Back when the Recovery Board released the Recovery.gov redesign contract, many in the transparency community were upset at the extent to which the General Services Administration redacted the contract. While we certainly expected General Services Administration (GSA) - the agency which conducts most of the federal government's procurement - to redact proprietary information, the document had massive swaths blacked out, including such ridiculous sections as the number of peak users and one part titled "Introduction."

On the basis of such sections, we, at the same time as ProPublica, filed a Freedom of Information Act request with GSA, hoping to see the unredacted version of the contract. Unfortunately, both our request and ProPublica's were rejected. This past week, we formally appealed the decision, and we hope that GSA will reconsider its decision to black out broad swathes of the Smartronix contact.

We strongly believe that the public has a right to as much information as possible, especially when it comes to government contracting. Actions such as our FOIA appeal help us achieve that goal. We are pleased that GSA, prodded by the Recovery Board, released portions of the contract in the first place, but the contract is not as useful when a vast majority of its information is blocked from view.

It is in this vein that we also filed FOIA requests with several other agencies seeking information related to FederalReporting.gov, the website on which Recovery Act recipients will file their spending reports; CDX, a program used by FederalReporting.gov to manipulate report data; and the original Recovery.gov website. We believe the information in these contracts will allow watchdogs, the news media, and private citizens to piece together the processes by which information on hundreds of billions of dollars of federal spending will be made public.

NextGov's write up of OMB Watch's FOIA appeal is here, and Propublica's article is here. Also, if you really enjoy FOIA appeals, you can read our entire appeal letter here.

Image by Flickr user screenshots3. Used under a Creative Commons license.