When Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act) in early 2009, the legislation's transparency provisions represented a significant step forward for government openness. While select agencies and programs have been using recipient reporting for years, the Recovery Act represented the first time such reporting had been attempted across all agencies at once and presented to the public online. Thus, bumps in the road toward transparency and accountability, including data quality problems, were inevitable. A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report shows that while there are fewer reporting errors as time passes, there is still room for improvement in both data quality and implementation details.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has taken a significant step toward making more chemical health and safety information available to the public even as trade secrets claims continue to conceal such information elsewhere. A new EPA policy will reject most industry claims that chemical identities included in health and safety studies are trade secrets. Meanwhile, the oil and gas industry continues to use trade secrets privileges to thwart attempts to disclose chemical information related to the BP oil spill and controversial natural gas drilling operations.
The Obama administration recently caused considerable controversy when it sent 
State legislators across the nation are introducing campaign finance legislation to mitigate the impact of the