Technological Ineptitude in Congress is Just Sad

sadnessEarmarks has become the new four letter word in Congress of late, with most members rhetorically castigating earmarks while quietly slipping in earmark requests for funding in their districts to committee staff, in conference reports of bills, and anyplace else they can stick them.

As we reported in early January, the chairmen of the House and Senate appropriations committees - Rep. David Obey (D-WI) and Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI) - announced that all earmark requests would be required to be posted online on the requesting member's website in an attempt to try to increase the transparency of the earmarking process. Even though this was an improvement over past practices, it wasn't clear to us the disclosure system proposed by Obey and Inouye was the best way to do it.

Bill Alison over at the Sunlight Foundation has been following the ins and outs of the earmark disclosure changes in 2009 (and long before) and was one of the first to lay out in detail why the Obey/Inouye plan could end up being pretty much useless. Bill's prediction at the time turns out to have been just about spot on. He spent the past weekend reviewing the initial round of disclosures on House members' websites and has done an amazing job of compiling the hodge-podge of disclosure formats and locations. Bill has also posted some commentary on the compilation of disclosure methods he's put together and the scope of disclosure of earmark requests across House members' websites.

We work with Bill a lot and with the fine folks over at the Sunlight Foundation and both Bill and the Foundation do really fantastic work. I'm very impressed with Bill's efforts to fix the quite predictable problems with the earmark request disclosure structure Congress has adopted. He dedicated a good portion of his weekend in the pursuit of a more transparent government - certainly a noble cause. But the sad part about Bill's noble sacrifice is how unnecessary it really all is.

Creating an online database that all members of the House and Senate could use to enter, submit, and then publish to the public, earmark requests is startlingly easy. Not only would it be easy to build and better for public access and analysis, but it would be easier for the folks up on the Hill themselves! Such a system could save hundreds of hours of staff time, speed up the budget process, and improve congressional representatives ability to conduct oversight of federal spending and communicate with each other and with their constituents.

Usually when there is a self-serving reason for Congress to take action, they get it done right away. The fact that Congress is either too inept or too lazy to develop such a system is just plain sad.

Image by Flickr user Mr. Gunn used under a Creative Commons license.

back to Blog