OpenGov Voices: Bringing transparency to earmarks buried in the budget by Matthew Heston, Madian Khabsa, Vrushank Vora, Ellery Wulczyn and Joe Walsh.
From the post:
Last week, President Obama kicked off the fiscal year 2016 budget cycle by unveiling his $3.99 trillion budget proposal. Congress has the next eight months to write the final version, leaving plenty of time for individual senators and representatives, state and local governments, corporate lobbyists, bureaucrats, citizens groups, think tanks and other political groups to prod and cajole for changes. The final bill will differ from Obama’s draft in major and minor ways, and it won’t always be clear how those changes came about. Congress will reveal many of its budget decisions after voting on the budget, if at all.
We spent this past summer with the Data Science for Social Good program trying to bring transparency to this process. We focused on earmarks – budget allocations to specific people, places or projects – because they are “the best known, most notorious, and most misunderstood aspect of the congressional budgetary process” — yet remain tedious and time-consuming to find. Our goal: to train computers to extract all the earmarks from the hundreds of pages of mind-numbing legalese and numbers found in each budget.
Watchdog groups such as Citizens Against Government Waste and Taxpayers for Common Sense have used armies of human readers to sift through budget documents, looking for earmarks. The White House Office of Management and Budget enlisted help from every federal department and agency, and the process still took three months. In comparison, our software is free and transparent and generates similar results in only 15 minutes. We used the software to construct the first publicly available database of earmarks that covers every year back to 1995.
Despite our success, we barely scratched the surface of the budget. Not only do earmarks comprise a small portion of federal spending but senators and representatives who want to hide the money they budget for friends and allies have several ways to do it:
I was checking the Sunlight Foundation Blog for any updated information on the soon to be released indexes of federal data holdings when I encountered this jewel on earmarks.
Important to read/support because:
- By dramatically reducing the human time investment to find earmarks, it frees up that time to be spent gathering deeper information about each earmark
- It represents a major step forward in the ability to discover relationships between players in the data (what the NSA wants to do but with a rationally chosen data set).
- It will educate you on earmarks and their hiding places.
- It is an inspirational example of how darkness can be replaced with transparency, some of it anyway.
Will transparency reduce earmarks? I rather doubt it because a sense of shame doesn’t seem to motivate elected and appointed officials.
What transparency can do is create a more level playing field for those who want to buy government access and benefits.
For example, if I knew what it cost to have the following exemption in the FOIA:
Exemption 9: Geological information on wells.
it might be possible to raise enough funds to purchase the deletion of:
Exemption 5: Information that concerns communications within or between agencies which are protected by legal privileges, that include but are not limited to:
4 Deliberative Process Privilege
Which is where some staffers hide their negotiations with former staffers as they prepare to exit the government.
I don’t know that matching what Big Oil paid for the geological information on wells exemption would be enough but it would set a baseline for what it takes to start the conversation.
I say “Big Oil paid…” assuming that most of us don’t equate matters of national security with geological information. Do you have another explanation for such an offbeat provision?
If government is (and I think it is) for sale, then let’s open up the bidding process.