimony as Appendix II examined how well the government publishes data reflecting legislative process and the budgeting, appropriating, and spending processes.
Having broken down each element of these processes, we polled the community of government data users to determine how well that data is produced, and we issued letter grades.
The grades were generally poor, and my assessment mine alone, not endorsed by other participants in our process was that the House has taken a slight lead on government transparency, showing good progress with the small part of government it directly controls. The Obama administration, having made extravagant promises, lags the House by comparison.
Since the release of the report, more signs of progress have come from the House, including forthcoming publication of committee votes, for example. Having assessed the publication practices that we believe will foster transparency, and having graded the government's publication practices in key areas, we are not waiting for good data to materialize.
We have begun producing the data ourselves. He was named president of Princeton University, became president of the American Political Science Association, was elected governor of New Jersey, and finally was elected the twenty-eighth president of the United States in It was through his educational training and vocational experiences that Wilson began to identify the need for a public administration discipline.
He felt it was getting harder to run a constitutional government than to actually frame one. Therefore, administrative activities should be devoid of political manipulations. Wilson advocated separating politics from administration by three key means: making comparative analyses of public and private organizations, improving efficiency with business-like practices, and increasing effectiveness through management and training.
Rather, the bureaucracy should act with a sense of vigor to understand and appreciate public opinion. Still, Wilson acknowledged that the separation of politics from administration was an ideal and not necessarily an achievable reality. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a time of great bureaucratic growth in the United States: The Interstate Commerce Commission was established in , the Federal Reserve Board in , the Federal Trade Commission in , and the Federal Power Commission in With the onset of the Great Depression in , the United States faced record levels of unemployment and the associated fall into poverty, food shortages, and general desperation.
When the Republican president and Congress were not seen as moving aggressively enough to fix the situation, the Democrats won the election in overwhelming fashion. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the U. In the s, the federal bureaucracy grew with the addition of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to protect and regulate U. Additional programs and institutions emerged with the Social Security Administration in and then, during World War II, various wartime boards and agencies.
By , approximately , U. Johnson in the s, that number reached 2. Volunteers in Service to America was a type of domestic Peace Corps intended to relieve the effects of poverty. Johnson also directed more funding to public education, created Medicare as a national insurance program for the elderly, and raised standards for consumer products.
All of these new programs required bureaucrats to run them, and the national bureaucracy naturally ballooned. Its size became a rallying cry for conservatives, who eventually elected Ronald Reagan president for the express purpose of reducing the bureaucracy. While Reagan was able to work with Congress to reduce some aspects of the federal bureaucracy, he contributed to its expansion in other ways, particularly in his efforts to fight the Cold War.
The two periods of increased bureaucratic growth in the United States, the s and the s, accomplished far more than expanding the size of government. They transformed politics in ways that continue to shape political debate today.
While the bureaucracies created in these two periods served important purposes, many at that time and even now argue that the expansion came with unacceptable costs, particularly economic costs. The common argument that bureaucratic regulation smothers capitalist innovation was especially powerful in the Cold War environment of the s, 70s, and 80s. But as long as voters felt they were benefiting from the bureaucratic expansion, as they typically did, the political winds supported continued growth.
As seen in this photograph, President Ronald Reagan frequently and intentionally dressed in casual clothing to symbolize his distance from the government machinery he loved to criticize. In the s, however, Germany and Japan were thriving economies in positions to compete with U. This competition, combined with technological advances and the beginnings of computerization, began to eat away at American prosperity. Factories began to close, wages began to stagnate, inflation climbed, and the future seemed a little less bright.
In this environment, tax-paying workers were less likely to support generous welfare programs designed to end poverty. They felt these bureaucratic programs were adding to their misery in order to support unknown others. When he ran again four years later, his criticism of bureaucratic waste in Washington carried him to a landslide victory. While it is debatable whether Reagan actually reduced the size of government, he continued to wield rhetoric about bureaucratic waste to great political advantage.
Why might people be more sympathetic to bureaucratic growth during periods of prosperity? In what way do modern politicians continue to stir up popular animosity against bureaucracy to political advantage?
Is it effective? Why or why not? During the post-Jacksonian era of the nineteenth century, the common charge against the bureaucracy was that it was overly political and corrupt. This changed in the s as the United States began to create a modern civil service. The civil service grew once again in Franklin D. The most recent criticisms of the federal bureaucracy, notably under Ronald Reagan, emerged following the second great expansion of the federal government under Lyndon B Johnson in the s.
Congress passed the Pendleton Act in , which created a system for hiring federal workers based on qualifications rather than political allegiance; employees were also protected from losing their jobs when the administration changed.
To encourage a nonpartisan bureaucracy, the Hatch Act prohibited federal workers from running for office or actively campaigning for other candidates. Such limitations on civil liberties are considered by many the price that has to be paid for a professional, nonpolitical bureaucracy.
During the s, the size of the federal bureaucracy mushroomed due to President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal agencies. Out of these agencies' programs grew the concept of the welfare state, under which the federal government rather than individuals, municipalities, or the states assumes the major responsibility for the well-being of the people.
As with the New Deal, many Great Society programs became a permanent part of the federal bureaucracy. The idea of the government seeing to the needs of its citizens carried on into the s: The Environmental Protection Agency EPA was created by the Nixon administration, the new Occupational Safety and Health Administration OSHA in the Labor Department transformed the workplace for most Americans, and new cabinet departments were established.
The federal bureaucracy deals with more than social and economic policies. A large number of agencies are responsible for protecting the American people from both foreign and domestic dangers.
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