A Call for Better E-Gov

A senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University has characterized federal agencies’ efforts to post data and documents online as a perfunctory exercise and calls for legislation to force agencies to make more information available and searchable online. That way, public policy can be improved because more people can access and manipulate government information.

Jerry Brito, in his working paper “Hack, Mash & Peer: Crowdsourcing Government Transparency,” writes:

Unfortunately, many of the statutory requirements for disclosure do not take Internet technology into account. For example, the 1978 Ethics in Government Act requires the disclosure of financial information -- including the source, type, and amount of income -- by many federal employees, elected officials, and candidates for office, including the president and vice president, and members of Congress. The act further requires that all filings be available to the public. One might imagine, then, that every representative or senator’s information would be just a Web search away, but one would be wrong.

He adds that, “Even when public information is available online, it is often not available in an easily accessible form. If data is difficult to search for and find, the effect might be the same as if it were not online.”

Brito attributes the lack of online, searchable information to “bureaucratic inertia” and to “no incentive, and often a disincentive, to make public information easily accessible.”

Brito calls for agencies to make information “meaningfully publicly available and in today’s day and age this means it should be made available online” and to put “data online in structured, open, and searchable formats.”

To do this, Brito calls for legislation. “The most obvious route to this goal is legislation that mandates online disclosure. Any such legislation, however, must take care to ensure that it lays all parts of the foundation.” He also argues for why it is government’s role to do this, and not the private sector:

First, government holds the digital originals of the data and can ensure the integrity and quality of the data made available online. ... Second, while exact figures are difficult to estimate, the marginal cost to the government of presenting its data in a useful format is certainly less than the cost incurred by third parties to devise and maintain clever hacks [defined by Brito as “a modification of a program or device to give the user access to features that were otherwise unavailable to them”] to siphon otherwise difficult-to-access government data. Finally, not all desirable government data can be hacked and made available by third parties. The major obstacle is that the government has not made some data available online. Online availability is a foundational piece that can only be addressed by government, and to the extent it makes new information available online, as we have just seen, it makes most sense for it to do so in useful formats.