President Obama has made Internet-enabled government transparency a cornerstone of his administration, but there hasn’t been much talk about the information technology needed to pull it off.
Well, the time has come. The White House’s vision for transparency is clouded with numerous technological hurdles, and agencies right now are making decisions that will determine whether this effort makes government more open or becomes another costly federal IT blunder.
The feds have entered the big leagues of data complexity with the February launch of Recovery.gov, the Website that promises to let citizens track most of the $787 billion in economic stimulus spending authorized in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, signed by the President in February.
The promise is to let people track stimulus funds beyond federal agencies down to the states and cities, and even to the contractors and nonprofits, presenting data that could involve hundreds of thousands of different sources. Today, agencies email spreadsheets that reveal only the first step of fund distribution (typically to a large federal program) and that then get posted. It’s a clumsy, stopgap approach that doesn’t offer much insight and won’t scale when, in July, the first recipients of funds – typically, cities and states – are supposed to begin reporting to the feds on contractors and nonprofits receiving stimulus money.
For a glimpse of the technical work Recovery.gov will require, look at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is administering $13.6 billion in stimulus funds. Beginning in July, if HUD makes a $2 million block grant to New York City, which then contracts with a nonprofit developer to rehabilitate a housing project, New York must report to the Department on which nonprofit got the grant and how the funds are being used, then regularly update the project’s status and estimate how many jobs it creates.
But HUD must break down its own data silos. Nine of the department’s programs relate to Recovery.gov. HUD is writing requirements for the technologies it needs in order to extract data from the myriad data stores and applications where it resides, and to create mashups that present the data in a way the public can easily view and search.
Recovery.gov is forcing HUD “to think more holistically across our programs,” says Peter Grace, special assistant to HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan. HUD expects to use XML-based data feeds – it’s debating RSS or Atom formats – to update Recovery.gov with its data. What HUD doesn’t want to do is add another layer of infrastructure, such as a data warehouse just to combine HUD silos into one that serves Recovery.gov.
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— Mary Hayes Weier
Next Page: Much at Stake
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