White House Dashboard Tracks a Handful of Building Projects

A White House Web page launched Wednesday tracks federal permitting and environmental review progress on 14 high priority infrastructure projects.

The administration handpicked the 14 projects for "expedited review," because officials believe they will "create a significant number of jobs... and... significant steps remaining before construction are within the control and jurisdiction of the federal government and can be completed within 18 months," according to a memo from the government's Chief Performance Officer Jeff Zients.

The new site deserves points for thoroughness. For each project, there is a long list of every necessary permit or review, where that action stands now and when it ought to be completed plus any agency comments.

It's tough to applaud the administration for ramping up transparency only on 14 handpicked projects, though. That's a little like ranking a university on the grade point averages of 14 entering freshmen of its choice. Sure, it's a little bit of a gamble, but barring drop outs and drinking problems the deck's pretty stacked.

Another important note: the new infrastructure dashboard is built as a sub-site within the administration's larger federal performance-tracking website Performance.gov, rather than as a standalone site.

The administration ultimately plans to pull all its performance-tracking websites inside Performance.gov as part of the dot-gov reform effort, an administration official told Nextgov in August.

Performance.gov has faced performance problems of its own since its August launch, including a barely operable search function.

Those problems can be at least partially traced to a last-minute deal to avert a government shutdown in April that cut fiscal 2011 funding for online open government initiatives by more than three quarters to about $8 million.