Barack Obama, in one of his first steps in the shoes of the presidency, pledged a new era of transparency between the people and the government. Yet all we’ve been offered to date are Flickr picture websites showing the president throwing the football around, some rather creaky websites where we can follow the lack of economic recovery, and several rounds of lies by the president. What we all thought was transparency somehow turned out to be a MTV Cribs special.
The attempts to open websites are at least admirable, even if they were pathetically insubstantial. But the outright deception by Obama is hard to swallow. Lobbyists “won’t find a job in my White House” said the president, yet at least a dozen former lobbyists have found top jobs in his administration. The White House announced that “For too long, the American people have experienced a culture of secrecy in Washington, where information is locked up, taxpayer dollars disappear without a trace, and lobbyists wield undue influence.” Yet what was done to assuage this distant feeling between the people and political power? Not too much. The Associated Press reported in late November, according to White House visitors records, that “President Barack Obama’s top aides met frequently with lobbyists and health care industry heavyweights as his administration pieced together a national health care overhaul.”
Further, the blogs and data sites offered were not government-wide and therefore did not produce the lucidity we were promised. Nothing revolutionary was given, even when the future was promised. Well, those days are behind us (hopefully). On December 8 the White House announced its transparency policy through the system of Open Government Directive. This new project requires every federal agency to come up with “three high value data assets” and to release them in the next month and a half. Then, once those are released, these agencies have to start up an open government website to show their transparency endeavors. The Office of Management and Budget will then regularly monitor these agencies’ push to be more transparent and collaborative.
You may be saying, “We’ve heard these promises before. How do we know they’ll stick to them?” The White House is setting up an Open Government Dashboard as a barometer to see how transparent these agencies are. This Dashboard records and shows evaluations of how each agency is doing day to day on meeting the new transparency standards. If an agency is meeting or exceeding expectations, of if they are below the bar, people will know. On the websites citizens will be able to evaluate and recommend the newest transparency methods or practices so that it becomes a free flowing open communication system and not just a one-way dead end. That will cause a check and balance method to be in place.
However, problems do seem inevitable. The public definition of “high quality data sets” will most likely be different than the president's. We hope that sets of information that are easy to read and understand will be offered, but many worry that convoluted and ultra-complex statistics and data fields will end up being produced. Obama feels that the framework is in place for proper data and easy access to be the product of this initiative. He believes that transparency will make the government run more efficiently since they will now have millions of Americans looking over their shoulders. This initiative will hopefully streamline our government and make efficiency and spending more streamlined.
Revolution is a process and not a moment. The president has been given eleven months to show us a clear idea of his transparency vision. He has left most of us frustrated. Offering us pounds and pounds of websites that offer ounces of information, the White House has filibustered the people with empty data pools. As Szymborska said, “There is so much of Everything that Nothing is quite well concealed.” However, this initiative, if done properly, can work to fill the hollow handshakes between Obama’s early pledge and the people’s late disappointment. How much more time are we willing to give him though? That much is certainly transparent. He is most definitely on the clock.
