In a positive sign for transparency advocates everywhere, on Monday the Wall Street Journal reported that House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA) is expressing support for Congressman Ron Paul's (R-TX) bill authorizing the Government Accountability Office to audit the Federal Reserve. While it may seem to be the most unholy of unions (the gay liberal from Massachusetts partnering with the archconservative from Texas), this is one of those rare policy areas where almost every politician can agree.

A glitch on the federally run Regulations.gov website prevented more than 100 users from successfully submitting comments to several rulemaking agencies, according to Nextgov.com reporter Aliya Sternstein. Unfortunately, even though the service disruption occurred in late July, the problem is far from resolved.

Over the next few months, as the October 10 recipient reporting deadline approaches, expect to see many more articles such as this one out of New York City. Apparently, the city is having some problems with estimating how many jobs are being created through teh Recovery Act. With the Office of Management and Budget leaving it up to recipients to estimate/guess how many jobs are being created, such articles are going to be inevitable. The question is whether or not OMB decides to do anything about it, and rework the guidlines for Recovery Act job estimation. A good place to start? Introducing a more effective full-time equivalent standard, or the number of hours that constitute a full-time job. Right now, states can decide on their own what constitutes a full-time job, which makes it difficult to compare projects across state lines. Standardizing the full-time equivalent across the country would be a great first step towards taking the guesswork out of job estimation.

Image by Flickr user sensesmaybenumbed used under a Creative Commons license.

On Aug. 25, The National Security Archive published an online database of over 83,000 federal government documents related to the detention and interrogation of individuals by the United States during the “global war on terror” as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  This database serves as a central point of access for documents obtained through whistleblowers, litigation, and the Freedom of Information Act.